Be a creator of relationships, not a consumer of mates

On Yuval Noah Harari's wisdom on the misperceptions around romantic relationships

Yuval Noah Harari is one of my favorite living thinkers. His ability to strip away the narrative and look at what is happening underneath the stories we tell is unparalleled, but he is also acutely aware of the power and utility of good storytelling. In an interview about his favorite films and TV shows, Yuval discusses what dating apps get wrong. His team put out a short clip of his answer:

Humans are not consumers of mates, they are producers of relationships.

I find that this quote applies to a lot more than just dating apps. And while Yuval is making a descriptive claim- this is how humans are- I like to use it as a reminder of how I should approach relationships, whether romantic or platonic. In a romantic setting, if you think of your ideal relationship as finding the right one person in 7.8 billion people, you will likely never be satisfied with the person in front of you. Some rationalists have hilariously come up with algorithms to the explore-exploit problem by recommending sampling a certain number of prospective mates, then “settling” for the first mate after the exploring phase that is better than all the mates met in the explore phase- a straightforward extrapolation of a computer science problem to romantic love. This misses the point entirely: a good relationship is something created between two people, that emerges from their time together, growing and taking on complexity as the individuals give more to the relationship. Of course, there are still bad relationships and bad potential matches. But the goal is not to find Mr or Mrs Right-for-me, it is to find someone who you want to create something with, and then do the work of creating a relationship. That work does not stop at finding the right person, or at marriage, or ever- if you stop creating a good relationship with someone, that relationship will decay.

This wisdom applies to friendships as well. My old friendships that I spend less time on have so much time and energy invested in a deep relationship that it would be a shame to lose them. The idea of the relationship as a thing that we have created together helps me pick up the phone to call an old friend or family member. Similarly, it helps me to meet new people. Instead of being judgmental about who I want to be friends with, I can try to create new relationships that are worthy of sustaining. They won’t always be worth the effort, but they often are, and if I make an effort to invest in the relationship it is often met in kind. Before I know it there is a relationship forming, created by the two of us, and giving something back that is more than the simple sum of its parts.

Here is the full interview, with lots more YNH wisdom: