Essay · Aurelie Dore
The Mirage of Connection
What we lost when courtship moved to a screen.
I notice fewer real relationships these days, and more loneliness, more scams, more people crying over betrayals by strangers they met on a screen. Reading recently about a person who lost nearly everything to a romance scam, down to their last few hundred pounds, crying every day, I didn't feel automatic sympathy. I felt a deeper sorrow: not for one victim, but for a society that has lost its way in how it forms love, trust, and belonging.
The Commodification of Intimacy
Dating apps promise connection but deliver a marketplace. Swipe left, swipe right. People become profiles, options, commodities. In the pursuit of efficiency and endless choice, the platforms have stripped away the necessary friction that once protected us: trust earned over time, character revealed in the open, the slow and grounding work of real acquaintance. Like the slot machine, they profit not from the win but from the next pull. They have built their fortunes not by fostering love, but by monetising the endless search for it. The consistent winners are the owners. Not the users.
The Price of Disconnection
What happens to a society when real trust is replaced by clicks and screens? When loyalty is downgraded to a series of ephemeral messages? When the rich ecosystem of human bonding, family, neighbours, shared histories, is uprooted and replaced by synthetic signals from strangers? We get what we are now seeing: mass loneliness, scam epidemics, and a rising tide of quiet despair that no app update can fix. A member of my own circle, who once did this work professionally, no longer takes relationship cases at all. The loss is not merely personal. It is structural.
What the Old Ways Held
Maybe it is time to look again at what we discarded. The friction we escaped was real, and some of it was control: the family that vetted too harshly, the community that policed who belonged. Escaping that was no small freedom, and I would not wish it back. But the same friction was also protection. The grandmother who saw through the charming stranger, the neighbours who knew a reputation before you did, the slow acquaintance that let character show itself. These were not only a cage. They were a buffer, absorbing risk on behalf of the person who could not see it alone. We were right to escape the control. But we lost the protection in the same breath, and we built nothing to stand in its place. The lonely heart now faces the predator with no one in between.
Rebuilding What Matters
In the end, real community is not something you download. It is something you build, with patience, with effort, with the courage to place duty beside desire. It is not nostalgia, and it is not survival of the old order; it is the rebuilding of what the old order, for all its faults, quietly did well. Because love, loyalty, and real knowing are not luxuries. They are the architecture of any society worth living in. No algorithm can do it for us. Only we can.
But ask why one more time. Why was the lonely heart alone to begin with? Because the family was an ocean away. Because work and ambition and sheer survival scattered us across cities and countries, far from the people who once knew our names before we spoke them. The app did not empty the village. It moved into the space the leaving had already cleared. That is an older story, and a longer one, for another day.