Love in the Time of Tech: A Commentary

This post contains spoilers for Bonding by Mariel Franklin and the film Materialists.

“The language that is happening in the dating game itself is so number oriented: height, weight, income, education, age. It becomes a list of statistics. Transactional. And the thing is, we know the truth about love, which is that love is an ancient mystery. It’s a thing that you can’t quantify no matter how much you try.”

– Celine Song 

Relationships, in today’s world, are increasingly shaped by the impulses and the language of economic transactions, facilitated by innovations of technology. This is one of the core ideas explored by a novel I recently read, Bonding by Mariel Franklin, and a film I recently watched, Materialists (2025, dir. Celine Song). 

In Bonding, the protagonist is a woman in her thirties named Mary, living in London. After getting laid off from her job quite abruptly, she travels to Ibiza, where she meets Tom, a handsome and wealthy chemist. They become an item. When she returns from her vacation, she receives a job offer from an old friend/ex-girlfriend named Lara, who recently founded a new and exciting ultra-progressive dating app called “Openr.” Tom, in turn, begins work on launching “Eudoxa,” a new “wellness” drug that seeks to alleviate all symptoms of depression – but actually ends up facilitating extreme erotic side-effects. Eventually, and just as Mary and Tom are planning their escape from their increasingly-distressing jobs’ and retreat into an idyllic mountainous home, Tom is killed by a mob of violent protestors as a result of internet-fueled cancel culture.

In Materialists, Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy Mason, a failed actress turned successful matchmaker who works at “Adore,” a matchmaking company in New York City. Lucy describes herself as a “voluntary celibate” and says that her nonnegotiable characteristic for a potential partner is wealth. The film follows Lucy as she is embroiled in a love affair with a seemingly perfect “match” who fulfills her criterion to a T; meanwhile Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, John, shows up and brings up memories of their failed relationship which fell apart due to the couple’s financial difficulties. When one of her clients is sexually assaulted by a match Lucy set her up with, Lucy becomes increasingly disillusioned by the matchmaking industry and the unrealistic demands of her clients. 

True Love 

In both worlds of Bonding and Materialists, relationships are transitory and superficial. None of the characters seem to have any good friends or lasting relationships. Though Bonding is narrated in first person, Mary hardly ever mentions having a family; and although she cares for her roommate through several drunken nights, their relationship remains shallow and distant. In Materialists, Lucy finds herself with nowhere to stay after she breaks up with her wealthy boyfriend – nowhere except her ex-boyfriend’s house. She seems to have no other friends or family who she can stay with. At another point in the film, Lucy’s client Sophie jokes about how, in her time of need, she does not have anyone to call except her matchmaker. This lack of stable community relations seems integral to this world of technical, transactional, superficial relationships. 

Similarly, the seeming impossibility of sustaining a relationship and of getting married is at the core of both works. All the characters are painstakingly striving for their “happy ending.” “I’m going to die alone,” one of Lucy’s clients tells her more than once throughout the film, and Lucy responds by disagreeing: “You are going to marry the love of your life. It’s fine if you don’t believe it,” she says, “I believe it.” The usage of the word “believe” in this context, and several times in the film, portrays “true love” and marriage as a fiction, a fantasy, that one either “believes in” or doesn’t. Relatedly, Mariel Franklin admits that she wrote Bonding because she wanted people to think about “why relationships have become so unstable, and so much harder to find.” Bonding is essentially about the difficulty of attaining and sustaining meaningful and lasting relationships because of the false promises of progress, namely the sexual revolution and technology. In Materialists, we see this happen before our eyes. We watch as couple after couple, set up on dates by their trusty matchmaker, discard and hurt each other in more ways than one. 

Love As Tech 

As a lover of romantic comedies, I enjoyed Materialists because, cinematographically, it is clearly inspired by the classic romcoms of the 1990s – an astute observation made by Issam after we watched the film together. When Harry Met Sally (1989), one of my favorite films of all time, is interspersed with elderly couples explaining to the camera how they met and what drew them to each other. In Materialists, Celine Song includes similar shots of random actors talking to the camera – but this time, they are alone in the frame, and they are describing their ideal partner to their matchmaker.

“He was a head counselor at the boys’ camp, and I was a head counselor at the girls’ camp. They had a social one night and he walked across the room. I thought he was coming to talk to my friend Maxine. Because people were always crossing rooms to talk to Maxine. But he was coming to talk to me. And he said, “I’m Ben Small, of the Long Island Smalls.” At that moment I knew. I knew the way you know about a good melon.”

– When Harry Met Sally, written by Nora Ephron

“I want to meet someone who is a combination of all the different awesome parts of the last four matches. Sophie’s job and education level. Emily’s body and lifestyle. Piper’s face and sense of style. And Jane’s hobbies and taste in TV shows.” – Materialists, written by Celine Song 

Love is reduced into a technology in itself: two people meet, and if they check the right boxes, they make a good match; it works like clockwork. They are supposed to be a good match according to the calculations, and so they must be: “It’s math,” as Lucy says. The clients of the matchmaking company describe their “ideal partner” as though their true desire is to create or mold a Sims character, rather than a human being. At one memorable point in the film, one of Lucy’s clients hands her a stack of papers delineating all the qualifications and criteria that she is looking for in a man, justifying herself by saying: “Look at me – I’m a catch.” Lucy, in turn, reaches her breaking point and berates her client: 

“Patricia. I know that every year you go without having a husband raises your expectations for him exponentially, but that doesn’t mean that you’re due to get one. And it doesn’t mean that you can customize, because this is not a simulation. If the service I was providing you was building you a man, then of course I could build you a man with everything on this list. But I can’t. Because this is not a car or a house. We’re talking about people. People are people. They come as they are. And all I can hope to find for you is a man that you can tolerate for the next fifty years, who likes you at all. And you are not a catch. Because you are not a fish.” 

Disposability 

In their process of reducing potential relationship partners into a stack of categories and checkboxes, clients inevitably end up objectifying not only their potential partners but also themselves. Disposability is a theme in both works, shedding light to the rather unnoticeable ways in which the prevalence of digital tech and the transactional relationality it props up encourages us to dehumanize and abandon one another. 

After finishing Bonding, I read excerpts from Eva Ilouz’s Cold Intimacies, including a chapter that analyzes internet dating. In this book, Ilouz argues that market relations and economic transactions directly shape how we relate to each other and how we build relationships. More specifically, “Internet dating makes encounters into economic transactions” (87). It comes as no surprise, then, that the language of economics has seeped into the language of relatedness – or that “Economic metaphors and analogies have become widely pervasive in the offline meetings which follow Internet interactions” (Ilouz, 88). Users of dating apps frequently describe how one has to market oneself through their dating profile. “What are you offering me, what do you bring to the table,” and these phrases are repeated throughout Materialists.

“Romantic relations are not only organized within the market, but have themselves become commodities produced on an assembly line, to be consumed fast, efficiently, cheaply, and in great abundance. The result is that the vocabulary of emotions is now more exclusively dictated by the market.” (Ilouz, 91)

People as Merchandise  

The outcome of all this is that people have stopped being real to us – instead, we start thinking of each other as avatars or purely online personas. Mary Harrington calls this “generalized unreality” in a recent article examining the “lockdown generation” and their degrading sense of trust in authoritative sources of information. The internet, and social media, has become the pervading domain of reality. Conversely, real life – the physical world around us and those who inhabit it – is of very little consequence. 

Franklin tackles exactly this idea in her novel, writing that “Digital technology was liberating in that it took the emphasis off flesh and blood. You could reinvent yourself online because it was a space that didn’t define you by your chromosomes” (138). In doing so, she echoes an argument made by Ilouz years earlier: “In computer culture, embodiment is often represented as an unfortunate barrier to interaction with the pleasures of computing… In cyber-writing, the body is often referred to as “the meat,” the dead flesh that surrounds the active mind which constitutes the “authentic self.”” (Ilouz, 75). 

If people are no longer human beings to us, it becomes easier for us to treat them as objects. And the way in which a dating app – or a matchmaking company like “Adore” – functions necessarily entails arranging people into a wide array of choices that “users” or “clients” can pick and choose from, effectively turning people into products that the client either values or discards in relation to the product’s position in the dating market. As you swipe through a dating app, you are surveying your different options, shopping for a date the same way you would swipe through clothing options on the Zara app. Celine Song, in an interview, distinctly draws the connection between this relatively new dating app industry to the industry of self-improvement; encompassing everything from botox, plastic surgery, and gym/wellness culture. “There’s so many industries that are about improving your value as merchandise,” she points out, “But the truth is, merchandise can’t fall in love with other merchandise. The only thing that’s possible is for a person to fall in love with another person.” 

Choice 

In our contemporary era, following the sexual revolution, choice reigns supreme. “Choice feminism” – the concept that any choice made by a woman is inherently a feminist choice – seems to structure most mainstream feminist discourse. Yet love, Celine Song maintains, means losing one’s freedom. “Love is surrender.” Love also entails obligations that we may or may not choose, and seldom enjoy. In many ways, love is the antithesis to freedom. 

In Bonding, Mary contemplates the ways in which life has become reduced to a series of choices with little consequence or meaning: “Even marriage wasn’t clear anymore. It was no longer a monolithic practice, bound to the Church and to extended family. It was now a lifestyle choice, albeit one that had become aspirational as it had become rarer. Like everything else in the social sphere, it existed as a form of personal expression – one that resulted in divorce around half the time” (198). In the same vein, Ilouz critiques how internet dating is primarily organized “under the aegis of the liberal ideology of ‘choice’” (79). The self becomes a “chooser” and our idea of a romantic encounter is that it should be the result of the “best possible choice” (Ilouz, 79). 

Indeed, dating apps flood the user with hundreds of choices so that we are oversaturated with options for potential partners, and nobody is ever good enough because someone better is always out there. Ilouz evocatively remarks that much of the allure we have traditionally associated with romantic love is related to an “economy of scarcity” that enables “novelty and excitement.” In other words, when the only way to meet potential partners is through friends, family members, or by coincidence at the neighborhood bar, you tend to feel as though there is a low chance of meeting someone special. On the other hand, internet dating makes it so that there are exponential opportunities to meet someone new. “The spirit presiding over the Internet,” writes Ilouz, “is that of an economy of abundance, where the self must choose and maximize its options and is forced to use the techniques of cost-benefit and efficiency” (85). The result is an unprecedented and endless process of bargaining within romantic relationships because one is actually able to “visualize the market of potential partners” (Ilouz, 87). 

Conclusion 

Both Materialists and Bonding have been described by audiences and readers as too heavy on the social commentary, and a bit light on the artistic aspects with a weaker-than-necessary plot. I don’t necessarily disagree with this characterization. But I think these works are essential, and the social commentary they provide, even if heavy-handed, is beyond necessary for our current era. 

I’ve spent this post detailing commonalities between the two. One essential difference is that Materialists, as a romantic drama, has the feel-good Hollywood happy ending we all long for – but Bonding doesn’t. And in that way, Bonding feels like the more realistic story of the two: sometimes we don’t get a happy ending and sometimes we do die alone. And it seems more and more unlikely, in today’s dystopic digitalized transactional world, that a happy ending will be possible for all of us.