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The Cost of Loving Crisis: How Modern Dating Became So Transactional

BYKhaoula Ghanem

November 3, 2025

When Jennifer Lopez sang “my love don’t cost a thing,” she clearly hadn’t been on Hinge in 2025. These days, love seems to cost everything. We are living in the golden age of options, yet somehow, no one feels chosen. Dating has never been easier, or lonelier. It seems like people aren’t simply looking for someone to hold anymore but for someone to hold them up. You can blame the dating apps, the podcast bros, or social media, but the truth runs deeper than algorithms and bad advice. What’s really changed isn’t just how we date, but the world we’re dating in, where connection is treated like currency and love like labor.

But before we blame it all on TikTok or late-stage capitalism, it’s worth remembering that across time and geography, love has rarely been free. Marriage, in its original form, was never built on romance. In fact, it was built on economics, survival, and social order.

In ancient Egypt, for instance, marriage was a binding agreement to merge property and lineage. Husbands promised to provide; wives pledged loyalty and domestic stability. Women could technically own land, but that ownership often transferred upon marriage. In Mesopotamia, the famed Code of Hammurabi laid out the economics of marriage in painstaking detail: what dowries were owed, what compensation was due in divorce, how infidelity affected property rights. Love was not absent, but it was irrelevant to the legal structure.

In classical Greece, marriage existed to ensure legitimate heirs, not happiness. Aristotle wrote that women were “colder” beings, necessary for reproduction but incapable of rational partnership. The family, he argued, was the smallest unit of the state, and within it, women were the labor force that made the polis function. Ancient Rome wasn’t far off. Marriage among the elite was a political transaction, a way to secure alliances, wealth, and citizenship. Affection existed, but it was secondary to strategy.

By the medieval era, the Church began formalizing marriage as a religious institution, but the underlying economics persisted. Noble families used marriage to consolidate power, exchange dowries, or merge estates. Daughters were leverage, not heirs. In England and France, entire political landscapes shifted on the basis of who married whom— from Henry VIII’s strategic divorces to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s alliances that determined the fate of empires. Even among commoners, marriage was survival: a pooling of labor to work land, raise children, and share risk in a world where individual life expectancy was short.

And it wasn’t only the West. In dynastic China, Confucian doctrine codified family as an economic and moral system, where marriages arranged between families served to maintain filial hierarchies and preserve wealth. In the Islamic world, the mehr— a mandatory gift from husband to wife— reflected a recognition of women’s material vulnerability. It wasn’t romantic, but it was an acknowledgment that love and livelihood could not be separated. The pattern repeats across civilizations. Indeed, affection was tolerated, but obligation was the foundation.

The notion of marrying for love, as historian Stephanie Coontz reminds us in her landmark work Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (first published in 2005), is astonishingly modern. It appeared in Western Europe around the late eighteenth century, in tandem with industrialization and capitalism’s rise. When wealth became portable, when work moved from fields to factories, when people began earning independent wages, they could finally choose partners for personal rather than economic reasons. Capitalism, ironically, made romantic love possible, and then, centuries later, made it nearly impossible to sustain.

Because as markets matured, love became another market. The logic of trade, profit, and optimization seeped into intimacy. As Karl Marx warned in his early writings, capitalism transforms human relations into exchange relations— even the ones that feel sacred. The family ceased being a production unit and became a consumption unit, its value measured in lifestyle, not labor.

Today, dating operates by that same logic. The commodification of connection defines how we meet, assess, and even desire one another. Dating apps and social media have turned attraction into an interface; a system of sorting where curiosity is replaced by comparison. We don’t stumble into love anymore…we filter for it. Profiles become portfolios, signaling desirability through income, travel, beauty, and taste. Love is marketed, curated, and optimized. The messiness of human connection—the awkwardness, surprise, imperfection— becomes friction in a system designed for speed.

The sociologist Richard Sennett once wrote in his 2006 book The Culture of the New Capitalism that capitalism destroys long-term trust, and the same is true for love under capitalism. When your job, your rent, your visa, and your social capital all feel temporary, permanence itself becomes an extravagance. Modern dating reflects that instability. We no longer treat love as an act of faith but as a series of risk calculations: Will this person drain me? Will they slow me down? Can they sustain the life I want? Affection becomes a strategy, and that strategy, increasingly, is financial.

Kristen Ghodsee, in her work on post-socialist societies, argues that market economies reshape relationships because they turn love into a site of scarcity. When the state retreats from guaranteeing stability— housing, healthcare, childcare— people turn to partners to fill the gap. Romantic relationships start carrying the weight of economic survival. Love becomes labor and care becomes cost. In this sense, the rise of transactional dating isn’t moral decline, it’s economic adaptation.

And yet, the illusion of choice that digital dating promises makes it harder than ever to stay. Emotional capitalism tells us there’s always someone better, a more successful match, a higher-value partner, a shinier option three swipes away. We’ve mistaken abundance for compatibility. The more options we have, the more disposable people become. With “plenty of fish,” staying feels harder when the cost of leaving is low and the reward for moving on feels infinite. Choice, ironically, breeds dissatisfaction.

Economic precarity only sharpens the edge. High living costs push singles to factor resource support into their dating calculus, not necessarily out of greed, but realism. When every aspect of life feels expensive, relationships become part of your survival strategy. For many, financial stability and emotional security have fused into one pursuit.

The current global economy has made that logic almost inevitable. Wages have stagnated while living costs skyrocket; job markets are unstable, housing is unaffordable, and student debt in many countries has become a lifelong companion. In the Gulf, young people are experiencing what economists call “prestige inflation,” which is the gap between the life you can afford and the life you’re expected to perform. Across demographics, one in three millennials say they’ve postponed marriage or long-term commitment due to financial instability.

When the economy begins to crumble, love becomes a hedge against crisis. What people used to find in property or inheritance, they now look for in a partner. Dating becomes a way to secure stability when institutions can no longer guarantee it. The transactional nature of love isn’t a failure of morality; it’s a reflection of structural anxiety.

Love, in this economy, is expensive. Whether it’s the emotional labor of maintaining a relationship or the literal cost of dating — dinners, travel, therapy, weddings — intimacy now competes with survival. People don’t date to escape the system anymore; they date to manage it.

Hollywood has always sold us the fantasy that love can transcend struggle, and that two people against the world can somehow beat the odds. But the odds have gotten worse. When your generation is poorer than your parents, when your rent costs more than your salary, and when burnout replaces leisure, it’s hard not to see partnership as a practical alliance.

And this is where love starts to look like labor again, not just emotional, but economic. Women, in particular, are acutely aware of the invisible cost of care. They already shoulder the unpaid labor of households, relationships, and childrearing; asking for financial reciprocity becomes a way to rebalance that equation. Men, meanwhile, often face a parallel pressure to provide, to perform, to stabilize. Both are reacting to the same precarity, just from opposite ends.

This isn’t new. In every period of economic downturn— from the Great Depression to the 2008 financial crisis— marriage rates have dropped, birth rates have slowed, and transactional arrangements have surged. When nothing else feels certain, people look for partners who can offer what the state no longer can, including security, safety, and a sense of permanence.

That’s why transactional dating isn’t a glitch in modern romance, it’s its logical outcome. Love has become a means of survival in a world that feels increasingly unlivable.

But labor, in love, has never been equally divided. Capitalism might have redefined the marketplace of desire, but patriarchy still runs the register. The contemporary conversation around “50/50 relationships” exposes that tension perfectly. One woman told me, “When people talk about 50/50, they usually mean money. But to me, it’s a principle: balance across love, friendship, work, parenting. It’s not about splitting everything perfectly, but about carrying the weight together.” Her point was simple but radical in context: equality shouldn’t end at the bank account. True balance requires sharing the invisible work that keeps life from collapsing.

Another woman described it differently: “50/50 sounds fair on paper but life isn’t lived on paper. Men grow up expecting things to just happen (we have their moms to thank for that) and now I’m the one carrying a load I never signed up for. Even with help, I’m the operating system: tracking schedules, solving problems before they happen, keeping our world running.”

She listed the unpaid tolls of partnership like pregnancy, postpartum recovery, emotional regulation, the constant invisible management of domestic life, and the expectation to look good while doing it. “My career bends around our life, partly by choice, partly because that’s what’s expected of the modern working mom,” she said. “Sacrifices my husband never has to make, because I’m prioritizing his earnings over mine. The truth is, the financial pressure is on him, yes, but his hard work pays off better because I allow him to focus on it while taking care of absolutely everything else. This isn’t equal. It’s invisible work that keeps everyone afloat— and yes, it deserves to be recognized. Why not with a salary?”

Sociologists call this the mental load— the cognitive and emotional labor that keeps families, friendships, and relationships functioning. It’s the invisible infrastructure of care that capitalism takes for granted because it’s unpaid, feminized, and normalized as love. Yet it’s precisely this hidden work that enables productivity in the first place. Women’s emotional labor isn’t peripheral to the economy; it is the economy. It’s what keeps the system running quietly while pretending to be private life.

Under capitalism, love becomes the site of outsourcing. The home becomes the second workplace, and women— especially working mothers— become the unpaid administrators of everyone’s emotional and physical wellbeing. Arlie Hochschild called this the “second shift” decades ago, and it remains just as true today. Even as more women enter the workforce and earn their own money, they’re still expected to carry the domestic and emotional load. Equality at work rarely translates to equality at home. And while the language has evolved, the structure hasn’t shifted much.

Still, notions of equality are shaped by culture as much as by capitalism. One man I spoke to pushed back: “I don’t believe 50/50 is a thing. A man should provide, and I link it back to the idea of a man being the provider in Islam. I feel like going half is a very Western ideology. In Islam, the man provides and the woman is taken care of. There’s a balance, just not the kind Western people think of.” His perspective reflects another side of the conversation: that traditional structures of provision, though unequal on paper, can represent stability and dignity in practice. In this framework, financial responsibility is a masculine duty, not an exchange. Love is sustained by roles, not ratios.

But even within these frameworks— secular or religious— the same question lingers: what is the cost of care, and who is paying it? Emotional labor doesn’t appear in GDP reports or marriage contracts, yet it is the most consistent form of work in the world. It’s the hours spent remembering birthdays, managing moods, anticipating needs, holding families together. It’s love reframed as labor, hidden beneath the language of devotion.

And when this labor goes unrecognized, it breeds resentment, which, in turn, fuels the transactional mindset we’re now witnessing. If women are already giving so much for free— their time, their bodies, their care— then demanding financial contribution starts to feel less like greed and more like recompense. The “sprinkle sprinkle” rhetoric of influencers like Shera Seven or The Wizard Liz (who famously said she only gave her ex-fiance a chance because he sent her $10,000) is seductive because it reverses the imbalance. It tells women: stop giving for free. Make men pay. What might have once been considered gold-digging is now marketed as “self-worth.” These creators aren’t anomalies; they are products of the system, speaking to a generation that’s grown up watching emotional labor go unpaid and loyalty unreciprocated.

But the problem is that in trying to correct the imbalance, it reinforces the very system it seeks to escape. It still measures worth in money, and still treats affection as currency.

Capitalism has trained both genders to approach love like a ledger: who owes what, who brings what, who benefits more. But love, by its nature, resists that accounting. It’s inefficient, unpredictable, profoundly unprofitable. The late theorist Lauren Berlant called intimacy a “world-making project”—a fragile attempt to build meaning outside the logic of production. When we treat it as production, we lose it.

So much of what feels broken in dating today is mostly the result of how people— women especially— are trying to find fairness in a system designed to extract. The illusion of choice created by apps, the performance of perfection on social media, the rise of “get-rich-quick” relationships stems from the same wound that love, once imagined as refuge, now feels like work.

To truly love under capitalism is to refuse the logic that everything must return a profit. It’s to give care without reducing it to cost, to share labor without demanding receipts, to build a life not around efficiency but around empathy. If everything in our world is for sale, then perhaps the most rebellious thing you can do is give something freely.

The Cost of Loving Crisis: How Modern Dating Became So Transactional

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The Cost of Loving Crisis: How Modern Dating Became So Transactional

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