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Lea Veloso, 26, has an ever-growing ick list.
If he spits on the ground, can’t cook, lies about his height, identifies as apolitical or doesn’t travel enough. If he’s weird about other men wearing makeup (“like, K-pop idols”), says he wants a “slightly autistic woman”, has no skincare routine or only likes songs that got famous on TikTok. It’s an ick if he doesn’t call his parents, sniffs every five seconds, is an unsuccessful DJ or is embarrassed to do karaoke. Recently, she uncovered a new one: if he’s saving himself for marriage. It’s now at the top of the checklist on her Notes app that she references whenever she starts seeing someone new.
“Three strikes, you’re out,” she said.
Between growing up on a steady diet of fan fiction and a never-ending parade of dating content on her feeds, where strangers share the just-because flowers they receive and beloved creator couples post their lengthy breakup announcements on YouTube, Veloso finds it harder to take in the nuance of a person when she’s dating them. The noise of who she should be dating is just too strong.
“For so long, I’ve been idealizing this one man who will drop everything for me, who will know my likes, and is someone who’s the perfect mold,” she said. “I think I’m constantly disappointed by real men.”
Gen Z have long faced accusations of being losers in the dating realm: young people are having less sex, meeting fewer new people, getting cringed out by even sending roses on Hinge. They are the most rejected generation and the loneliest generation. Most of these trends point to a big change in dating culture: social media has entrenched itself into our romantic reality, often informing our interpersonal relationships rather than the other way around. For young women like Veloso who have never dated without the internet’s input, that means the construction of a Dream Man informed by viral terms served to her by algorithms, social feeds and stories people share online more than her IRL dating life.
The phraseology is expansive and ever-evolving, and for many, wielded as a prescriptive rubric for tackling the thunderdome of heterosexual dating content. There is no shortage of ways to describe the kind of man who is a romantically superior kind of partner: a loser provider man with golden retriever energy who worships you because if he wanted to, he would. The health of a prospective match can be deemed on a red-to-green flag scale, from minimum effort and weaponized incompetence to getting the princess treatment from a real yearner, written by a woman. Your happily-ever-after can be ensnared with the red nail theory or the orange peel theory. The truest love, the ship, the OTP (one true pairing), is also increasingly championed on social media through tropes, whether it’s enemies-to-lovers or a slow-burn relationship arc.
This desire to develop theories that explain the painful steps of falling in love feels similar to older adages around dating, like the teachings of Cosmo magazine, Sex and the City, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. But relational psychoanalyst Cynthia LaForte said there is also a generational trend of diagnosing and clinicalizing everything, often propelled by misappropriated therapy speak on social media, that is unique to gen Z and the digital era of dating.
“We’ve pathologized away personality,” LaForte said. “I think there’s a big narrative around ‘these are the types of people you date’ and ‘these are the people you break up with’ and it leaves little room for compassion.”
TikTok user Lexie, @spicycokezero, is a creator who has built her from creating such viral videos as “3 Ways To Tell When They’re Being Friendly vs. Being Interested In You” and “3 Signs You’re Having a Friends-To-Lovers Dynamic.” The creator, 19, is a psychology major at school, and she said that she is not an expert on these subjects – but when she began posting videos in hopes of finding an outlet to share her in-class learnings, thousands of people resonated with her content.
“I frequently see comments that say something similar to they feel seen or understand themselves or others better after watching the video,” Lexie said. “I’ve also gotten comments saying my videos helped them start dating someone, realized the feelings are mutual, encouraged them to ask someone out, etc, which I always enjoy reading.”
Some dating criteria are undoubtedly useful. Nicole, 22, who asked to go by her first name for privacy reasons, said that the last promising guy she was seeing never got past the talking stage because of the first bullet point on her own ick list: “finds me intimidating”.
“As time went on, he kept making sly comments about how he was scared of me because I’m intimidating and he gets nervous,” she said. It seemed like an awkward attempt at flirting – asking her to plan the date in a flattering tone – but Nicole was not impressed. “I flat out told him: ‘There is nothing intimidating about me. You feel intimidated because some part of you believes I’m better, stronger, or even smarter, and I don’t have the time to make you feel equal to me.’”
“He had to go,” she said.
When asked about what kind of relationship she does want, Nicole referenced everything from television shows to celebrities: George and Amal Clooney, Damon and Elena from The Vampire Diaries, the notorious on-and-off relationship of Mr Big and Carrie Bradshaw except for the cheating.
“For lack of better words, I don’t want to wear the pants in the relationship,” she said.
Whether you are young or not, human relationships are fraught with emotional tripwires, and Dream Man content offers a safer way forward. But that means we are all dating under a panopticon, where virtues and sins can be broadcasted and scrutinized and farmed for engagement. There is a huge appetite for other people’s horror stories especially. Millions-strong Facebook groups like Are We Dating The Same Guy? and apps like Tea were specifically designed to catch cheaters in the act. Really any fuckboy behavior can be posted and reposted until daters are ubiquitously known across the internet as West Elm Caleb or the Couch Guy or the man from Reesa Teesa’s notorious 50-part “Who TF Did I Marry?” TikTok series. And online, it doesn’t matter if the crime was pathologically lying or not looking overjoyed enough when your girlfriend walked through the door – the deliberation and condemnation processes are the same.
“Social media makes me scared shitless to date,” Nicole said. “Everyone is on the wave of holding people accountable, which I do very much support, and because of this, people are highlighting more of the abusive side of things to raise awareness to it. But it also drowns out the hopeless romantics.”
It is not just women Build-A-Bearing their ideal partner. There are plenty of phrases to describe the ideal woman among creators that make dating content for men, whether it’s a high-value woman or a black cat girlfriend or someone they can piss off on purpose. The Cut recently surveyed 100 men and found many were cutting women off for their own icks: “because she was a picky eater, she was too into Burning Man, she didn’t like the book Nickel and Dimed, she deleted his ex’s profile from his Nintendo Switch,” EJ Dickson reported.
LaForte said that having guidelines for dating, even if informed by social media, can often serve as a grounding reminder of what you actually want when things get complicated: “It can guide you, save time, it can help hold yourself accountable.” But in the same breath, treating dating as an intellectual process of ticking off boxes fails to account for the humanity of it. “It also can be very reductive. It can be taking a person and reducing them to checklists.”
Veloso particularly feels like the digital world offers too much content about what love should (or should not) feel like, and particularly how a love interest should (or should not) show their passion. So she plays otome games such as Love and Deepspace – romance video games where players assume the role of a female protagonist with the goal of developing a connection with another male player.
“It’s a kind of love that feels more safe than going out into the world and being uncertain about what kind of love you have,” she said. “Having a guy who is completely devoted to you and very much willing to defend your relationship with all his might is a goal for me. But then it’s all these sorts of realities when it comes to men [that bring] everything down. This man can’t even talk about his own interests?”
For Veloso, it’s just easier to leave it all as fiction.
