Dating in Anomie: Why Dating Feels So Hard Now

This is a diagnostic book about modern dating as a coordination problem, not a moral one. It argues that what makes dating exhausting today is not primarily that people became worse, colder, or less sincere—but that the shared structures that once made romantic interaction legible have weakened. Time no longer binds. Silence no longer closes. Goals are often implicit, reversible, or unstated. In that environment, interpretation replaces decision, and fatigue replaces excitement.

This book exists to make that condition clear enough that readers can recognize it and stop misdiagnosing it as personal failure. It does not offer “tips,” communication scripts, or self-improvement ideology. It explains why logistics became psychology, why closure collapsed, why signaling replaced action, and why an optimization regime selects for ambiguity even when everyone involved claims to want connection. The goal is not to fix modern dating from the inside, but to show the operating system that produces its recurring failures.

What this book is

A structural explanation for why dating now feels confusing, draining, and unstable
A theory of anomie applied to intimacy (anomic intimacy)
A clear distinction between signals (cheap expressions) and returns (actions that change state)
A map of how modern systems reward optionality and punish closure
A framework for understanding “mixed signals,” drifting, and exhaustion as predictable outcomes

What this book is not

A self-help book, dating “strategy guide,” or pickup manual
A critique of men or women as a group
A moral sermon about “people being shallow now”
A therapist’s model of attachment styles and emotional wounds
A promise that better texting, better vulnerability, or better intentions will fix the system

Structure of the book

This book is published as chapters / essays released in serial form. Each chapter is written to stand on its own: it names a single structural function (timing, closure, leadership, ROI, signaling, cooperation) and explains how that function behaves under modern conditions.

You can read chapters independently. The order is intentional, but it is not instructional. It reflects analytic escalation:

the felt experience (fatigue, interpretation, instability)
the mechanism (binding failure, goal collapse, ROI selection)
the consequence (signaling dominance, cooperation failure)
the counter-system (what would have to change structurally for dating to stabilize again)

This is not a program to follow. It is an operating description—so the reader can decide whether to keep playing the current game, or exit it.

Preface

Preface —Meta-Pattern Essay — How Technology Stabilizes Insecurity

Core Thesis Essay — Insecurity as a Stable Equilibrium

Architectural Essay — Exhaustion as a Structural Signal

Chapter 1 What Anomie Means in Plain English

Architectural Essay: Norm Decay Is Not Norm Absence

Chapter 2 What Dating Looked Like in the 1990s

Architectural Essay: Cost Was Attached to Action

Architectural Essay: Embedded Coordination and Externalized Enforcement

Chapter 3 When Logistics Became Psychology

Chapter 4 Leadership Without Compensation