Welcome to the second installment of Unpacked’s new love and relationship column, Love, Unpacked with Logan, where relationship and sexuality expert Dr. Logan Levkoff answers your messiest questions about love, boundaries, and Jewish identity in a very complicated world. Submit for Love, Unpacked with Logan’s next edition here.
You’ve probably seen it: the graph analyzing 15 years of Reddit relationship advice, drawn from 1.1 million comments. Before I dive into what it all means, if it means anything at all, let’s just ask ourselves a fundamental question: Why are more than a million people outsourcing their love lives to strangers on Reddit, people with no expertise and almost no meaningful context?
Sorry, but it’s true.
The more I think about it, the more I come back to the same: we don’t always like what our friends have to say, especially when they are not validating us. They know us too well. They know our patterns, our blind spots, our bad habits, and the parts of the story we would rather soften or leave out. A stranger, by contrast, can feel easier.
Safer? Maybe. Effective? Eh.
The reality is that the people who know us best are also the ones most willing to challenge us. Strangers don’t have that investment and have zero responsibility to us or the outcomes of their advice; they lose nothing if they get it wrong. Their guidance might turn your relationship straight into an epic dumpster fire, and while you’re sobbing over the wreckage, they’re living their best life (OK, maybe not — but they’re still not hanging around us cleaning up the wet tissues).
What strangers offer, at least potentially, is immediate validation and a sense of clarity, rather than nuance. And really, what could be clearer than someone bluntly saying, “End it”? That kind of certainty is seductive. More than half of respondents seem to be giving exactly that advice.
Do people on Reddit have your best interests at heart? Who knows. But that’s always the risk of sharing your intimate information with strangers on a public forum. There is no expectation of altruism, no real accountability, and certainly no guarantee of expertise.
And who are these respondents really? Not to put a damper on this whole thing, but realistically speaking, may there be a bot effect here? Probably. Still, I’m willing to set that aside for the sake of the graph itself, especially because the discrepancy between advice options is hard to ignore.
If I were trying to be optimistic, I could read the data and say that people are getting better at recognizing the signs of unhealthy relationships. Maybe commenters are encouraging posters to leave before things get worse, rather than waiting for obvious problems to magically resolve themselves. That would imply that we are far more attuned to the qualities that make for a meaningful and “good” relationship.
Do I honestly believe that? No.
And it’s not that I’m being pessimistic, it’s just that I don’t think we have many stellar relationship role models to draw from, so it’s hard to believe we have developed a shared, reliable understanding of healthy relationships. So when people crowdsource advice without any universal model of what relationship non-negotiables are, it doesn’t necessarily move the needle toward healthier relationships. More often, it just reproduces personal preferences, unresolved baggage, biases, and whatever moral framework happens to be trending in the replies that day.
Add to that the data points on declining sexual intimacy: only 37% of adults today report having sex weekly, down from 55% in 1990. That doesn’t prove Reddit advice is bad, but it does suggest something broader may be fraying in how we connect, communicate, and sustain intimacy. Think about how many adults aren’t having regular partnered sex! That points to a world in which a lot may be missing from our partnerships, and maybe from our expectations of them too.
The prevalence of “end the relationship” advice may also point to something more indicative of a dating world increasingly lived online: a growing discomfort with intimacy, vulnerability, and emerging run-of-the-mill challenges that come with partnerships. Online dating sells us with the illusion that there will be someone out there — if not many someones — who will meet all of our needs with less friction and fewer compromises. So when problems arise, which they inevitably do in human relationships, our instinct is to run rather than navigate imperfection. We jump to the next. Because we always assume there will be a next. In a swipe-based world, there usually is.
There is a factor, though, that would be remiss of me to ignore: we are simply not as well-practiced in relationships as we once were. Fewer people are marrying, many are marrying later, and more are not marrying at all. This is not to say that marriage is the end-all be-all for a healthy society, but it does suggest that we have fewer experiences with long-term relationships and the patience, compromise, and resilience they entail in order to be successful.
If I’m going to be pessimistic (again), and at this moment I am, I might also contribute some of this advice culture to the epidemic of loneliness shaping modern life. While connection happens online, real connection, the kind that sustains a partnership (and the kind that may be messy and imperfect but yet incredibly meaningful), is personal and intimate. It cannot be fully practiced through a screen.
At some point, we are going to have to ask what we are really looking for: meaningful relationships or convenient reasons to leave them without feeling guilty for doing so. Strangers offer you easier exits, but not necessarily smart ones. Because at the end of the day, they don’t have to live with the consequences.
You do. And the grass isn’t always greener.
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