Love In Data

The platform's real romance is not between you and the other person, but between your attention and its data pipeline

Long before we had read receipts and ‘last seen online’, there was a young man named Werther, who managed to turn one unrequited crush into a full‑time metaphysical occupation. The guy basically invented what we now know as the “situationship” and then takes it so seriously he dies from it. Werther is the main character in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. He meets Lotte, decides she is not just an object of affection but the organising principle of reality, and then proceeds to treat every social cue, every boundary and, eventually, every bullet as secondary to that decision.

If Werther found himself plonked in our current times with the internet, he wouldn’t be waiting for letters, he’d be watching Lotte’s “typing…” bubble blink in and out, re‑reading old messages, and stalking her Instagram stories like a private eye. The technology might have changed, but the basic structure is familiar, a subject who would rather reorganise the entire universe around a single, ambivalent attachment than accept that she’s just not that into you, bro.

Werther’s tragedy is that he has too few options. He lives in a single village, one pub, and of course, only one Lotte. The tragedy we find ourselves in today looks like the opposite. We have a potentially infinite feed of “Lottes”, algorithmically served up to us with every refresh. Where Werther is destroyed by the impossibility of his one love, we are sustained in a kind of low‑level misery by the permanent possibility of another love waiting to appear in our feed.

But the contemporary situationship is not just a failure to define the relationship or your boomer Dads idea that people are afraid to commit. Instead it’s a successful business model. Ambiguity keeps us checking and scrolling. The platform’s real romance is not between you and the other person, but between your attention and its data pipeline.

In Wethers letter’s we read a slow, painstaking log of his inner life. Our modern equivalent lives in the cloud. Not in a spiritual way, in our search histories, chat exports, screen‑time reports, the GPS Strava track where we swear we “just happened to be nearby”. Most of us are now keeping Werther‑level records of our desire without ever intending to and just calling it “data”.

However, unlike Werther’s letters, which only ever look backwards, our data doesn’t just keep a record, it also looks ahead. Not only does our data remember what we’ve done, but it quietly proposes what we will want next, who we might like next, what kind of love story is available to someone with our pattern of clicks.

The French philosopher and cultural critic, Roland Barthes’ concept was that when we fall in love, we don’t just feel something. We play a role. Think about how much of love is actually a performance of love. The one who waits by the phone, who reads too much into a single word, and says “no worries if not” while very much worrying if not. These aren’t quirks of individual personality. They’re lines from a script we have absorbed so completely, from novels, songs, films, and group chats, that we mistake them for our own feelings. Barthes called this role “the lover”. Not a type of person, but a speaking position we step into, equipped with ready made scenes and borrowed phrases. Love, in this reading, isn’t a pure feeling rising naturally from within. It’s a library, and we’ve been reading from it our whole lives.

If the twentieth‑century lover was spoken by literature and cinema, the twenty‑first‑century lover is also spoken by interfaces. The swipe, the typing indicator, the “recently online” notification are new figures in the discourse of love. They are not neutral features, but instead are tiny narrative devices telling us what role we’re in, pursuer, pursued, ghosted, back‑burner, and prompting the next line.

Barthes’ lover is surrounded by fragments, little scenes and sentences that can’t be added together into a neat whole. Our platforms are allergic to that kind of opacity. They work by turning fragments into metrics like compatibility scores and “Top Picks”. The chaos of desire is translated into statistical legibility, not so it can be understood, but so it can be acted on, sorted, ranked, and of course monetised.

Back to our loveable lame-guy-beta, Werther. He decides Lotte is the organising principle of reality. Today, the apps decides certain kinds of Lotte are the organising principles of our reality. How many times have you seen “people like you also liked…”, “most compatible with…” and similar. In each case, love is not just a feeling but becomes an architecture of attention that someone or something else has helped to build.

One of the strangest side‑effects of datafied love is that lovers and things start to share a visual grammar. The same motion that dismisses a stranger on a dating app dismisses a jacket from a shopping site or a song from a playlist. Our lovers, shoes, takeaways and our news all arrive as tiles in a feed, optimised for the same gesture.

Werther collapses reality into one object, as he has turned Lotte in an object of desire. We collapse objects into one reality via the feed. Within that feed, we appear to each other less as persons and more like options. We are clickable, comparable, replaceable, constantly re‑scored.

It’s tempting, at this point, to get sentimental about a pre‑digital age of “real” love and even that relationships that started without apps are somehow superior. But that would be too easy. Desire has always been mediated by institutions. The Church, the family, the novel, the cinema, each has its own norms and exclusions. What is new isn’t mediation as such, but the concentration of technical and economic power over the infrastructures that now do this mediating, and the granular intimacy of the data they command.

So the question is not how to purify love in data, like we could go back to some pre‑coded spontaneity. The question is how to live with the knowledge that our loves are already entangled with databases, already being shaped by someone else’s model of what we should want and when.

Maybe it starts with something small. Noticing when we open an app out of loneliness and close it feeling worse. Recognising the specific flavour of desire we feel for someone we’ve never spoken to, and asking where that feeling actually came from. These aren’t revolutionary acts. But they are moments of friction in a system that runs smoothly precisely because we never stop to ask what it’s doing to us.

If capitalism has learned to code love as data, perhaps our task is the inverse, to read data as one of love’s sites in which what we do with our clicks, scrolls and swipes becomes part of a struggle over what it will mean to desire, and to be desirable, at all.