Editor's Note: Author Mads Larsen has published the academic monograph Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder: The Evolution of Modern Mating Ideologies, Dating Dysfunction, and Demographic Collapse. This article has been timed to coincide with the publication.
Homo sapiens’ imaginative capacity lets us our communities employ made-up stories to disseminate norms and values, but also question and scrutinize old beliefs and practices, while exploring and uniting around new ones (Gottschall, 2012). Fiction was integral to the radical transformation of Western mating from antiquity to modernity. A line of new mating moralities facilitated the journey from the polygynous kinship societies of Germanic tribes, through the lifelong monogamy of Christian feudalism, to modernity’s unique embrace of individual choice. I conceptualize this process to have comprised three sexual revolutions—around the years 1200, 1750, and 1968, respectively—and that we now, concurrently with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, are entering into a Fourth Sexual Revolution, for which fiction could be similarly central as with the previous revolutions.
Antiquity’s mating morality is referred to as heroic love. The main imperative of this ancient rape culture was that “a woman had to love the best warrior, even if he had killed her father or husband” (Bandlien, 2005). Through humanity’s agricultural phase—and, to a lesser extent, the forager phase—intertribal raiding often evolved the rape or capture of non-kin females, a practice culturally justified by the us-versus-them morality embodied in the ideology of heroic love (Buss, 2021). Polygyny, concubinage, and sexual slavery were commonplace. Powerful men hoarded women by the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands (Raffield et al., 2017).
With the Church’s Gregorian Reform (1050–1200), the West was set on a unique path (Reddy, 2012). Its most influential tenets were the sanctification of lifelong monogamy and female consent. Even the most powerful of men were now supposed to mate with only one woman. Moreover, this woman was neither to be captured, nor treated as a mere good that her father could hand off for the appropriate compensation. The new ideal was that the woman should consent to being paired up with the man in question.
This was a radical break with the previous mating regime. It typically took centuries to convince and coerce new populations to go along with the Church’s innovative Marriage and Family Practices (MFPs) (Henrich, 2020). Central to the dissemination of the norms and values of the West’s First Sexual Revolution was the ideology of courtly love imbued in medieval romances. Stories of knights and maidens, such as those of Tristan and Iseult, conveyed that martial superiority was still important, but that women also had to be courted using sophisticated social skills. Through exaggerating the power and duration of human pair-bonding emotions, courtly romances instilled the idea that only lifelong monogamy could provide the “special ecstasy” that results from an exclusive “spiritual dedication” of reciprocal sexual and emotional fidelity (Singer, 1984).
The Norse experience attests to the centrality of fiction when a population must change its mating beliefs. Aristocrats were introduced to courtly ideals in the mid-1100s, but did not begin adapting to the new mating demands until after King Hákon of Norway commissioned a line of romance adaptations, beginning with Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (1226). The scholarly consensus is that this literary program set in motion a cultural change that made aristocrats internalize the righteousness of Church MFPs by around 1300. Courtly ideals migrated to ballads, which contributed to how Norse commoners, too, were on board half a century later (Larsen, 2022).
The dissolution of Europe’s tribes set in motion a psychological-institutional coevolution that made populations increasingly individualistic (Henrich, 2020). By the mid-eighteenth century, a rapidly increasing number of young people felt entitled to make their own decisions in matters of mating. The Second Sexual Revolution entailed a unique transition from parental to individual choice. No previous human community, at least that we know of, had let young people wrest so much power over mate selection away from the older generations (Apostolou, 2017).
Another innovation in fictional formats accompanied this revolution. The modern novel, with its obsession on interiority, engaged a line of negative externalities. Women were increasingly free to choose their own mates, an agency that for many resulted in catastrophe. Illegitimacy doubled, tripled, and quadrupled across Northwestern Europe (Seccombe, 1992; Coontz, 2005). Higher-status men seduced women with promises of marriage, but often left them to deal with pregnancies on their own. The modern novel offered training in theory of mind, so that women could enhance their understanding of men’s intentions and their value as long-term mates.
The Romantic Century (1750–1850) was facilitated by the transitional ideology of libertine love, a cultural dissolvent that countered the pragmatic ideology of companionate love, which had promoted low-arousal, arranged marriages in late-medieval and early-modern Europe. Libertinism—disseminated through hedonistic works such of those of Voltaire and de Sade—justified individual choice also with regard to uncommitted copulation. This mating morality had such adverse ramifications for many women that the Romantics felt that it was imperative to reattach copulation to pair-bonding through the ideology of romantic love. Moralizing, sentimental works—such as those of August Lafontaine—contributed to a cultural change that, from 1850 on, led to a decline in illegitimacy across the West.
Westerners may have felt increasingly entitled to individual choice both on long- and short-term markets, but their impoverished environment with ineffective contraceptives could not facilitate such a morality. The modern mating ideology of confluent love (confluence: come together) was intermittently discussed in fiction after the Second Sexual Revolution, but only became hegemonic after the Third Sexual Revolution, which I symbolically place in 1968 (Giddens, 1992). Post-WWII prosperity and the contraceptive pill empowered women to make their own choices. An increase in female employment made women less dependent on men for provisioning, while the pill detached copulation from reproduction. This facilitated an ideological change, as the Third Sexual Revolution was about “the hard sexual core, thinking eroticism most precious in what human relationships have to offer” (Shorter, 1975).
Confluent norms and values were discussed and disseminated through a line of artistic formats, from New Hollywood cinema and increasingly daring TV, to novels and a host of musical genres. The romantic utopia had been that a heterosexual man and woman would become whole by merging through a monogamous relationship of lifelong love. They were complementary halves who would self-realize through the housewife-breadwinner model. Confluent love sanctified convenience, reward, and individualistic self-realization, values which brought Homo sapiens back to the mating practices for which it had evolved: serial pair-bonding interspersed with opportunistic, short-term relationships. The main idea was that men and women, now freed from cultural oppression, would be able to live out their desires and thus achieve better lives.
Half a century after confluent love became hegemonic, its utopia seems to have played itself out, similar to how the romantic utopia played itself out after the 1950s’ near-universal implementation of the housewife-breadwinner model. Individual choice in combination with new dating technology drives a mating stratification among men that underpins increasing singledom, sexual inactivity, and plummeting fertility rates (Larsen, 2023). An alarming number of young men and women are opting out of both long- and short-term mating. Many find today’s mating markets to be so appalling that they settle for singledom and celibacy (Gelles-Watnick, 2023). Individual choice did not lead to men and women living their best lives, but—argue some—to an increasing exploitation, marketization, and depersonalization of mating that aligns poorly with our desire for intimacy and commitment (Illouz, 2019; Perry, 2022).
When the utopia of a mating morality has revealed itself to be just that, a utopia, it is time to negotiate and unite around new beliefs. I believe that our current era’s Fourth Industrial Revolution will so drastically change our environment that our mating practices will have to also transform, probably more radically than with any of the previous revolutions. Artificially intelligent sex robots, AI-driven matching services, and gene-edited reproduction are only a few of the innovations that are predicted in the decades ahead. The ideology of love that will allow humans to adapt to this new reality might be conceived of as dataist love.
The First Sexual Revolution transferred authority in matters of mating from the kin group to the nuclear family. The Second Sexual Revolution transferred authority to the individual, although this was not universally implemented until after the Third Sexual Revolution. Yuval Harari (2016) has suggested that when we experience how a super-intelligent AI will make better choices than humans, we will transition from humanist to dataist beliefs. I propose that this cultural evolution will affect our mating choices, too, so that dataist love will inform most human mating. A machine meant to understand our emotions better than we do ourselves, will be intended to match the right humans and facilitate that the appropriate emotions emerge.
For humans to submit to such a regime, compelling fiction would have to dissuade us from our embrace of confluent love, similar to how the medieval romance undermined heroic love, and the modern novel villainized companionate love. Which fictional formats will be most effective for such a task, I do not know. The task thereafter will be to investigate and disseminate what the specific tenets of dataist love should be. I suspect that AI-driven storytelling—however this might manifest itself—will underpin the Fourth Sexual Revolution. If the AI, instead of just telling stories of love, could facilitate immersive experiences that included actual partner-matching in real life, I think the tenets of dataist love could be embraced far more quickly than if we still had to rely on mere representation. Regardless of how this plays out, I believe storytelling will be as central to this revolution as it was with the previous ones.
