Tea at Trianon: What's Wrong with Modern Dating

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 30, 2026

What's Wrong with Modern Dating

From Elizabeth Stone:

There are many things wrong with modern dating, between the constant need for validation, our inability to wait, our uncontrolled lust, the fact that we treat sex as something casual, and that we use chemistry and feelings as the main guidance for love, you would think these things alone would be enough to explain why so many people feel lost, hurt, detached, and unable to form anything lasting, but honestly, I think there are two deeper things beneath all of it that make the whole situation far worse.
Dating now isn’t just more shallow, dating now has completely changed the way we see people altogether. Somehow, and somewhere along the way we stopped people as someone we want to know, someone to honor, pursue, discern and maybe even possibly fall in love with, instead now we approach others not as a person, but as an experience to be had. I mean even in our language this is obvious, we talk about others like they were some lesson, a story, just a chapter, a fling, an adventure, a waste of time… but the problem is that once another human person becomes just an experience, well it becomes very easy to just consume them and move along.
The second problem is that we have totally inverted the natural order of love, we have given others access to us and our bodies before we even know them, before we are even able to trust them, before commitment before anything that would protect us. We are trying to begin with things that are meant to be the fruit of love, we don’t plant a seed anymore and wait for it to grow, we take the fruit, never plant, and then sit and wonder why nothing ever seems to grow. (Read more.)