Lex Fridman argues that movies and cultural narratives have inflated what people expect from romance, making dating feel like a high-stakes quest for an instant emotional payoff. He warns this overlooks how real relationships work: they're embers you tend over time, not flames that ignite on command.
The stakes feel impossibly high, in part because we've come to view what we are entitled to romantically as this impossibly grand thing. You know, like it's everything we've ever seen in the movies. When we create stakes that are that high for something, what we're expecting is a feeling up front as opposed to something that we build with someone, like a sort of an ember that we nurture into a flame over time. We're expecting, like, the flames from the beginning. And I think it's a really dangerous way to approach relationships.
