BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
When Rebekka Grun von Jolk, an economist whose research sits at the intersection of love and behavioral science, spoke with students at Georgetown University recently, she expected a polite Q&A. Instead, when the formal session ended, many students stayed behind. They wanted real answers about modern dating, commitment, and what the data actually says about love and life outcomes.
What she found was not a generation drifting or checked out. “With young people like this, there is reason for optimism,” she wrote afterward. “They will seek, learn, and do better than previous generations.” Their questions, she noted, clustered around four recurring tensions.
The cost of not deciding
The first tension is one many young people will recognize: the situationship. These are romantic or sexual relationships that stay deliberately undefined, existing somewhere between friendship and commitment without being fully either.
Grun von Jolk is direct about what this ambiguity actually costs. “Non-decision is a decision,” she writes. “If you don’t decide, every whim of your environment may decide for you.” The human tendency toward status quo bias makes it easy to stay in an ambiguous arrangement long past the point where it serves you, missing other opportunities in the process. “Ambiguity feels safe in the short run but can be expensive in the long run,” she writes.
Her research-backed view is that behavior and intention should move together. When physical intimacy outpaces emotional commitment, attachment tends to form regardless of what either person intended.
Whether political difference is a dealbreaker
The second tension is about who people pair with, and whether political distance is workable. Research consistently shows strong assortative matching among long-term couples: people tend to pair with those similar in values, education, and outlook. In more polarized environments, political alignment increasingly functions as an identity filter.
Grun von Jolk’s view is that this sorting comes at a cost. “Romantic love can be a force for social integration,” she writes. Evidence does suggest that over time, couples converge in daily habits, and that the more politically engaged partner often shapes the other’s views. But political convergence in couples is modest compared to the initial sorting that brought them together. Two people who begin with different politics are unlikely to fully merge.
What the research does not support is the assumption that political difference makes a relationship unworkable. The question is whether differences are embraced rather than managed into submission.
The economics of being single
The third tension is more practical: is there what Grun von Jolk calls a “singles tax”? Her answer, from an economic standpoint, is yes. Partnerships generate economies of scale: shared housing, distributed household labor, and a form of informal insurance when one partner is temporarily unable to contribute. In some countries, tax structures explicitly favor married couples.
This is not a case for rushing into partnership. “Singlehood is not a failure,” she notes. But she is clear that “from a strictly economic perspective, partnership often generates efficiencies,” a finding that rarely makes it into either the pro-relationship or the go-your-own-way cultural narratives.
Whether similarity predicts success
The fourth tension is about assortative matching: should people actively seek partners similar to themselves in education, religion, income, and core values?
The evidence says that similarity on values generally predicts stability. “Values shape how we plan our lives and invest our time,” Grun von Jolk writes. “If partners see eye to eye on these fundamentals, there is strength in unity rather than recurring conflict.” Compatibility reduces friction. Complementarity, by contrast, can create growth when differences are genuinely welcomed rather than negotiated around.
The distinction matters. Seeking someone identical to yourself is not what the research recommends. What predicts stable, growth-oriented relationships is alignment on values combined with openness to the differences that remain.
The common thread: intention over drift
What connects all four tensions is whether you are making deliberate choices or letting circumstances accumulate into outcomes. Grun von Jolk’s central argument is that modern dating, precisely because it lacks the social structures that once provided external guardrails, demands more active decision-making than many people bring to it.
“Intentionality is powerful; ‘seeing where it goes’ is not,” she writes. Love, she argues, “is not only about maximizing utility. It is about choosing a direction” and following through. The students at Georgetown who stayed to ask hard questions understood that already. Their rigor, Grun von Jolk wrote, gave her reason to be optimistic about the whole generation.
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