The Right Reasons
Among the many absurdities that make The Bachelor a near perfect mirror of our era, the most potent must be the bizarre refrain: Here for the right reasons. In a franchise that encourages one man to simultaneously date thirty women (or vice versa), contestants bolster their own virtue by proclaiming that they are "here for the right reasons" while the titular character lobs suspicious barbs at suitors who don't seem to be "here for the right reasons." Of course, in forty-something seasons of the show, no one has ever thought to explain what the right reasons might be1—or indeed whether there are any good reasons to seek love (or notoriety) in the midst of a staged competition fueled by champagne, uneaten food, vapid conversation, hot tub make-out sessions, and fantasy suites.
Naturally I'm well-aware that the average Bachelor contestant does not stake their actual happiness on the stems of roses dispersed at the urging of producers from one man to thirty-something women. However, the state of modern dating, romance, and love is truly abysmal—and perhaps only slightly less absurd than reality TV.
Online dating distills a human person into a series of staged photographs and facile factoids. Tinder and its ilk force date-seekers not only to denigrate the dignity of potential matches by swiping them away in the blink of an eye, but also to erase their own intrinsic self-worth with the notion that they are only valuable if they are beautiful or witty or crass or cute. If you're swiping through people as if they were groceries, it may turn out that you are also being viewed as nothing more than a piece of meat.
Chesterton points out that the iconic characteristic of the modern era is a massive pile of virtues unmoored from meaning. As a result, we have a great number of well-intentioned but clueless people seeking to do good—but who have no idea what good is or where it comes from. So, for instance, we find people who suppose health is the virtue of inoculating oneself from bad choices rather than seeking to do what is good for the body. Or we observe that justice is re-cast as a sort of relentless equality rather than proportionality which gives each person their due—both reward and punishment.
Similarly, we notice that love is stripped not only of nuance but of meaning entirely, spoken of most often with the circular phrase "love is love," which seeks to assign equal value to all forms of love without defining what any of them are. In this re-formulation, we lose the particular beauty that comes with the differences between, for instance, filial love and friendship—or self-love and charity. Most of all, we discover that romantic love is largely dissolved into a tenuous combination of vanity and lust.
Most of us are prone to one of two errors (or both) in seeking romantic love. On the one hand, we may seek to erase our own loneliness, so we find a partner who will help us combat our own self-hatred. On the other hand, we may seek a vessel for our desire, so we find any partner capable of satisfying our sensuality. In both cases, we commit the grave sin of treating people as objects, as means toward satisfying our own needs. Many of us can deceive ourselves for some time about our own intentions, but the burden of a bad relationship tends to quickly outweigh whatever fraction of relief we find in it.2
Having spent the bulk of my twenties making mistakes in my romantic relationships, I arrived at an understanding of love in the same way that one might solve a particularly difficult Wordle puzzle: by systematically eliminating everything that isn't right.
So, in honor of Regina's birthday, these are some of the right reasons to be in a relationship:
You desire good for your partner, even if it involves sacrifice.
You can love your partner for who they could be without ceasing to love them for who they are.
You and your partner encourage each other spiritually, intellectually, socially, psychologically, and physically.
You want to start and sustain a family with your partner.
You love yourself, and you understand that absolutely no one except God can love you enough to erase your loneliness.
I'll continue to learn many more in the coming years, I'm certain.
I'll admit I can't confirm this is true because I exclusively watch better shows than this (or differently bad shows, like Survivor.)