Our Dating, Love & Romance Emergency
Young Hollywood's unvarnished thoughts on the impossibility of it all — and what this business loses without rekindling passion and heart for other humans
I don’t know if this is the very worst things have felt in the near decade since I started writing this column, but they sure don’t feel good — on all sorts of fronts, for all sorts of reasons.
That was going to be my topic today — like Robert Eggers dragging his camera into Count Orlok’s castle, I was going to have the courage to look the dread stark in the eye and bathe in the great terror.
Then I remembered that it’s Valentine’s Day this week, and I decided that dread can wait for another moment.
Because, to paraphrase the poet Burt Bacharach, What our world needs now, is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that we’ve just too little of.
I. Looking for Love
Hollywood has not been a fun place to work lately, to say the least. Amid the insecurity and gloom, our kindness and affection for one another always takes a backseat. In my recent journey and wanderings as well as my field guides and How-To H’wood series, it struck me that through it all, tales of romance, entanglements and adventures rarely come up. I don’t mean office liaisons — which are fraught for all sorts of reasons and regulations these days — but outside of work. Even looking at people’s Instagrams, I don’t know how to quantify this but it feels like the romance quotient has taken a nosedive across our world.
Everyone is a careerist, seeking validation to prove they are important emanates from social media, thanks in part to human nature, yes, but also an industry where bosses or metrics no longer provide that. Certainly, marriage is not in and of itself an end goal, but it’s worth noting that California, New York and D.C. have the oldest ages in the nation for men and women for tying the knot (around 31).
A creative community where people can’t or don’t love is a big problem. A hard-hearted industry where people feel anxiety about their career and making money, and the need to be hustling and “networking” at all times, well. . . It’s worse than an emotional dead end. It’s a business problem, because such people are not going to be able to do a very good job communicating with the hopes and aspirations of the world for very long. (Maybe that partially explains the creative output of the past few years.)
So I reached out to the place that should be ground zero of romance, where people still have a heartbeat: Young Hollywood.
For romance, to paraphrase another song, if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere.
I talked to a bunch of young professionals in our assistant ranks for their thoughts about the state of romance and love at the entry-level rungs of this business (all while trying not to sound like I’m not a 300-year-old man when I spoke with them).
What they told me was, indeed, horrifying but also strangely hopeful and uplifting. Here are four of the dispatches I received that encapsulate dating today, and then I’ll share my conclusions and recommendations for Hollywood amour.
‘Working Production Essentially Rules Out a Relationship’
Assistant 1 (Female): “No, I don’t believe love is possible in the industry. I’ve had bosses who openly preferred when I was single because I was ‘more dedicated to the job and less focused on myself.’
“I also think the schedule of working production essentially rules out a relationship . . .
unless you’re, like, long distance because the hours are just so prohibitive. I once turned off my phone for a couple of weekend hours to spend time with a long-distance partner who had flown into town and got in huge trouble with my boss. I basically got demoted (he didn’t want to fire me, he was a ‘nice guy’).
“Other people outside the industry don’t understand the hours/demands, and people within the industry are too competitive and jealous. Also, we are all way too poor to go out anyway. It’s grim here in the trenches.”