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Hollowed writers is definitely part of it. More broadly, I remember a relatively recent Lindyman post about how people/artists used to have much more interesting and varied lifestyles. Going through their wikipedia seems like their lives just upend at random, back and forth from rags to riches across varied types of work.
Today, people focus on a career pretty early, due to increased access to education, credentialism, safetyism and general structural rigidness of life. Yes, I guess a software dev can just quit, move out of Sillicon Valley to Idaho and be a writer while working some odd jobs, but that's unfeasible unless he saved up a lot or just made millions. But more likely he either got burned out, did FIRE or usually fried himself up with psychadelics.
Even so, there's more romantic relationships now than ever. Maybe it's so common audiences lost interest in seeing them on the big screen. Maybe there is such a discrepancy of expectation from growing up with ideas about romance, that when confronted with the reality personally, people are just not interested. Seeing so many divorces, breakups, cheating or other such behaviors while growing up on "Love conquers all" is cognitively dissonant.
Maybe past works were so interesting because most people didn't marry out of love, but ended up loving their partner nonetheless? So a story of pure genuine desire had a different impact.
Maybe over the last few decades, as fiction became more popular and more media genres portrayed, reached a peak of "people believing romance to be possible and desireable" and "people did find romance" and we're slowly coming off that peak?
I think that's what happened to hookups and hookup culture. Popular sitcoms (and other movies) in the 2000s made it super desirable and popular, out of what experiences, personal or witnessed, writers had from being young in the 1980s and 1990s. As hookup culture gained traction, it reached a peak (probably 1-2 years after Tinder was invented) and now we're here, with the (male) loneliness epidemic.
I'd say that since romance that was previously pretty achievable becomes more "impossible", then we should see more impossible romances and relationships in media. I am thinking of monsters, aliens, robots etc but that would be difficult to disentangle from the lifting of (intimate) taboos.
Isn’t paranormal romance the best selling genre out there? Werewolf porn hitting it big is consonant with your predictions.
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Yes there are "more" romantic relationships in that people date serially. My point is that these relationships aren't as deep in terms of depth of emotion and connection than they were in the past.
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