I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In The Agony of Eros, philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that erotic love is suffering because we are all achievement narcissists, all striving to be the best we can be in a consumerist capitalistic can-do culture: we are all the same. There is no Other, upon which the transcendent experience of erotic love depends:
Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.
Han writes that our culture of constant comparison—our consumerist culture where everything including people might be compared and ranked against one another—removes any possibility of placelessness (atopia):
Our contemporary culture of constant comparison [Ver-Gleichen] leaves no room for the negativity of what is atopos. We are constantly comparing one thing to another, thereby flattening them into the Same, precisely because we no longer experience the atopia of the Other. The negativity of the atopic Other refuses consumption. Therefore, the society of the consumer endeavors to eliminate atopic otherness in favor of consumable—heterotopic—differences. In contrast to otherness, difference is positive. Yet today, negativity is disappearing everywhere. Everything is being flattened out into an object of consumption.
Otherness is atopic, proposes Han; it can’t be placed on a continuum of better or worse, or in a three-dimensional space of evaluation. It is different. Not the same.
Online dating encourages comparison: profiles shown one after the other, swiped left or right. Each person becomes an item in a catalog, measured against others in terms of photos, prompts, and metrics (height, age, political leanings). The uniqueness of the Other, their atopia which means they cannot be placed, consumed, or easily assimilated, disappears under the endless process of comparison.
Instead of encountering someone as radically Other, you experience them as “placed”: fixed in a grid, searchable by filters, locatable within categories. Online dating makes people placed, not placeless. Each profile online must occupy a legible slot in the consumer’s field of vision.
Han distinguishes Otherness (negative, resistant, unassimilable) from Difference (positive, consumable, interchangeable). Online dating operates entirely in the register of difference. You are this tall, not that all; into hiking, not reading; liberal not conservative. Difference is sortable, ranked, and endlessly compared.
In online dating, desire is flattened into preferences. The negativity of being confronted with a person who does not fit, who resists your categories and your checklist, is neutralized in favor of smoother matching.
As Han suggests, this is how consumer society operates: it turns Otherness into consumable Difference. Online dating doesn’t give us encounters with strangeness.
What kind of relationships can develop out of this placefulness of online dating? Ones in which two narcissistic subjects interact, each only aware of their own selves and preferences, and the reflection of their self in the other person?
Each person desires not the Other, but their own reflection refracted through the Other. Instead of curiosity—”Who are you, apart fro me?”—the focus is “How do you confirm who I already am?” The partner becomes a surface for self-validation.
For Han, negativity (the strangeness, the Otherness) creates eros. Without it, there’s no tension, no attraction that unsettles and transforms. There is only smooth sameness. The relationship risks being hollow, more like an echo chamber than a dialogue.
On the surface, such a relationship might look harmonious: both partners mirroring each other’s preferences, lifestyles, or self-images. The harmony is deceptive; it isn’t born of genuine recognition. It’s a mosaic of self-reinforcements, easily shattered when either partner fails to reflect the other “properly.”
Because each person is only aware of their own self, the bond is fragile. The moment one partner asserts genuine otherness, the other feels threatened or betrayed. What looked like intimacy quickly turns into estrangement.
Eros dies; desire doesn’t move outward toward difference; it circles endlessly back to the self.
This is what I described in my recent story for Things Men Gave Me: each of us arriving as narcissistic subjects, concerned only with our own selves, preferences, and needs.
What would a relationship look like if formed between two people who approach not as narcissistic subjects but as erotic subjects? Subjects who acknowledge the existence of the other as Other? Not as one to be compared and consumed but as one who cannot be compared (to other people) and consumed?
Desire moves outward towards the other. Each person doesn’t just look for affirmation of who they already are. They seek to be surprised, unsettled, and even changed by the Other’s alterity. This keeps eros alive, because it thrives on the unknown and the unassimilable.
Negativity—friction, drama, strangeness—is accepted as part of intimacy. Because the other is not entirely knowable or consumable the partner cannot be fully possessed. This creates depth, tension, and ongoing interest. There is the possibility of transcendence and transgression. There is the possibility of being hurt and wounded.
Importantly, the relationship becomes dialogical and dialectical instead of reflective; it presents as an ongoing conversation. Each partner recognizes the other as an independent subject, not just a mirror. That means listening, risking misunderstanding, and allowing space for difference. The two people don’t collapse into sameness but sustain a dynamic of encounter.
When one partner asserts something unexpected or resists being assimilated, the relationship isn’t shattered, it’s deepened. The strangeness and alterity of the Other isn’t a threat but rather makes love compelling.
Eros flourishes. Each person opens themselves to the Other’s alterity. Each person is drawn beyond oneself. Desire generates growth, change, and intimacy.