I recently watched the new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, and somewhere between the longing glances, the unspoken feelings, and the men who seemed incapable of making a straightforward decision, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated. Not because the story was particularly surprising, but because it felt embarrassingly familiar.
Jane Austen published Sense and Sensibility in 1811. More than two centuries later, we have dating apps, therapy language, sexual freedom, and seemingly endless conversations about emotional availability. Women can own property, earn their own money, and choose not to marry. We have considerably more freedom to pursue relationships on our own terms, yet somehow, we are still trying to decipher whether someone who clearly enjoys our company actually wants to be with us.
I don't want this to become another article blaming men for everything, although I would be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind. What interests me more is how little some of the emotional dynamics of courtship seem to have changed, even as the institutions surrounding them have transformed almost beyond recognition.
We are no longer waiting for a gentleman to secure his inheritance before proposing marriage. Instead, we are waiting for someone to decide whether they are emotionally ready for a relationship, whether they want to keep things casual, or whether defining the relationship might somehow ruin whatever it is we have.
Different centuries, different vocabulary, surprisingly similar frustrations. And it makes me wonder whether modern dating has actually made us better at choosing love, or simply given us more sophisticated ways of avoiding the choice.
Love Was Never Just About Love
One of the things I appreciate about Austen is that her stories are rarely as romantic as their film adaptations initially suggest. Beneath the beautiful dresses, countryside walks, and declarations of affection is a rather unsentimental understanding of how relationships operate within social and economic structures.
The Dashwood sisters are not simply two women looking for love. After their father's death, their financial security becomes precarious, and marriage represents something much more consequential than romantic fulfillment. Their choices are constrained by inheritance laws, class expectations, and the uncomfortable reality that affection alone cannot guarantee stability.
Anthropologists have long examined marriage as something beyond a romantic arrangement between two individuals. Across different societies, marriage has organized kinship, property, inheritance, and relationships between families. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, explored marriage and kinship through the exchange relationships that connected social groups, although his framework has also been criticized for treating women as objects of exchange.
What interests me is how radically our understanding of relationships has shifted. In Austen's world, romantic decisions were visibly entangled with family and economic obligations. Today, particularly in Western societies, we tend to frame love as an intensely personal decision, something that should emerge naturally from individual desire and emotional compatibility.
Yet relationships are no less socially constructed simply because we experience them as personal choices. We still have expectations about who should initiate, who should pursue, when a relationship becomes serious, and what commitment is supposed to look like. We may have escaped many of the formal constraints of Austen's world, but we haven't necessarily escaped the cultural scripts that shape our behavior.
The Convenience of Ambiguity
What frustrates me most about contemporary dating is not necessarily rejection. Rejection can be painful, but at least it provides information. What I find more difficult to understand is the reluctance to make one's intentions clear while continuing to enjoy the emotional benefits of another person's attention.
Willoughby is an interesting example. He cultivates intimacy with Marianne, encourages expectations, and behaves in ways that suggest a future together. Yet when those expectations become inconvenient, he chooses another path.
His circumstances are not identical to those of someone avoiding commitment today. Austen gives him specific financial motivations, and the social consequences of his decisions are considerably more severe. Still, the underlying tension is recognizable: one person experiences the relationship as something meaningful and developing, while the other retains the possibility of withdrawing from it.
We have developed an entire vocabulary to describe this ambiguity: situationships, talking stages, mixed signals, breadcrumbing, emotional unavailability. These terms can be useful, but their proliferation also suggests how accustomed we have become to relationships that resist definition.
Sociologist Eva Illouz explores this uncertainty in Why Love Hurts, arguing that romantic suffering cannot be understood solely through individual psychology. Modern relationships are shaped by consumer culture, individualism, and an expanding sense of choice. When the possibility of meeting someone else is always present, commitment can begin to feel less like a natural progression and more like the decision to close off alternatives.
There is something faintly absurd about approaching intimacy as though it were a purchasing decision. Yet modern dating can sometimes feel like an endless comparison between what is available and what might still be available.
Of course, uncertainty isn't always manipulation. People can be genuinely unsure of what they want, and not every undefined relationship is unhealthy. But uncertainty becomes something else when it is repeatedly used to avoid responsibility for the expectations one has helped create.
Are We Asking Women to Be Understanding Forever?
There is another reason Austen's work continues to feel relevant, and it has less to do with romance than with the emotional labor expected of women.
Elinor's restraint is frequently presented as admirable. She remains composed, protects other people's feelings, and carries her disappointment privately. Marianne, by contrast, expresses her emotions openly and suffers visibly. Their differences raise a question that still feels familiar: how much emotional management are women expected to perform in order to make relationships function?
Modern women are encouraged to be independent, self-aware, communicative, and emotionally mature. We are supposed to understand our attachment patterns, communicate our needs without sounding demanding, respect other people's boundaries, and remain compassionate toward their difficulties.
None of these qualities are bad. But there is something exhausting about the possibility that emotional maturity can become another obligation disproportionately placed on the person already doing most of the emotional work.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the concept of emotional labor to describe how people manage feelings as part of their work. Her later writing on domestic life also explored the unequal distribution of emotional and household responsibilities. Although dating is not the workplace she originally studied, the broader question of who is expected to manage feelings remains relevant.
We are encouraged to understand why someone might struggle with commitment, why they need space, and why their previous experiences might make vulnerability frightening. But at what point does understanding become an excuse for accepting less than we need?
Women can be avoidant and inconsistent, too. Still, heterosexual dating has a long history of expecting women to interpret men's behavior while regulating their own responses to it. We are asked to be patient without becoming passive, interested without appearing desperate, and emotionally available without expecting too much in return.
It is a rather elaborate performance for something that is supposedly meant to be mutual.
When Freedom Becomes the Fear of Choosing
One of the more curious features of modern romantic culture is the assumption that commitment represents a restriction of personal freedom. We talk about being tied down, settling down, giving up independence, or losing ourselves in relationships.
There is some truth to this. Relationships require compromise, and historically, marriage has often demanded far greater sacrifices from women than from men. It would be naive to romanticize commitment without acknowledging those inequalities.
But I wonder whether our understandable resistance to restrictive relationships has gradually become a suspicion of commitment itself.
Anthony Giddens describes the modern ideal of the pure relationship, one sustained through mutual satisfaction and communication rather than external obligations. It is an appealing idea: relationships should continue because both people want them to, not because society demands it.
But this also introduces a kind of instability. When relationships are sustained primarily by individual choice, choosing must become an ongoing act. Commitment is no longer guaranteed by tradition, but negotiated between two people who remain free to leave.
Perhaps this is why commitment can feel so intimidating. It requires accepting that choosing someone means not choosing every other possibility. It involves vulnerability, uncertainty, and the possibility of regret.
Philosopher bell hooks offers a useful alternative in All About Love, where love is understood not simply as a feeling but as something expressed through care, trust, responsibility, and action.
That distinction brings me back to Austen. Marianne initially associates love with overwhelming feeling, while Elinor approaches it with caution and restraint. Their experiences complicate both positions. Passion alone cannot guarantee reliability, but restraint can also conceal genuine affection.
Perhaps the question is not whether we should approach relationships with more sense or more sensibility. It is whether we have become too comfortable separating romantic feeling from the responsibility of acting upon it.
Two Centuries Later
I don't think everyone who struggles with commitment is secretly waiting for someone better. Sometimes people genuinely fear repeating past relationships, losing independence, or making a decision they cannot easily reverse. Sometimes two people simply want different things.
The problem is not that these differences exist. It is that we have become remarkably skilled at allowing them to remain unspoken.
We can spend months interpreting messages, analyzing behavior, and discussing what someone might be feeling, all while avoiding the possibility that their actions have already provided the clearest answer available.
What makes Sense and Sensibility so compelling is not that Austen offers a simple lesson about choosing the right man. Her understanding of love is more complicated than that. Affection is shaped by money, class, reputation, family obligations, and the different ways people respond to emotional vulnerability.
The new adaptation reminded me how much has changed since the Dashwood sisters navigated their romantic disappointments, but also how familiar the emotional negotiations remain.
I don't think the solution is to return to a time when commitment was socially compulsory. The ability to choose whether to marry, remain single, or pursue different forms of intimacy is a freedom worth protecting.
But perhaps freedom should also include the ability to be clear about what we want without treating that clarity as an unreasonable demand.
Wanting commitment does not necessarily mean wanting marriage, permanence, or a predetermined future. It can simply mean wanting someone whose actions are consistent with their affection, someone willing to participate in the relationship rather than indefinitely considering the possibility of one.
Maybe the most depressing part is not that men in Austen's novels could be indecisive, selfish, or afraid of commitment. It is that, more than two hundred years later, we have developed an extraordinary vocabulary to describe these behaviors without necessarily becoming much better at addressing them.
I don't think we need to be less romantic. But perhaps we could become a little less impressed by romantic potential and a little more interested in romantic responsibility. Because the ability to make someone feel wanted is not quite the same as the willingness to choose them.
And surely, after two centuries, we should know the difference.
Further Reading
If you're interested in the ideas behind this essay, these books offer different perspectives on love, relationships, and the social expectations surrounding them.
Jane Austen — Sense and Sensibility
The original novel, and the natural starting point for understanding how romance, class, and economic security intersect.
Eva Illouz — Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
An exploration of modern romantic suffering through the lens of consumer culture, choice, and social structures.
bell hooks — All About Love: New Visions
A thoughtful examination of love as a practice involving care, trust, responsibility, and commitment.
Anthony Giddens — The Transformation of Intimacy
An influential account of how modern relationships have shifted toward individual choice, negotiation, and emotional equality.
Arlie Russell Hochschild — The Managed Heart
A foundational study of emotional labor and the social expectations surrounding the management of feelings.
Claude Lévi-Strauss — The Elementary Structures of Kinship
A more academic read on marriage, kinship, and the social organization of relationships across cultures.
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