Are our must-have love lists killing our chance at happiness?

In the final moments of Celine Song’s debut feature film, Past Lives, a woman closes the door to a cab taking her childhood love, a man who represented a lifelong “what if?”, to the airport to fly from New York back to Korea, where he lives and she grew up. The camera follows her down the street to the stoop where her husband sits waiting. The first time I watched it, the cinema lights came up soundtracked to my heaving sobs.

The second time I saw the film, I excused myself from the cinema before it reached that scene, because I feared the post-screening Q&A I was hosting with the writer-director would be embarrassing and damp. A deeply romantic, patient and quiet film, Past Lives went on to top many of the year’s “best of” lists and earn Oscar attention. It cemented me as a fan of Song for life.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

Then it was announced that her follow-up would be another romantic drama positioning one woman between two men who represent bigger choices than just affection and passion. Materialists is in Australian cinemas now, and before bundling up in half a dozen layers to see it on Sunday night, I’d heard the director had pulled off another feat and that the marketing of Materialists as a fluffy rom-com about a big-city matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson was something of a Trojan horse. The real story was a treatise on modern dating and what our outsized expectations for partners does to our chance at relationships.

My curiosity was piqued. As the perpetually single one, I’ve learned to tune out the inquiries from well-meaning friends who’ve never had to swipe left or right, have never had to scroll through profiles of men in their late 30s who are still “not sure” if they want to have children. Every attempted date organised with a man whose profile bleats about how “no one on this app actually wants to meet in person!” and who unmatches me the day we’ve made plans to do just that makes me more hardened towards the whole process … until a month or two later I decide to reinvest because what is there to lose.

People these days, I’ve been conditioned to believe, don’t meet by chance any more. They don’t meet as children or at artist residencies, like Nora in Past Lives did with the two men she felt split between.

I’ve been asked, by those friends spared from the Hinge trenches, what I want in a partner – and then been scolded for not having high enough standards when my answer was simply, “taller than me and has a job”. (After every year on the apps, even those criteria become less “dealbreakers” and more “nice to haves”.)

Lucy, Johnson’s character in Materialists, notes down similar expectations of her clients when they first meet. Men in their late 40s looking for women under 25. Women who make $80k a year on the hunt for a man making more than $300k. Men wanting a “fit” woman – which, of course, has nothing to do with strength or cardiovascular health or time spent in the gym, but is instead code for “not fat”. Women not looking twice at men under 180 centimetres.

Lucy’s similarly calloused to the whole enterprise. Her clients are seen as either “high value” or delusional. She personally believes that romance is a numbers game – specifically the numbers in a prospective partner’s bank account.

What her career – and the collective time we singles are spending on miserable, hopeless apps – has missed is the surprise and spontaneity underpinning so many of the good relationships, the ones that don’t just get the chance to begin, but last. A friend of mine drunkenly declared she’d marry a man she saw in line at Hungry Jack’s one night. They took their wedding photos outside that takeaway spot years later. If another friend had not gone to a house party, who knows if she’d have a baby and a mortgage with the guy she met there. I was the officiant, early this year, of the wedding between two friends who were dancing near each other at a pub when one of them worked up the courage to put their number in the other’s phone (and barely remembered afterwards).

No criteria or checklists or forensic accounting or seeing how someone (literally) measures up. Just chemistry that an app or matchmaker can never dream of conjuring up. It’s almost enough to give a sceptical human barnacle some hope. Almost.