What Plastic Can Teach Us About Dating in a Consumer Culture
In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, science journalist Susan Freinkel begins with a simple exercise: she pays attention to every piece of plastic she encounters in a single day. The list is almost endless. Her toothbrush, her clothes, food packaging, household objects, medical equipment. Plastic is everywhere. Freinkel calls the world we live in “Plasticville”, a place where we have become so accustomed to plastic that we barely notice it anymore.
Freinkel's discussion of plastic also raises a broader question: what happens when convenience and abundance begin to shape the way we think about everyday life? Today, that question applies not only to the products we buy, but also to the way we meet and evaluate potential partners.
Think about how strange the experience of modern dating via dating apps actually is. We can open an app and scroll through hundreds of people in a single sitting. We can filter potential partners by age, location, height, education, religion, interests, and almost anything else we can think of. We can decide whether we're interested in someone in a few seconds and, if we're not, move on to the next person.
There are obvious benefits to this. Dating apps have made it easier to meet people outside of our existing social circles and have connected people who otherwise may never have crossed paths. They have made dating more accessible, particularly for people who have moved somewhere new or don't naturally meet many new people in their daily lives.
But Freinkel's book made me wonder what happens when something designed to make our lives easier becomes so successful that it starts changing the way we think.
The connection between plastic and dating apps might seem strange at first. One is a synthetic material; the other is a tech-enabled social network. But Freinkel's book is ultimately less about plastic itself than it is about consumerism, and what happens when abundance, convenience, and mass production become part of everyday life.
In that sense, the comparison starts to make a little more sense.
Plastic Made Us Consumers
In less than a century, plastic helped usher in what Freinkel calls a synthetic age. It offered “liberation from nature’s stinginess,” with affordability, convenience, durability, and flexibility that traditional materials couldn't match.
Plastic also helped make consumer goods available to more people. Early plastics could imitate expensive materials like ivory, allowing products that had once been reserved for the wealthy to be mass-produced at lower prices. As manufacturing technology improved, plastic could be molded quickly and cheaply into almost anything. It changed what we could buy and how much we could buy. That was part of what made plastic revolutionary. If something broke, it could be easily replaced. If a new version came out, we could buy it for cheaper. If we wanted something in a different color, shape, or size, it could be made.
Convenience became the expectation.
Dating apps have introduced a similar kind of abundance into dating.
Before dating apps, your dating pool was largely determined by where you lived, where you went to school, where you worked, who your friends knew, and who happened to cross your path. Now, we can access thousands of potential partners from our phones.
That is an incredible expansion of choice.
But more choice also changes the experience of choosing.
When Dating Starts to Feel Like Shopping
Spend a few minutes on a dating app and the comparison to consumer culture becomes hard to ignore.
You browse. You compare. You filter. You decide.
A profile gives you a handful of photos, a few prompts, a job title, a list of interests, and maybe a sentence or two about what someone is looking for. It's enough information to make a decision, but nowhere near enough information to actually know a person.
In some ways, dating profiles are packaging.
They are the version of ourselves we choose to put on the shelf.
We pick the best photos. We write the funniest prompt. We highlight the most interesting parts of our lives. We try to make ourselves appealing in a space where everyone else is doing the same thing.
And then we look at everyone else's packaging and decide what we want to take home.
The problem is that the things that make someone a good partner aren't necessarily the things that make a good profile.
You can't put emotional maturity into a search filter. You can't tell how someone handles conflict from a few carefully chosen photographs. You can't know whether someone is thoughtful, generous, curious, or kind from a six-word prompt. You can’t determine how you’ll mesh with their friends or family.
And sometimes the person who looks the best on paper isn't the person you actually connect with.
That's where the consumer mindset can get in the way.
When there are always more profiles waiting, it's easy to think of the next person as another option rather than giving the person in front of you a real chance.
We don't necessarily do this because we think other people are products. Most of us don't.
But the structure of the experience can encourage us to behave like consumers.
The Cost of Convenience
One of the most interesting parts of Freinkel's book is that plastic isn't simply a story about something bad entering the world.
Plastic has done enormous amounts of good.
Freinkel spends time discussing its role in medicine, where disposable plastic products helped make healthcare safer, cheaper, and more accessible. Plastic gloves, IV bags, sterile packaging, medical devices, and other products changed the way hospitals operated. Freinkel describes the shift from equipment that had to be repeatedly sterilized to disposable products as an important improvement in both safety and efficiency.
The problem is that some of the same qualities that made plastic so useful (its low cost, convenience, and disposability) also helped create a culture built around using things once and throwing them away.
That distinction is important when thinking about dating apps.
Convenience is not the enemy. Being able to meet someone new without relying entirely on chance is a good thing.
But when meeting someone becomes incredibly easy, moving on can become incredibly easy, too.
A conversation doesn't have to go anywhere. A disappointing date doesn't have to be explored. Someone who doesn't immediately seem right can simply be replaced by the next profile.
There is always another option.
Over time, that can create a strange tension. We have more opportunities to meet people than ever before, but it can become harder to slow down long enough to actually get to know one.
The interaction becomes disposable even if the person isn't.
What's Under the Packaging?
This is where the comparison between plastic and dating starts to become more complicated.
Plastic is excellent at presentation. It can make things sleek, attractive, lightweight, inexpensive, and easy to transport. It can imitate other materials and take almost any shape.
Dating apps are also built around presentation. But there is a lot of life that doesn't fit on a Tinder profile.
You learn more about someone from their family than the interests listed in their bio. You learn more from how they talk about their friends than from their job title. You learn more from how they treat someone who can't do anything for them than from a carefully chosen photograph.
Those things require authentic conversation and the desire to truly get to know someone and the people that shaped them.
And that's difficult to prioritize when the current dating app environment is built around making quick decisions.
More Human, Not Less Technology
Freinkel doesn't conclude that the world should simply get rid of plastic. That would ignore the enormous benefits it has brought to modern life.
Instead, she looks at how we can change our relationship with it. Better systems. Better technology. More responsible production. More thoughtful consumption.
The same idea can apply to dating.
Dating apps aren't going away, and they don't need to. They have made it possible for people to meet others they never would have encountered otherwise.
The next step is creating a dating experience that feels a little less like shopping.
That's part of the idea behind KNOWSBEST App.
Instead of relying entirely on an individual to sort through an endless stream of profiles, KNOWSBEST App brings another person into the process: someone who already knows you.
A mom/mother figure may notice things that you don't. She may recognize a pattern in the people you're attracted to. She may see potential in someone you would have immediately passed over. She may also notice a red flag that is harder to see when you're caught up in the excitement of meeting someone new.
Most importantly, she's thinking about whether this person actually makes sense for you.
Dating doesn't have to be an entirely individual, algorithm-driven process. There is value in perspective, context, and authenticity. Having important conversations about your values and family doesn’t have to be saved for the sixth, seventh, or eighth date. We should be upfront and honest with potential partners early on.
What We Consume and What We Keep
Plastic is not the villain of Freinkel’s book. Her worry is that we built a culture around plastic without fully considering what that culture would look like decades later.
Plastic gave us abundance, convenience, and choice. Those things made life easier. But they also changed what we expected from the things we bought and how quickly we were willing to replace them.
Dating apps have given us a different kind of abundance. More people. More options. More information. More opportunities to meet someone.
Those are good things.
We don't need to choose between having more options and having more meaningful relationships.
If dating becomes too focused on presentation, comparison, and moving on to the next possibility, we risk missing the things that make relationships meaningful in the first place: curiosity, patience, vulnerability, and actually getting to know another person.
The goal isn't to have fewer choices; it's to make better use of the choices we already have.
Plastic changed the way we consume. Dating apps may be changing the way we choose people. The challenge now is figuring out how to use the convenience and access technology gives us without letting it turn something deeply human into another thing we simply scroll through.
Because a person is not a product. And finding the right person probably shouldn't feel like shopping for one.
Writer’s Bio
Kaitlin Brandt is a Boston-based finance professional and cofounder of the KNOWSBEST App (a registered trademark of Knows Best LLC). A graduate of Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business (finance and marketing), she spends her free time singing, exploring art galleries, and working out.
