Why Dating Still Matters, Even If It Feels Like a Disaster

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyWelcome to Friends and Benefits. Follow our new sex and relationships columnist into the lives and psyches of men and women, young and old, gorgeous and tragic, divine and insane.The dating game today isn’t so much a game as it is an ordeal, a trial, a punishment. At least, that’s the common narrative—that the landscape is bleak; that young people don’t have sex; that the apps are dismal; that having a boyfriend is embarrassing.All of these things may be true, to an extent, but they’ve unfairly come to dominate the cultural conversation, cynically willing us to renounce our carnal desires.