What 'Materialists' Gets Wrong About Modern Love

The world could really use a romantic comedy revival right now. Romances and rom coms, from Pride and Prejudice to When Harry Met Sally, have always been able to celebrate romantic love while skewering the individuals and society that make lasting love so hard to find. And there’s plenty in the modern world to talk about. Marriage rates are on the decline, particularly among young people, and social media is filled with both insightful and idiotic discourse about sex and relationships from self-proclaimed experts. A movie that’s able to cut through the noise and acknowledge our struggles while imagining a positive path forward could be just what Cupid ordered. 

By these measures, Materialists is easily one of the better romantic dramedies of the past 20 years, though a flawed one. It takes a laser to both the social and individual problems that make finding love in the modern world so difficult. Even so, the film can’t quite escape some of the bad ideas that permeate our culture—and therefore perpetuates them. 

Written and directed by Celin Song (Oscar-nominated writer-director of Past Lives), Materialists follows Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a pragmatic matchmaker in New York City who has found success for many clients by treating love like a marketplace formula to solve. She starts to question her values when, on the same night, she meets a seemingly perfect man, Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), and sees her ex John (Chris Evans) again for the first time in years. 

The film is very attuned to the modern conversations around dating and the general feeling of pessimism people have about finding a partner. Both men and women seem to have a long list of criteria and demands for a partner, demands that are pricing them out of the dating “market.” Materialists takes a mallet to this through its matchmaker protagonist Lucy and skewers the long line of people who come to her with wildly unrealistic criteria and blame her when she can’t perform miracles. As the title implies, Lucy becomes increasingly disillusioned with the fact that both she and her clients primarily base their decisions to marry on largely shallow (“materialistic”) criteria like money, age, and height.

There’s a reason the film seems so in tune with the woes of modern dating. Writer-director Celine Song was briefly a matchmaker herself. “I feel like I learned more about human beings in those six months than I did in any other part of my life,” she told Today. She really wanted to show how the materialistic standards of the modern dating landscape are harmful to both men and women. 

The truth is men are also crushed by the dating market. They’re also crushed by the way that we date and with the way that we objectify and commodify ourselves and each other. I really wanted there to be a very real consequence for men in the film, and have them be crushed by the same dating market that crushes [the women in the film].

This is something the film does really well. Both Lucy’s male and female clients are portrayed as equally unreasonable in their standards, and both are shown facing real consequences for that. To Song, dating is hard because we objectify each other in this way. “Love is easy,” Song insists. “But it’s also hard when people are afraid to let go of control and completely surrender,” she adds. “But the truth is, I think, when it happens, it just happens. They say, ‘If you know, you know.’ That’s kind of what it is. You face it, and then when you face love, it’s very simple and it’s very easy.”

It’s here that the film hits some snags with its analysis of modern love. It insists on pitting a highly sentimental view of love against the rational and realistic—and views the latter as materialistic and shallow. Lucy starts out seeing marriage as a formula based on data for a compatible match but spends the whole movie having that worldview taken apart. First, a client of hers is assaulted because all the “boxes” she and her client tried to check somehow missed the “good man” part. Next, she realizes, even though Henry “checks all of his boxes,” she doesn’t love him. Finally, she realizes that even though John doesn’t have money, he’s a good man and she loves him, so in the end she chooses him. 

Saying “love” is the answer while also insisting that love is always easy is a recipe for disaster.

And yet, separating love from the rational this way is likely to create more failed relationships. People with overly sentimental views of love, like the belief in soulmates, are predictive of lower relationship success. They’re more likely to see the relationship not fitting their ideal emotionally as a sign it’s not right (like Lucy does to Harry in the story), rather than something to work on. It’s common for people in successful relationships to say something to the effect of “love is hard, but it's worth it.” 

Moreover, not all considerations captured in the data for what makes a compatible match are shallow. The fact that people sort in mating for compatible intelligence, values, and–yes–even considerations around money, isn’t automatically shallow, nor contradictory to love. Why would you want to marry someone who didn’t share your values? 

This is all very relevant when it comes to the relationship between Lucy and John, who broke up in the past over money issues. Conflicts over money are a big predictor of divorce. And particularly when the man is less financially stable than the woman–something that is certainly true of Lucy and John. You can complain about this as shallow, or you can recognize this as a natural expectation for women to have of men, and recognize the problem as social trends that increase men’s financial instability. (John reveals at the end that he’s been an aspiring actor for years and yet has been turning down commercial work and still doesn’t have an agent.) Either way, if Lucy and John are going to make this relationship work, it’s going to take work and a plan to get through it. Saying “love” is the answer while also insisting that love is always easy is a recipe for disaster.

Now, as Materialists rightly notes, there are often limits to the data that we can quantify. As Lucy’s boss tells her, she didn’t know her client’s date was capable of assault because she didn’t have that info. This is one of the reasons that you might fall in love with someone in person that you would reject based on their Tinder profile: there are other factors in the real person that you see that you would miss online. 

In Walter Hickey’s book on movies, You Are What You Watch, he has a fascinating chapter on the phenomenon of creative “flow.” Artists are most creative where they just “know” what to do and can break the rules and create something amazing without thinking about it–when it feels “easy.” As sociologist Jonathan Haidt discusses in The Anxious Generation, decades of sheltering young people from the real world while giving them unfiltered access to social media has impoverished them from gaining the skills of social acclimation, where clicking with the right person feels “easy” and can be done without thinking about it. This would have been a fascinating thing for Materialists to explore. But it unfortunately does not.

Data can also make you more optimistic about marriage. But Materialists often acts as if choosing love is a brave choice that goes against the data. As Lucy watches a couple get married, she says that one day they’ll hate each other for no reason, stop having sex, and get divorced. John asks why anybody gets married if that’s the case. Lucy responds, “Because people tell them they should. Because they’re lonely. Because they’re hopeful.”

Song spoke about the movie’s ending, which features marriages taking place at City Hall, explaining that the scene is meant to represent the ambiguity of Lucy and John’s future marriage success.

We don’t know how many of those marriages that happen in City Hall, how many are going to work. But we know in the news that 50 percent of them will fail. If you ask me what’s going to happen to Lucy and John, it’s 50-50. Unless either of them reaches a different tier in their class — if Lucy takes the promotion, or John catches a slightly bigger break — their chances of staying together would drop further. Maybe a miracle will still happen, where they are so moved by their love, and so in love, that they’re going to be able to move through it, which is the other 50 percent of those marriages that survive.

And yet, we know from research that the exact opposite is true. The rates of divorce for first marriages are somewhere between 40-50%, and most married people are happier than singles on average (even controlling for factors like wealth or a previous disposition to be happy). 

Moreover, as IFS’s own Brad Wilcox lays out in his book Get Married , there are practical things you can do to have a more successful marriage that don’t rely on simply being “moved by love”: go to church regularly, have a “we first” rather than “me first” or “career first” mentality, share bank accounts, put barriers to infidelity around your marriage, etc. Once again, knowing the data on what makes marriages more successful isn’t necessarily the enemy of love, but can empower lovers to have more successful relationships. 

There’s clearly a need and a desire for stories about love that take the struggles of relationships seriously. But while the issues this movie poses are relatable, how it addresses them falls flat. Materialists is a welcome celebration of love and a satire of the modern social and personal factors that keep us from it. It should be praised for taking love and its barriers seriously and for using the rom com genre as a vehicle to address these issues. Unfortunately, while it expresses quite well the questions we share, the answers it provides may perpetuate the problem for many as much as solve it. 

Joseph Holmes is an NYC-based film and culture critic. He's written for outlets such as Forbes, The New York Times, Christianity Today, World Magazine, Religion Unplugged, Relevant, and Religion & Liberty. He co-hosts a weekly podcast called The Overthinkers. 

*Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima/A24 (L-R: Dakota Fanning and Chris Evans in Materialists)