$7000? Sounds like dating apps are wildly underpriced, or they are not fit for purpose. Likely a bit of both. A girlfriend of mine once used a matchmaking service for profesionals that was priced in the $10k range and the stories she told me about them all seemed to have the similar theme, where if you want a person to represent something in your life (wife, partner, husband, etc.), it's a recipe for disappointment.
Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one.
Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game.
For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly.
Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them.
That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.
A relationship is a noun and not a verb because it is formed into something stable the people in it can commit to, and because our limits into knowing another person's heart and mind are so profound, and feelings change with, for example, external events, committing to shared goals and life is more realistic than one irrational human to another. Free love isn't free for all.
Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one.
Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game.
For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly.
Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them.
That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.