The Case Against Single-Use Relationships

Maybe I Need to Rebrand: Turns Out Everyone Wants Boundaries, Not Connection

We live in a world of single-use everything.

Fast fashion that falls apart after three washes. Meals delivered in minutes and containers tossed within hours. Phones designed to be obsolete in two years. Furniture made of particle board and glue, engineered to break down right after the warranty expires.

We’ve been trained to expect instant gratification and easy replacement. If something doesn’t work perfectly right away, we don’t fix it… we throw it away and hit “add to cart” again.

And now, we’re treating relationships the same way.

Here’s the wake-up call I didn’t ask for: according to new data analysis of Reddit’s relationship advice forum over the past 15 years, the most popular relationship advice has shifted dramatically. Comments advising boundaries, therapy, and breakups have surged, while advice about communication, compromise, and working through things has dropped.

According to Reddit, you should break up approximately half the time.

As someone who’s built a career around teaching skills for long-term love, this hit different. The market has spoken: people want permission to leave, rules to enforce, and lines to draw. They want boundary-setting ebooks, not conflict resolution. They want exit plans, not relational repair strategies.

The Price of Disposability

Boundaries are important. Knowing when to leave is important.

But here’s what concerns me about this trend, and the disposable culture that’s fueling it:

If you want a long-term relationship, you’re going to need more than an exit plan.

You’ve got to learn how to move past “the ick” on a first date and give someone a second chance when they’re nervous and fumbling. You’ve got to learn how to work through problems that don’t have clean solutions. You’ve got to sit with uncomfortable emotions instead of immediately deciding they’re red flags. If you want long-term love, you’ve got to toughen up (I say this with all the love in my soul).

The uncomfortable reality is: Don’t expect to have deep love and connection if you’re unwilling to look at yourself and how you could improve things in your relationship. Don’t expect intimacy if your first instinct is always to set a boundary instead of getting curious about what’s happening here.

We’ve normalized disposability in every area of our lives. Our clothes are made to fall apart. Our phones are designed to become outdated. Even our food comes wrapped in plastic we’ll use for thirty seconds before it sits in a landfill for three hundred years.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that if something requires maintenance, repair, or actual work, it’s broken. Time to upgrade.

But here’s the thing about single-use relationships: they leave you feeling just as empty as that takeout container you tossed last night.

“Buy It New, Wear It Out, Make It Do, or Do Without”

My grandfather used to say: “Buy it new, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

He was talking about material things, but he was really talking about a completely different way of being in the world, one where you don’t throw something away just because it’s no longer shiny. One where repair is a skill worth having. One where longevity is the goal, not convenience.

That worldview? It’s almost extinct. And our relationships are paying the price.

We wonder why we can’t commit. Why we’re always looking for the next upgrade. Why discomfort feels like a dealbreaker. Why we swipe through hundreds of people but can’t seem to build something that lasts with any of them.

Maybe it’s because we’ve forgotten how to do anything other than dispose and replace.

What If We Tried Something Different?

Now, I’m not talking about staying in abusive or fundamentally incompatible relationships. I’m not advocating for suffering through something that’s truly broken at its core.

But if you’re in a relationship with someone you genuinely believe is good-willed at or you’re out in the dating world looking for something real, what if you tried a different approach?

What if, instead of immediately focusing on the boundaries to set, the rules to enforce, and the red flags to catch, you focused on how to live more relationally?

What if you got curious about your patterns? What if you learned to repair instead of just learning to retreat? What if you developed the capacity to stay present with discomfort long enough to actually work through it?

What if we stopped treating people like single-use products?

The Unsexy Work of Long-Term Love

That’s the unglamorous, unsexy, counter-cultural work of long-term love. It doesn’t get upvotes on Reddit. It doesn’t go viral on TikTok. It requires more of you than just knowing when to walk away. It requires you to learn how to stay. How to show up. How to grow.

So maybe I do need to change my marketing strategy. Maybe “Learn to Break Up Effectively” would get more clicks than “Learn to Stay and Grow.” Maybe I should lean into what the algorithm rewards.

But I’m not going to.

Because I believe in long-term love. And building a world where we choose repair over replace. Depth over disposability. Growth over easy.

-Lil