Getting Your Love On in 2056
AUTHOR: Joyce Ellen Armond

New Scientist.com celebrated its 50th birthday by assembling one forward-thinking visionary for each of its anniversary years and asking them to give a glimpse of what life in 2056 might be like. Few of these futurists, be they scientists, educators or entrepreneurs, seemed to consider how their visions might change how humans find, and even define, romance. Even as the new millennium gets underway, we're struggling as a species with fundamental changes to how we view love. The basic paradigm of finding a life partner with whom we create offspring is already beginning to crumble. What the heck might love look like in 2056, when the basics of living and being human have changed?

Happily Ever After Might Be A Really, Really Long Time

Our current ideas of romantic love are fairly new, in terms of human history. Choosing a mate for emotional satisfaction became fashionable only after rigid class barriers and economic constraints on women fell away. Now we marry for love, not because we have to produce an heir for Queen and country, or because without a husband's financial and social support we'd be outcasts in our own culture. And this cultural shift is celebrated by all in uber-romantic Valentine's gifts, elaborate wedding ceremonies and golden anniversary photos in the local paper. Being married for fifty years is considered something special, a shining example of the enduring power of love.

So what's going to happen to love when an adult human commonly lives a healthy 140 years? Advances in our understand of human genetic expression and cellular operation could lead to, according to some of the futurists at New Scientist.com, people routinely re-growing a failing heart. By 2056, everyone's health care plan could be tailored to their unique genetic code and able to prevent the onset of disease, or even what we now consider normal aging. As contributor Francis Collins sums it up, "It is possible that a half-century from now, the most urgent question facing our society will not be How long can humans live? but How long do we want to live?"

Which naturally leads to the question, "How long do I want to live with him?"

Science fiction often imagines a future of carefully contracted hook-ups that carry no strings. After the term, the partners split and move on to whatever is next. But modern life shows how unrealistic that is. Multiple ex-spouses, blended families, blended incomes -- these produce entanglements more complex than any envisioned by a string theorist. So how will we adapt our vision of happily ever after to relationships that commonly last for 50, 60 or 80 years?

Longer life spans have already set back the average age a person marries. Will marriage be something people do instead of planning for retirement? And what sorts of relationships will they have before they tie the knot?
And how will our understanding of marriage be affected by other medical advances? According to New Scientists contributors, breakthroughs in fertility treatment and embryology could end all uncertainty about ability to conceive, when to conceive and what will you conceive. The chemistry professor who helped design oral contraceptives sees a future when women can exercise greater control over her biological clock. If a woman can put her eggs on ice, so to speak, until she's found not only Mr. Right but also The Right Time, and regenerative technology delays menopause past age 80 or 90, how will that change a woman's outlook about settling down, or settling for Mr. Mostly Right because she's running out of childbearing years?

But enough about marriage and monogamy and families. On to the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of the chase, the giddiness of the first kiss, the memorable first time. How will dating and courtship change in the years between now and 2056?

How Did You Two Meet?

I met my husband through an online personal ad, which was still pretty cutting edge eight years ago. Consider how the information age has already revolutionized the way we meet potential lovers, and imagine how more radically modified courtship might become as our modes of communication change.

We've all experienced how small the world has become with the advent of email and the internet. One of my critique partners lives in the UK, and that wouldn't be possible without Yahoo Groups and online file transfers. It's certainly cheaper to transport information than it is to transport people. Compare and contrast the cost of even mailing manuscripts across the Atlantic, never mind a quarterly flight across the Pond to exchange material, to monthly online charges. Electronic and digital communication modes are here to stay, and considering how much energy it takes to move a human from here to there as opposed to moving data the same distance, it's going to be more and more important in our lives.

So if you can meet a person living thousands of miles away, communicate with them, know their minds, their likes, their dislikes, share their fears and triumphs, and basically do everything you need to do to fall in love except touch?how is that going to change our ideas about romance?

We're already using telepresence through remote controlled landers to explore the surface of Mars and the bottom of the oceans here on Earth. If the economics of energy or even the physics of the space/time continuum keep us from traveling to be with the person we love, will we develop a more sophisticated erotic telepresence with an entirely different kind of remote controlled lander?

And before the snickering really gets going, consider that some futurists think that our growing knowledge of genetics and nanotechnology may result in our ability to create synthetic life. So if the love of your life lives on the other side of the globe -- and remember, if you're going to live to be 150 you better be sure he is The One! -- would you be willing to imprint your consciousness on an artificial you, located near your beloved? And if you are, could you resist the temptation to, you know, add, subtract or enhance any strategic parts of you (or, if he's doing the imprinting, strategic parts of him) to keep interest high through that long HEA? What would you do with the original you? And where would you get the building blocks for the artificial you? Disturbing questions that may be faced in the future by an American who falls in love with a New Zealander. Or faced by an Earthling who falls in love with an alien living millions of light-years away, on a planet with a deadly atmosphere and designed with incompatible plumbing.

All these difficult questions could be avoided, of course, with a radical shift in our understanding of the nature of reality, and the nature of humanity.

A Really, Really Brave New World

Forward thinkers in neuroscience anticipate that we'll be able to see what goes on in the brain when we form opinions, access memories or experience emotion. Some go further: once we see how it works, we'll be able to manipulate how it works. Human-computer interfaces will become common, even indispensable. Schizophrenia, autism even depression will be wiped out. Behaviors and feelings could be turned on and off as if with switches.

If you could save yourself the heartbreak of falling in love with that person halfway around the world, or on the next world, would you? Would you choose to flip the switch so you could fall in love with the guy next door instead? Especially if you could essentially program him to be Your Mr. Right, while he programs you to be perfect for him?

It would certainly allow us to be endlessly happy in our increasingly long ever afters, but does it leave you as unsettled as it does me? Our lovers and spouses all have habits we wish we could change, some of them rather petty (like cigarette ashes on my keyboard!), but some of them life-altering, like a cocaine addiction or predisposition to violence. If you could flip a switch to change your mate (whether he agreed to it or not), would you?

And what if the next 50 years brings a more radical revolution in our scientific understanding of reality and/or our cultural foundations? Traditional ideas of romantic love and marriage, courtship and sex could be completely changed.

Neuroscience might show that our cherished concept of free will is mostly an illusion. Without free will and choice, can there be romantic love?

How will we make romantic choices if we are freed from "the social and sexual appeal of conspicuous consumption," as Geoffrey Miller calls it. What will romantic partnerships look like if "Absurdly wasteful display will become less popular once people comprehend its origins in sexual selection, and its pathetic unreliability as a signal of individual merit or virtue"? Imagine mankind's mating rituals if power, money and success are not a factor in making a man attractive.

Or consider the vision of the future put forth by Simon Conway Morris, a professor of evolutionary palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge. What if we recognize a deficit in our fundamental interface with reality? What if after leaving the Aristotelian starting gate and surviving Newtonian mechanism, Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty, we find that our "reality" is just an incomplete understanding of a greater "hyperdimensional matrix"? What if "Mind and matter re-link, and so propel humanity to the strangest of destinations"?

More chance of that than de-linking power, money and success from human sexual selection, don't you think?

So go forth and create love stories that answer the questions raised by new technologies and new paradigms, and redefine what will make us live happily ever after.

(Read all the predictions at New Scientist.com.)

From her home base in rural Pennsylvania, awaiting the zombie apocalypse, Joyce Ellen Armond edits the Speculative Romance Online newsletter. Check out her fiction and non-fiction at www.JoyceEllenArmond.com.