The ways in which love could look a decade from now with the huge involvement of technology could fall in two opposing parts: Technology could kill romance, or it could make it more efficient.

Terry Young, the guy behind the trend-spotting shop Sparks & Honey, offers some intriguing ideas about relationships of 2025 based on three "macro" trends:

1. Technology is speeding up how we interact
2. Unconventional relationships are becoming more accepted
3. Kink (e.g. porn) is going mainstream.

Projects such as 23andMe and uBiome reveal our personal genetics and microbial make-ups, so it can match us up with complementary genes and gut.

So future, we'll be quantifying not only ourselves, but our relationships. "The use of wearable technologies bleeding over into the way we interact with each other," says Young. "Sex and relationships are fertile new frontiers for measurement. Big data provides insights into why relationships work and fail."

Also, location based communication services like Vine, Snapchat, and Grindr will proliferate, allowing people to find like-minded matches more easily, and meet instantaneously. "Technology is allowing every aspect of flirting to be localized and be location-based," Young says. "The rise of instant gratification social media platforms have turned courtship into a sped-up process."

Technology that allows us to stimulate each other remotely will be normal in future. It's already available. Full-on robot sex surrogates can't be much further away. "Virtual reality innovations will allow unparalleled sex experiences," Young says.

"Men and women have become so over-stimulated by the abundance of porn that it's hard for them to perform sexually, or their relationships become like porn," Young says. That could lead to backlash, like the movement, Make Love Not Porn, that Cindy Gallop is trying to foster, or detox services that wash our minds of skin-on-skin imagery. Or something sadder. "Large numbers of men are no longer physically attracted to human women," Young notes.

Furthermore, we'll probably have services indexing relationship performance. "Once you finished a relationship, you report it and get an analysis of what went right, and what you need to optimize next time," Young says. "It's an index of how you've done, and what you may consider doing differently in the future."

Sparks & Honey releases its "future of relationships" mini-report in December.


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