How Dating Became A Cycle Of Aesthetic Consumption

Timothée Chalamet is a rat boy. That’s why women loved him. “Loved,” because, like many leading men who rise quickly in public attention, his cultural moment has cooled. 

What’s a rat boy, you might ask? It’s a boy who has angular features, expressive eyes, a certain wiry unpredictability, or “rat-like,” as the internet so generously labeled it. The archetype remains today, but Chalamet is no longer the one carrying it.

It can be difficult to track the constant ebb and flow of male figures elevated as representations of the “ideal man,” but it's safe to say that Chalamet has been replaced. Most recently, public fascination has returned toward a more classically yearning figure, more reminiscent of older romantic archetypes, such as Paul Anthony Kelly’s portrayal of John F. Kennedy Jr. in the television series “Love Story,” in which longing and restraint replace boyish eccentricity.

Like fashion and art, the “ideal attractive model” rotates through cycles of popularity. Dating back to early cinema, the scene was dominated by figures like Paul Newman and Gregory Peck, men defined by effortless masculinity, a quiet confidence paired with physical presence. Over time, this singular model fractured into a range of more specific archetypes. The internet accelerated this fragmentation, generating new language for increasingly niche categories: the “golden retriever boyfriend,” the “sad boy,” the “soft boy,” with each featuring a micro-adjustment of tone, posture, and emotional availability.

Each iteration does not erase the last, but layers over it, compounding expectations of beauty, femininity, and performance.

The evolution of leading ladies follows a similar trajectory, from Clara Bow to Angelina Jolie. Each era ushered in its own model of desirability. The flapper of the silent film era gave way to the polished glamour of mid-century bombshells like Marilyn Monroe, which in turn evolved into the sharper, more controlled allure of figures like Sharon Stone and Michelle Pfeiffer. Today, these archetypes have splintered into hyper-niche identities, such as the “black cat girlfriend,” and the “manic pixie dream girl.” Each iteration does not erase the last, but layers over it, compounding expectations of beauty, femininity, and performance.

By 2024, the culmination of hyper-focused, idealized “hot guys” adapted into the somewhat absurd and yet entirely predictable “summer of the hot rodent boyfriend.” This era brought with it the rise of figures like Timothée Chalamet, Josh O'Connor, and Jeremy Allen White, men whose appeal lay not in conventional symmetry but in something slightly off-center. Women, half-seriously and half in jest, began “setting traps” for this new wave of desirable men, men who felt accessible yet elevated, flawed yet magnetic.

But as quickly as the archetype rose, it began to shift. Today, only two years later, the landscape of desirability continues to evolve at a dizzying pace. There now exists an informal but widely recognized system for tracking who is “in” as the “white boy of the month.” Like any popularity index, it is inherently unstable. Today’s obsession is tomorrow’s afterthought.

What’s different now is that these preferences do not remain confined to online discourse; they manifest physically. The emergence, and re-emergence, of lookalike contests is perhaps the clearest example of this translation from digital to real life, and of a growing desire not just to admire archetypes, but to inhabit them. Men gather to embody a particular ideal, dressing and styling themselves to match the current template, competing until one is declared the closest approximation.

While lookalike contests are not new, their recent resurgence can be traced to an October 2024 Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest, where the actor himself unexpectedly appeared. That moment sparked a kind of renaissance. Since then, contests have been organized for Jeremy Allen White, Paul Mescal, and a rotating cast of internet-approved figures. The point is no longer simply resemblance; it is participation in the cycle itself.

You are no longer simply yourself; you are a category, a type, a reference point in a larger aesthetic vocabulary.

In this sense, the “rat boy renaissance” of 2024 was less a passing trend and more an inflection point. It marked the beginning of a more fully realized ecosystem of archetypes, one sustained by the chronically online and deeply commercialized nature of modern dating and identity formation.

From there, something subtle but consequential happens: individuals begin to pursue archetypes rather than people. They shape themselves to fit a mold, and in turn, expect others to do the same. You are no longer simply yourself; you are a category, a type, a reference point in a larger aesthetic vocabulary. The internalization runs deep. Style, posture, and even personality traits become curated outputs.

Consider Justin Bieber. At the height of his early fame, his signature swooping hairstyle became a cultural shorthand for a certain kind of boyish appeal. It was widely imitated, copied in middle school hallways, suburban barbershops, and across social media profiles. Today, that look reads as dated, even as Bieber himself remains widely admired, evidenced by his massive following at events like Coachella, where he broke records for sales. The affection persists, but the archetype has moved on. The lesson is about the disposability of the form.

The result is a culture in which people see not whole individuals, but fragments, pieces of an ideal self, pieces of an ideal partner. Attraction becomes less about discovery and more about recognition: Does this person match the template I have already decided I want?

The cyclical nature of attraction to archetypes is not new. What is new is the speed, scale, and commercialization with which these archetypes are produced, distributed, and internalized. Women and men alike are no longer limited to the cultural icons of their immediate environment. Instead, they can access, remix, and idolize an endless stream of curated identities, each one optimized for attention and replication.

We have muddied the waters to the point where a coherent philosophy of getting to know another person, without first requiring them to fit a highly specific mold, feels almost radical.

Are we dating people, or are we dating ideas?

What is needed in this modern ecosystem is not a rejection of desire or imagination, but a recalibration—a willingness to see people not as archetypes to be matched or assembled, but as individuals to be encountered.

If attraction is increasingly mediated through archetypal templates, then the work of building relationships requires something deliberately countercultural. It asks for a posture that resists the ease of categorization and instead returns to something slower, less legible, and ultimately more human. 

In practice, this begins with humility. As people contemplate what it means to find partnership and build relationships, they must do so with a willingness to recognize both the limitations of the self and the limitations of others. Not as a form of resignation, but as a corrective to the inflated expectations produced by a culture that treats people as assemblages of traits rather than whole, imperfect individuals.

It is only through the lens of these imperfections that real intimacy becomes possible. Two people, neither of whom has been optimized to meet a curated ideal, are forced into a different kind of honesty. They are no longer performing toward an imagined standard of desirability; instead, they are learning how to meet each other in the unpolished space of reality. This requires an active rejection of entitlement to a particular combination of aesthetics, behaviors, or personality traits. It also requires a loosening of the belief that compatibility should feel immediate or visually intuitive in the way archetypes condition us to expect.

As attention becomes increasingly mediated through screens, so too does the temptation to curate both self and other into something more consumable. But intimacy cannot be sustained through curation alone. It depends on transparency, on the gradual permission to be seen beyond what is filtered or protected. And it requires extending that same permission outward.

Because while the rat boys will come and go, the underlying question remains: Are we dating people, or are we dating ideas?