A friend of mine has already designed her dream wedding. The perfect cushion-cut ring, and a beautiful band adorned with glimmering diamonds. A flawlessly planned culmination of picturesque scenery and intentional originality. I know her well enough to know she’s certainly going to bring this fantasy to fruition, but I believe her to be the exception to the rule. The sad reality is that relationships have dramatically lost their value. To a lot of people, relationships have developed into something much more problematic; a transaction and a performance.
The performance within the world of online dating, brought to you by the architects of social media, Facebook and Myspace. A vast landscape of singles connected by similar interests, and with a few easy clicks, you too could take part in this revolutionary approach to finding a partner.
Online dating is a ridiculous way of avoiding real human interaction. We favor apps as a means to minimize the sting of rejection and the discomfort of awkward conversations. Dating apps have degraded the real emotion that comes with meeting a potential partner, stripping it of its authenticity and leaving us with scraps of what love used to look like.
Apps like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge enable users to find people based on shared interests, providing them with fun opportunities to connect with like-minded individuals and avoid unpleasant interactions. I believe that before dating apps, it was unpleasant experiences that taught resilience to those in relationships and developed their character outside of it. An unfortunate casualty, but most of us can attest that unpleasant experiences in romance certainly aren’t lost.
The effects of this new and improved way of looking at dating extend far beyond the users of the apps. It’s evident that the “Digital Age” no longer refers to how high our screen times are, but how we’ve been conditioned to interact with the world. Call it bad timing, but a skyrocketing dependency on social media, as entertainment, has truly ruined everyone’s ability to be patient. One 2019 study published by World Psychiatry determined that, “the internet’s digital distractions and supernormal capacities for cognitive offloading seem to create a non‐ideal environment for the refinement of higher cognitive functions in critical periods of children and adolescents’ brain development.” It’s possible our parents were right; we can blame everything on those “damn phones.”
While I place a lot of blame on dating apps and social media as a whole, there’s no way to objectively hold one event responsible for how we reached this point. I certainly don’t think I have enough left in my word count to cover it all. What I do know is that themes of overconsumption and mental struggle have been prevalently discussed as correlating with our device usage. I don’t think love has escaped these bounds. If anything, love has been most impacted by all of these themes.
For fear of ending on a depressing note, I offer some friendly advice. A relationship is not the solution to your problems; it is a loving addition to your life. No one is perfect; do not expect change unless you yourself are willing to undergo it. Finally, be brave in life and in love; your fairy tale will not come without first conquering the dragon.
