Relationships don’t look as they used to before. It is no longer a standard to get a girl flowers and take her dancing. Going out for a drink or getting coffee became the new reality. Starting a conversation with a stranger to ask them out is no longer in common, you have to slide into someone’s DM’s or ask them out via dating apps. Many people long to the “old dating” style and want to experience that. But we live in age of social media, photo editors and dating apps.
We create our online persona (not only on dating apps but also social media such as Instagram) and it doesn’t always corelate with who we actually are. It presents who we want to be and as who we want to be seen. We only post our best pictures, often highly edited. No one has to know we took over 100 pictures to get the perfect shot. We choose the information we want to put on our profile. It is so easy to become a new person.
When downloading a dating app, a user is instantly bombarded with picking their preferences, setting their dealbreakers and editing their whole profile. If one thought that is overwhelming, wait until they get to the swiping section. Users are asked to swipe right on people they think they might like, based purely on their looks. Or left on people they don’t feel like they would have a connection. If the user matches with someone, they can start a conversation with them, or not.
There are no rules when it comes to talking to people on dating apps, you don’t know each other’s friend groups, there is no common environment. This means you can just disappear without a word and vice versa. This also means that you can talk to multiple people at once without any consequences. You build the relationship based on what both of you want to appear like and when you meet it is impossible to keep up with the act and you reveal your true personality. This can result in a deeper connection or, which is a more probable scenario, completely disliking this person and ghosting one another.
Online dating can be considered as “full time job”. It requires you to take time to get to know people, go on dates with them and remember things they told you and you told them. This is mentally exhausting and instead of giving you hope for finding love it leaves you being way more frustrated about not finding a connection with someone. Because let’s be honest, this connection was forced from the beginning. You didn’t want to get to know them as a person, but already as a potential romantic partner. And this puts a lot of pressure onto both of you. In comparison when meeting someone in real life, you first get to know them and later you might consider them as a romantic partner.
Trying to find your soulmate online is not impossible but is rare and most people delate their accounts without finding what they have been looking for and being drained and overwhelmed. People deserve to find love but I don’t think dating apps are the way to do so. They have way more flaws than positive aspects. So go outside, meet new people, give a compliment and see what may happen.
I think you are touching upon a really important topic here that affects a big part of our generation at the moment. I struggle with online dating a lot, and I agree with the way you have described it in your blog post. For me personally, the first problem already occurs when swiping on people. The digital aspect of dating apps takes away our opportunity to talk to the person, see how they act in real life, what kind of atmosphere they create, if they make you feel comfortable or not etc. What is left is to just decide mostly based on their looks (or potentially a couple of funny sentences they wrote on their profile) whether they are worthy of matching. If you actually manage to match with someone, even if the conversation is interesting right from the beginning (which is quite rare in my opinion), it is difficult to say whether they are actually entertaining, or they are just putting up a fun online persona to impress. Don’t get me wrong, I think that online dating can be a practical way to meet new people because, for a lot of us, it can be quite difficult to get out of our known circles and meet someone new. However, I feel like nowadays dating online is becoming such a norm that it is very challenging to go through the ´old school´ dating experience, even if you want to. Although I know I am not the only one who feels this way, it still feels pretty much impossible to break down this new, modern way of dating, as it has become so widespread and popular.