technology v. romance
Or ‘How OKCupid Singlehandedly Killed Any Prospect of a Serious Romance’
One of my mother’s fondest memories of dating my father took place over 30 years ago. While she claims they really connected over long distance phone calls and letters– she finally shared the story with me: “Well, it was the university’s Honors awards ceremony, and he asked me to be his date.” The night of the Honors Awards Ball was an important evening for my father: he was being honored for his pre-medical studies. “He was very handsome back then. A lot of the ladies wanted to be courted by him. But your Auntie Elvie matched us together, and then he courted me,” my mother recalled in her heavily accented English, with an unfamiliar smile on her face that gave her a youthful glow. At the end of the evening, as they were walking back to their residences, my father decided to give my mother his heavy commemorative plaque as a sign of his affections for her. This tiny gesture stuck with my mom for years: even though they eventually lost touch (she moved to the East Coast for a couple of years to attend Columbia University, and then worked in the city– my father on the other hand, did a year of residency in Michigan before he switched to University of Hawaii’s program,) they reconnected over long-distance calls and handwritten letters. It got to the point where my mother dropped out of her Ph. D program at Columbia and moved to Hawaii to be with my father. They have been married for over 20 years. My mother’s nostalgia caused the instantaneous sensation of nausea and admiration. With another other couple it would have been the most beautiful story ever; but because the story was about my parents… it was a little off putting. Their story is the type of love story that every little girl dreams about but nowadays, never comes to fruition.
The millennial generation has successfully rejected the idea of traditional courtship and commitment. Alex Williams wrote an impressive article in The New York Times (Williams, “The End of Courtship?”) about an idea that has been written about to death: Technology has effectively ruined romance; millennials are navigating the dating scene through a non-committal eye because of technology. Maybe he’s right… at this point in time, the majority of twentysomethings that I know have at one point or another, decided to try their hand at online dating. People have been broken up with via text message– or even worse, the victim of the “slow fade,” in which a person decides they are not interested in the other person they are dating and they slowly fade their texts to the point where they no longer contact the other person… it’s frustrating! But when you have a sociological and scientific phenomenon that booms like the development of technology in dating– it’s hard to fight it off, and sometimes you just have to let it happen. Call me a hopeless romantic, but what happened to people at least being completely honest with one another and having some common decency for others in this day and age? I guess my point of is this: What the fuck, you guys? What has happened to dating? And where is it going from here? Can it be stopped?
One of the biggest topics of concern with technology affecting romance is the advent of online dating. Online dating was, is, and will continue to be a mixed bag– however, the statistics don’t lie: meeting “the one” online has increased over the past couple of years. The University of Chicago conducted a study (Cacioppo et. al, 1) that found that more than ⅓ of marriages between 2005-2012 began online, and that online couples have seen to have more marital satisfaction in their marriages. One of my old high school teachers and dearest friends, Pete, met his wife online through match.com. They’ve been together for the past ten years, and the marriage has successfully produced a child, and Pete has also adopted his wife’s first son in the process. Online dating holds a stigma, and Pete has mentioned it in the past when he talked about meeting his wife: “Whenever someone asked my wife where we met, she would always freak out and claim that we met each other at a random event or a bar. It’s funny because I didn’t and still don’t go to bars often.” Stories like this bring hope to those who online date, and it is supported by the Cacioppo et. al study: the internet seems to be providing a higher sense of satisfaction in marriages and seems to be improving the dating climate. (4) However, the majority of people that participated in this study were older than 30… what about the millennial generation?
The thing that can count against the millennial generation or “Gen Y-ers” in terms of dating is the fact that we are so consumed and engrossed with technology and how convenient it is to communicate with one another. This makes dating difficult– even without the online aspect of meeting others. Due to the amount of time millennials spend focused on work or school, many do not have time to talk to their social support networks in person, and mostly spend communicate with their friends through text messages or through Facebook Chat. Through these venues, it’s easy to see how “Gen Y” has grown accustomed to instant gratification, and developed awareness that the person should be able to respond within minutes. Social cues no longer exist with instant messaging and texting. Instead of playing by the rules and waiting three days for someone to call back– people have become lazy and impatient. This makes online dating even more difficult for busy people: they have a more independent mindset, and prefer to go after what they want. But with the introduction of technology in dating, millennials go after what they want and they want it now!
Maybe this is why millennials are both so curious and hesitant to venture into the world of online dating. People use online dating sites like OKCupid for a variety of reasons. One of my really good friends used it in a move to a bigger city, trying to make new friends and trying to date around in order to learn more about herself and the city in which she resides. My best friend started using OKCupid to expand her social circle and to get over a difficult breakup by dating around– she had just gone through a messy breakup and wanted to find someone who “wasn’t from the same university,” because then she didn’t have to “deal with the drama.” One of my closest male friends uses the online dating site (as well as iPhone apps like Grindr or Growlr. Yes, apparently there is a niche dating app for ‘husky gay men’) for casual sexual encounters, and as he claims, “maybe to find someone, but I’m not over my ex boyfriend yet– so I’m really on it to get laid.” To each his or her own, right? Online dating is like the world’s best and worst bar: you can check out whoever you want at your most comfortable, but it causes you to become hypersensitive to flaws, you become extra picky and selective. You miss out on more people than you would in public because you’re so concerned that someone has to fit all your necessary criteria. Some people are there for fun, others take it way too seriously and are intent on finding that special someone right away. It’s fun for everyone, until you go on the first date.
At this very moment, a couple sitting across the room from me at the Julius Meinl off Southport are on their very first online date. It’s easy and apparent to tell, because the art of face-to-face communication is lost. The man is bumbling and gawky, stumbling upon his words as he tries to make small talk– it is apparently that his acute stress response has kicked in, and his forehead is glistening in sweat. With a predictable reaction, the enthusiastic energy from the woman has channelled itself into hyperactive nerves. “So…” the woman eventually manages to regain her composure and turn that awkward energy into a conversation about online dating. “What do you want from this? Why did you get into online dating? I got into it because…” The conversation surprisingly goes off without much of a hitch after this, as the couple’s body language eases itself with every word spoken, but it’s laughable because it’s so meta. To their credit, first online dates get awkward, and it is difficult to get past that. Or perhaps you know way too much about someone because you’ve Googled them ahead of time, or have held constant communication with them all before meeting face to face. Technology has caused us to become the dating process to turn into ‘me, me, me’ rather than ‘me, you, us.’
Dating is frustrating because technology has opened a new wormhole and host of problems that previous generations didn’t have to deal with. Admittedly, technology has provided ways for people (especially women) to become more selective and more proactive in their own romantic lives. However, there are still so many ways of fucking something good up nowadays that people become exhausted, relationships become shorter, the idea of dating ceases to exist– and ‘hanging out’ for something ‘more organic to pop up’ rules the mindsets of Generation Y. The traditional rules of courtship from my parents’ generation no longer apply to today’s dating climate. No more romantic, late night phone calls from a payphone, or months and years of courting a woman– it’s all about text messaging and online dating now.
That being said, I wonder if my parents would be together today if they had grown up with the technology in this era– would the gesture of my mother moving from New York to Hawaii have been as powerful? Instead my father endlessly searching for change to call my mother from a payphone in the middle of a frigid Detroit evening, would he have just shot my mother a quick text from his cell phone? There would be no late night phone calls, or struggling to figure out the time zones, or sneaking around family members due to the high fees on long-distance calls. There would not have been a letter inviting my mother to come move in with him to Hawaii in my father’s barely legible doctor’s scrawl, there would not have been an impromptu trip to New York to visit my mother. It seems like a different world– but the reality is: the marriage of technology and dating might not ever go away, but it is important for those who want to date in this climate to understand what they’re getting into, and to at least become accountable for themselves and their actions.
Works Cited
Cacioppo, John T., et al. “Marital satisfaction and break-ups differ across on-line and off-line meeting venues.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.25 (2013): 10135-10140.
Williams, Alex. “The End of Courtship?” The New York Times. The New York Times, 11 Jan.