Living in a rapidly digital world, it’s not possible that as a young adult you have not been on a dating application. Long gone are the days when you would accidentally meet at a bar offering a drink or at a library having accidentally dropped your notes. And in the COVID-19 era we have lost all our social skills and are trying to redeem ourselves through platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and more.
Seeing my family and friends have successful relationships is a bitter-sweet experience. All I am left with is a rom-com to soothe the pain, a couple’s travel gram, or a celebrity’s wedding, which all seem unrealistic in my world.
So, why is it at 24 that I am unable to keep the glimmer of hope alive to find love? Is it a cultural phenomenon or a personal tragedy?
The hook-up generation
As someone who is an old-school romantic I find myself standing against a brick wall in this ever-growing fast-speed dating culture of hook-ups, one-night stands, “casual” relationships and “short-term relationships”. Most people don’t communicate their feelings and expectations in a direct manner and tend to mind-read the intentions of the other gender. Instead of saying “let’s go with the flow,” one should set boundaries as to what they are looking for and not create confusion for later. One can simply say that they are looking for sex instead of putting others in a loop of trying to understand what they want.
This culture also propels unsolicited dick pics, non-consensual sexting and even phone sex, making one have dysphoric or toxic experiences.
“You’re not who you portrayed yourself to be”
There is a lot of deceiving that can happen on dating applications where people can not only fake their education, likes and dislikes, photographs, but also be totally different people or “catfishes”.
One way of being a catfish is using deepfake technology or thinking the other person is stupid to not do a background search on social media platforms. More than people who go to such lengths, I have seen them likelier to put on a façade where they say things you want to hear such as if I advocate for feminism, a heterosexual man would pretend to know what it even means or how important it is. They would even display their filtered photographs, and put so-called quirky and meme-worthy answers to appease the other person. It is even more easier to act or look differently in the Zoom age.
“All I want is good looks, good looks and good looks”
You would be lying if you said you did not match with someone because of how they looked. In a highly-visual world, dating applications work in cognisance with the idea of “aesthetics” and “beauty.”
There is nothing wrong with vanity, but if this is the only thing you are after, you are going against the theory of “Beauty is skin deep”. What if the person in front of you has a dull personality, or on a more serious note, a disrespectful attitude and dishonest principles?
More than that I have seen cis-gendered heterosexual women complain about their only reason to not match with a person because they are not 6 ft, and men dissing the women for being plus-size.
This leaves little to no hope for couple-goals to change from being “instagrammable” to being loveable. We need more “I want to know you better”.
“Too many fish in the sea”
It might seem antithetical that when you have a lot of options, you would automatically have more chances at finding love. But I have found more times than not, that is not true.
“The paradox of choice” makes one wait for the next best person and this has no end to it. We are left with a growing row of flowers and none to pluck.
This is the reason people tend to not put in efforts to carry a conversation because they have x number of matches already in their list.
“Having one failed long-term relationship”
“I cannot fall in love again,” is a defensive mechanism people have for not getting hurt again. They feel there is no scope of any relationship ever working because one did not. This clearly is a distortion to how reality works—we are merely fortune-telling and catastrophising the worst that could happen without looking at the “in-betweens.”
More than that love can happen more than once. There is no limit to that.