Too often, what used to be a romantic gesture of courtship is now merely a ploy to get some stranger to come home with us at the end of the night. It seems the original sense of a romantic relationship has almost completely vanished. In its wake, we’re left with hookup culture.
So what’s the predominant cause of this shift? I believe cell phones and the mobile apps they provide have made an incredibly negative impact on today’s dating culture.
In the past, going on a date meant having some level of accountability. Dating required you to plan in advance, either in person or over the phone. Today, with apps such as Tinder and OkCupid, responsibility has dried up. Because the people we’re messaging are often total strangers, they might not feel the need to follow through with plans or do anything more adventurous than “Netflix and Chill.”
During my brief stint on Tinder, I received an uncountable number of crude messages, and I began to wonder whether people actually find relationships on sites like these.
True, apps like Tinder and OkCupid take social pressure off their users, but it seems we’re increasingly becoming unable to form meaningful relationships.
Though it might be too late to stop this shift from occurring to some degree or another, the possibility definitely remains to stop the decline of dating culture from becoming worse. To do so, we need to set down the technology and try to form relationships based on real-life experiences rather than forming our entire understanding of someone via a late-night text conversation.
Maddie Eaton welcomes comments at [email protected].
