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A Look at Dating in the Digital Age

By Cassidy KirkPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
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Dating in the modern age has became a joke, the punchline being that we are now in the era of having digital relationships. Yes, you read correctly, today's young people are now accustomed to only communicating through text, face time and social media, but are unable to actually hold a basic conversation in the real world.

Why is this, you ask? We have lost our backbone when it comes to finding love as now it is only a click away. This begs the question of how many people in new relationships can now say they met organically without the help of any app of some sort? The answer is not many.

Is this a good thing though? A dating site, What's Your Price, published a survey which involved about 15,000 men and women. The aim was to find out how soon they friended or followed a significant other on social media, and how long that relationship lasted. Those who were online friends before meeting in real life barely made it past six months in a relationship, and only a shocking 18 percent of them enjoyed a year long relationship.

Social media and dating apps have allowed us to create unrealistic versions of ourselves; we can be intelligent, witty, and with just the right Instagram filter, drop dead gorgeous. This isn't real though.

Even 80 percent reported that it's easier to deceive others through their social posting according to a scientist and relationship expert, Clarissa Silva who conducted in-depth interviews with men and women, ranging from ages 28-73, that were active social media users.

These interviews also uncovered that the more selfies posted on platforms like Instagram, the higher the likelihood of relationship conflicts and jealousy, particularly when those images get significant attention, such as likes or comments.

Millennials and Generation Z eventually realised that you can't autocorrect yourself in real life, you can't blur out blemishes or walk around with a permanent Snapchat dog filter, and this terrifies us. Online dating in our age seems like a good idea but when it comes down to it, it has just made us even more fearful and insecure.

You don't need to take risks like asking out someone you just met in a coffee shop anymore. Why would you want to when instead you can sit at home and swipe until you see a face and description you like?

Our motivations for using social media and dating online are for love, casual sex, ease of communication, self-worth validation, thrill of excitement and trendiness, revealed by a study conducted by Sindy R Sumter, Loes Ligtenburg and Laura Vandenbosch in 2016.

This in itself is worrying that we are online for ease of communication and self worth validation, as experts like Leslie Shore, who specialises in communication, has said, “Those that have limited experience in reading people do not have the same level of social intelligence previous generations possess. If this becomes the new normal, building strong, deep relationships will take more time and will be more difficult to maintain.”

Meaning that, continuing to use social media to communicate is only going to result in our communication skills in real life to decline and become worse.

In regards to self worth validation, 60 percent of people using social media reported that it has impacted their self-esteem in a negative way which means that the thing we are using to increase our self worth is actually making it decrease. Ironic, isn't it?

A reason why being on social media whilst looking for love is increasing is because the more popular it becomes, the more we feel we need to be involved.

In the latest Match Singles In America studies on on how social media has impacted people’s dating lives, they found that 57 percent of singles say that social media has generated a Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

We fear if we aren't on social media, we are missing out on everything ranging from a new upload on Instagram of a Kardashian to finding our one shot at true love. It sounds so absurd and empty headed, but the frightening truth is that we all do this, considering 71 percent of us are using social networking sites and spend on average 135 minutes on social media per day, as stated by statista.com.

It may be easier to search for love online, and less time consuming than actually mixing and socialising with people in real life, but telling your grandchildren that you met granddad by matching on tinder or 'sliding into his Instagram dm's' doesn't have the same romantic ring to it as the stories we were told of how our grandparents and even our parents met.

Do we really want to be relying on social media and the internet to find our soulmates? Or is this our fate?

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About the Creator

Cassidy Kirk

I am a young freelance journalist who also enjoys creative writing as you can see from my work.

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