Modern dating. What an absolute mess we’ve found ourselves in.
Look around and ask any of your single friends what they think of the dating scene. Some will surely have no problem with what’s transpiring; maybe they’re pretty decent looking, have great social skills, or have a knack for putting themselves in good situations.
For most though, dating seems to be best described as a dumpster fire.
Just what the hell is going on?
Decaying social spaces, anticipatory anxiety, trading experience for thoughts, social media distorting our perceptions of life, the pandemic, and dating apps have all played large roles over the past twenty or so years to get us to this interpersonal wasteland.
Social spaces for humans to gather have been a part of our DNA for countless millennia. Whether it’s gathering around the campfire to pass down oral histories of our elders, having a drink at the pub, or walking and talking at the mall, humans have always found a way to gather together to share in what it means to be alive. To wind down. To turn our brains off and revel in the people we care about, especially for adolescents.
Places like the mall were once hallowed halls for adolescents to come together and be bored as one. These arenas used to be breeding grounds for trial and error, which is so desperately needed to form social skills with fellow humans. These were spaces to share thoughts about themselves and the culture at large, to share their emotions and try to figure out life together and what the hell all of this means.
If you look at these spaces now, both modern and traditional, they have largely crumbled as suitable places to socially gather. Partly because some spaces failed to adapt to how humans were changing their leisure habits and partly because generations of humans were slowly losing their social skills as they spent more time online.
Now, you don’t need them quite as much to find people anymore.
Now, you’re just a few short clicks away from meeting anyone in the world. A few short clicks away from saving yourself the risk of vulnerability that comes with the efforts of meeting in-person and sharing your whole self. Avoiding these spaces in favor of the internet is where part of the decline of social skills started because it’s just so damn easier.
With the convenience of the internet, why go out when you can get social gratification from the comfort of your own home? Why face someone in-person for a confrontation when you can send a quick text and sweep the whole thing under the rug?
Worse, the internet was turning into a repository of all the bad things that could happen to you. Forums and nascent social media were turning into places where you could see the worst of humanity straight from the sources themselves. Horror stories of people being subjected to and creating so many traumas. And it only got worse.
The message was delivered to entire generations: who would want to put themselves in harm’s way knowing all this information?
These stories, while mostly true, also distort reality. In truth, when you look at crime statistics in the United States, they have been decreasing since the 70s. With the notable exceptions in the rise of crimes post-9/11 and during the pandemic, we’re actually living in some of the safest times in human history. And it’s not close.
When you read the internet often enough though, this no longer becomes the case. People in happy relationships rarely post on Reddit about how happy they are; like Yelp, social media attracts and encourages posting what ails us rather than the positive. Continuously reading the worst about humanity has exploited a natural brain process called anticipatory anxiety. One of the aspects of this anxiety involves our brain making internal calculations on what could happen if you did certain things.
And this is largely a good thing! This is what our brain was designed to do! It’s this same anxiety that protected our ancestors from certain death by simulating events in the mind without actually needing to test in the real world.
What happens, though, if you continuously think that all the less likely things that could happen to you appear bigger than they actually are? And what if you also believe that the perceived ill effects will last longer than you think? Well, this turns into a recipe for generations of people who are now more risk-averse than ever. The trouble is, these risks are precisely what help you grow and evolve as a person.
Through this risk-aversion, society at large has pulled away from each other to minimize these perceived horrors. Rather than doing things, we assume that the odds of negative things happening in society are greater than they actually are and people start to live in fear and mistrust.
Combine these fears with the vast, easily accessible information on the internet and you have increasingly younger humans learning about adult things second-hand rather than obtaining them through experience.
It’s subtle, but generations have increasingly traded experience for thoughts. People start to think about what could happen rather than learning first-hand the truths of the world and releasing the rest.
Experience matters more now in so many things because, in part, more people are becoming afraid to be open to failure. Those that have taken risks and come out the other side have gained wisdom you cannot acquire any other way. Especially through failure. There are many other arenas where we have traded experience for thoughts, and in the process, offloaded critical thinking skills; helicopter and snowplow parenting, reading Twitter after a big cultural moment to see how others feel about it before evaluating it yourself, and looking at a Reddit post and skipping the article in favor of seeing what the “consensus” is in the comments before arriving at your own conclusions.1
Social media is another contributor to where we find ourselves now. It’s no secret; social media has deconstructed and reshaped modern civilizations. Specifically, what I want to point out is the way social media has further distorted our worldview of what life is actually like.
Apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have distorted the ways in which we perceive life in two very important ways. In these spaces, you can curate exactly how you want other people to see you. Typically, this emerges as posts which emphasize you living your best life, acknowledging good vibes only, and all through the lens of unnatural filters and posed pictures. The other appears to be the polarization of this; how terrible things are for you and sharing trauma for the world to see.
This is not how real-life works.
Shades of grey are everywhere, and social media amplifies and glorifies absolute thinking patterns that help breed emotional immaturity.
What actually happens in life is the whole range of human emotions impact us all the time. We have the lows with the highs. We have disappointment, failure, and harsh realities on our doorstep in addition to the days of unbridled euphoria. Mostly, though, we have days where absolutely nothing of note happens. And that’s okay! This is where, once we can accept this reality, true peace and contentment can begin to flow. However, these aren’t sexy events to tell your followers, friends, and family. Social media has helped wipe these mundane events away from view and has given younger generations a false impression of what life is actually like.
What happens when a couple of generations of adolescents are consistently seeing the absolutes in the possibilities of human life rather than being exposed to all the areas in between as well?2
Then came COVID-19.
If we think of the previous information as kindling, then we can imagine the pandemic being the blowtorch coming through and setting all of it on fire.
What the pandemic managed to do is set back social skills even further, especially amongst the more developmentally vulnerable. The pandemic saw hundreds of millions of children and adolescents across the world shelter in-place and isolate themselves from the rest of humanity. While the closing of schools in the hopes of slowing down the virus proved to have mixed results, extending lockdowns into a second year and beyond once COVID appeared to be doomed to stick around accelerated this already present social skills decay.3
What do you imagine might happen when you deprive an entire generation of kids and teenagers of the opportunity to practice social skills for two years? When you’re thirty-five, two years isn’t exactly short, but perspective allows you to compartmentalize that it isn’t an eternity either. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. When you’re fifteen though, two years suddenly seems a lot longer.
Not only this, but children and adolescents undergo enormous developmental changes and many of these rely on our interactions with other people for growth. These are the years where you learn things via trial and error, seeing through actions where you are in the world and how others react to you. We learn about our own identities, critical social cues, empathy, and other values through actually interacting with people in-person. Suddenly, the world lost two years of valuable social-skills building. Worse, with nothing to do outside the home, they were driven into exactly the traps internet spaces have created for people and it fucked with their minds. I see these serious effects nearly every day when providing therapy to my teenage and young adult clients.
To recap, we’ve looked at the evolution in the decay of social spaces for people to practice social skills, gain wisdom from failures, and learn the truths about the world and themselves. We’ve seen how losing these spaces increases anticipatory anxiety, which in turn has people shying away from the real world in favor of the virtual and what could happen. This helps create a world where we offload critical thinking and leave behind experiences in favor of thoughts. Social media comes around and further polarizes what it’s like to be in the world. This all poured gasoline on the globe for years and then COVID-19 came in like the Joker with a match and lit it all up.
Now, we arrive at what many perceive to be the core of the problem with modern dating; the dating apps themselves.
Holy goddamn shit are these things terrible.
Not only terrible in actually helping you find a date, but also in having come around and exploited, amplified, and contributed to the problems of increased distrust in groups of people with one another.
It used to be that dating apps actually helped you date people. In the beginning, these apps and websites were created with the purpose of rounding singles up and putting them in front of each other to spur interactions. As money flowed into these services and they became monetized, the dynamic changed. Rather than helping you find people, they started to care about how long you were on the app.
Now, you finding a date that results in a long-term relationship is antithetical to their existence. Eventually, if these services are good at providing what you’re seeking, they’ll put themselves out of business!
And we certainly can’t have that!4
What these apps also did was transition into amplifying and exploiting the pieces of tinder that were already lying on the ground from the above consequences. The transition took a long time. Algorithms were built. Human psychology exploited. You can see this with the evolution of added and removed features; disappearing and blurred likes, behind the scenes sorting of people into attractiveness categories, shadow bans, and resource scarcity to name but a few.5 They tapped into our increased conditioning over the past two decades of showing the surface level within us, the drive to show our best selves at all costs, and trading real-life interactions for the perceived safety of swiping and messaging from your couch.6
They also helped condition us to perceive dating as a continual and horrifying “grass is always greener on the other side” exercise. These apps show you far more people to potentially date than you normally would in the real world. You can swipe through hundreds of people in an hour; out there in the bars you might only talk with a handful of people in a night, depending on your tastes and interaction styles.
With this constant illusion of choice, we think we have more options than are actually viable for us. Conversely, for others, it shows us that we actually don’t have very many choices at all. What happens when you have instant access to a cognitively manipulating piece of algorithmic software that bombards you with either seemingly infinite choices or the reminder that you’re so far off from finding a real date that you give up altogether? Research and common sense shows that either having too much choice or not enough is damaging to folks, with too little choices actually being more damaging than we think. Specifically, the number of young men who report having no sex in the past year is at almost thirty-percent: 7 8
Dating apps are but the end of the story though, not the beginning.
They’re symptoms of what ails modern dating, not the underlying cause.
To help turn this around, we can restore and create new social spaces and return towards lived experiences. The good news is this already appears to be happening.
In 2020, people were spending less time engaging with social media. These trends have continued ever since, with the most promising piece coming in the form of total reduced time spent on the internet carrying into 2022:
We don’t need a full-scale revolt of the internet and technology. It's here to stay and provides many wonderful benefits to humanity. What we need is a better balance between utilizing the internet to progress humanity and the real world for proper human development. Modern dating is but one area of humanity that is shouting from the rooftops that we’ve gone awry over the past few decades.
What I dream for is the upcoming generations of teenagers and young adults to demand change from these online spaces and return more to the physical realm; to reshape humanity’s time spent online. I hope the rebellious, novelty seeking, wonderfully emotional adolescent mind will find a way around this and push humanity forward like it always does. It happens like clockwork; the Roaring 20s, the 60s Summer of Love, and the 90s Grunge movement are but a small taste for how generations of people ultimately react to their decaying surroundings. It’s been about thirty years since our last cultural upheaval. I think we’re due for another one, and I can’t wait to see how everything unfolds.
The dating world has been lit aflame. The question is, what will grow from the ashes?
Helicopter parenting has been in the lexicon for some time, but snowplow parenting might be newer to some of you. This is when parents seek to remove most negative obstacles from their children’s lives to relieve them of stress and negative emotions. Problem is, mild to moderate stressors and adversity are actually good for you! These are opportunities for you to problem solve, figure out your capabilities and limitations, explore your identity, bolster your immune system, and help you gain much needed experience. Especially at a young age.
One of my pet theories is, on the negative end of the absolute spectrum, when one isn't achieving what others are doing as teenager, this puts one in the “disappointment and failure” category in how one views themself fitting in with their peers. Teenagers are already a population that has developmental problems in planning for the future, in addition to evolutionary programming of wanting to belong with others. And what’s the absolute end of this line of thinking? I believe it’s through opting out of life via suicide/suicidal ideation, goblin mode, extending adolescence/emotional immaturity, and the changes in the pursuit of traditional milestones such as marriage, kids, etc.
My good friend Jake provided a wonderful perspective about COVID-19, in talking about the collective mourning of so many deaths and its impact on risk-aversion:
I think that [collective mourning] plays a big part in people's lives in general, and can cause relationship distance specifically…how isolating that is in general, and how many Americans still don't value mental health. How many people are trying to ignore that and power through their lives? That can't be healthy for any human connections.”
As is American monopolistic tradition, many of the most popular dating apps are all owned by the same parent company. Even when you “leave”, you still fall right back into the same web.
“Disappearing and blurred likes” - the former refers to someone liking you on an app, you go to swipe in the hopes of seeing who it is, only for you to never actually see them. This usually happens from fake profiles liking you to give you a nice dopamine hit and for you to be more likely to stay on the app. The latter refers to the transition of most apps from showing you a clear photo of the people that are interested in you to showing blurred photos of them to capitalize on our brain’s distaste for incomplete information. It also takes advantage of the brain’s ability to fill in information when it’s lacking; it’s more than likely going to try and convince you the blurred person is more attractive than they ultimately most likely will be, making it more likely you’ll spend on the app to remove the blurs.
“…sorting of people into attractiveness categories” - this refers to most apps ultimately putting a number or name label on your profile based on algorithms that include data such as who likes you and who you like on the app. Simply, this means that if you’re a "‘4/10”, it will make your profile less observable to people above your attractiveness, in addition to other fuckery.
“shadow bans” - this refers to your account being suspended/banned without your knowledge. The app will make it seem like you’re still in the dating pool, only no one else can actually see your dating profile and you’ll no longer receive likes/matches (unless it’s a fake profile), thus giving you the illusion you’re still a part of the game and more likely to spend money on the app to see what’s going on. You can be suspended because of a few things, such as someone reporting your account and/or you misusing the app (such as blindly swiping yes on everyone)
“resource scarcity” - this refers to apps adding features such as “super-likes”, which are turbo-charged likes that allow you to skip the line and go straight to the front of someone’s “see who liked you” pool. The catch is, you only get a few of these per day for free, or you can, conveniently, buy them!
Another disadvantage in online dating is you initially miss the vital physical cues to dating; pheromones, body language, tone, and facial recognition that makes navigating in-person dating that much more data-rich and beneficial to finding a right person for you.
Can’t imagine this got any better during the pandemic!
Hmm…see a pattern here? This rise almost perfectly aligns with the rise of smartphones and social media, which I’ll attempt to tackle in a future essay.