But I’ll come back to you, in a year or so
And rebuild, ready to become
The person you believed in, the person that you used to love
For I’m still here hoping that one day you may come back – Charlie Fink (The First Days of Spring)
I recently had a rather eye opening discussion with a friend about the impact dating sites has had on our generation of dating, how it has shaped and changed the way we engage with people, how we meet or approach people and our new attitudes towards casual and serious relationships. On the surface dating sites are obviously very shallow, often used to combat boredom, being horny, or purely wanting attention, they’re something that aren’t often taken seriously and are now more of a punchline to a joke than a way to seriously meet the love of your life. On a deeper level, for some, they’re a way to alleviate loneliness and provide some sort of gratification if a stranger tells you that you have a cracking set of tits, but how much of this is a problem? How much have we come to rely on this rather than approaching somebody perhaps in a club or at a bar and meeting organically, no matter how many failures it gives us we either move onto the next app or convince ourselves that it’ll happen eventually, why do we do this?
My answer for this came down to loneliness, there is such a pressure to find someone coming from numerous directions and because of this we end up meeting people who might be our type on paper but in reality they have the personality of a wet piece of lettuce. These kinds of apps only allow you to ‘meet’ people based on three things; age, location and whether you think they’re attractive, it leaves very little room for personal interests, common likes and dislikes or whether you’d just get on as people. As a generation we are so greedy and impatient, we need causal sex or relationships now, if it doesn’t work then we need to move on to the next person straight away, for the majority of us we are wired to think that we need someone else in order to be complete or satisfied, in order to not feel lonely. The superficial nature of it all means that some of us have met, dated, slept with, spent time with people who perhaps we didn’t really have a connection with but we’re like well I want someone so I guess i’ll just go for you.
The other side of the coin is that we have this issue of confusing love with lust and sexual attraction, we crave attention, compliments, someone to talk to when we’re bored and then because we believe it’s what we’re supposed to feel we just go for it. We’re so conditioned to think that we have to be on the look out constantly because it won’t just happen like it used to, you’re not gonna meet the man of your dreams in Sainsburys and expect everything to come up peaches but if he sends me a wink emoji on Tinder then i’m all for it.
Maybe i’m bitter, maybe the fact that the majority of people i’ve met and spoken to on these sites have been either massive failures or mugged me off completely and i’m now jaded by the whole concept, but I do believe that our chronic need to avoid being alone or feeling lonely plays a huge part in why these dating apps are so crucial to our everyday way of living. Ironically I had this whole conversation with a man I met on Bumble so perhaps they are good for something.
‘In an age of disposable lovers, where calculated sexual pleasure has supplanted the unpredictability of love, where looking for love is like shopping and we demand from it what we have come to expect from our other purchases – novelty, variety, disposability.’ – Erich Fromm