Former relationships were built on meeting through families, friends, sending each other letters, showing up to each other’s front door with flowers, and letting your parents know you’ll have your date home by midnight.
Now, we’ve collectively devolved to “talking stages,” “building the roster,” and “ghosting culture.” I can almost guarantee most of us have experienced all these phenomena and been left feeling hopeless for love.
What we experience isn’t normal dating. Our definitions of dating have completely changed. In a study conducted by Google, more than 20 percent of 18-24-year-olds confessed that, to them, a texting conversation counted as a date.
And how many of these countless text threads — or “dates” — even amount to anything?
First-year student at the University of Iowa student, Michael McGuire, doesn’t think there’s much reward in pursuing people through these superficial ways.
“We’ve created a society of mistrust through our conventional methods of flirtation and romance. Talking through social media fails to give you a good idea of who’s actually behind the screen, and the idea of ‘building a roster’ keeps you paranoid that the other person is talking to multiple other people,” he said. “There’s no way to really know whether the person you’re interested in is actually loyal or even intends to commit to a relationship with you.”
We are constantly playing the guessing game. “Loves me? Loves me not…” has turned into, “Is he talking to other girls? Did his snap score go up? Why is his following on Instagram all girls?”
It’s masochistic. Regardless of pain we endure from the past, we don’t learn from it.
Dating is supposed to be full of love and companionship. There’s only one person who fills that hole at the right time in your life, and we all know how important it is to carefully pick that person.
But instead, we participate in a game that forces us to play each other like pawns when we want, where we want, and how we want. We are killing the true meaning of love in relationships.
We barely even experience relationships anymore. Pop culture has adapted a new term: “situationships,” which are weird halfway spaces between commitment and being single. In other words, pure emotional turmoil.
McGuire personally has a lot of qualms with this.
“I’ve definitely been in more situationships than relationships, and the worst part is not being able to identify the girls I’ve had feelings for as exes or just meaningless crushes. We’ve connected and gotten to know each other, only for it to go nowhere or be a familiar fling we resort back to,” he said.
Sofia Korasick, a 19-year-old navigating her way through the new dating world on the UI campus, has been in plenty of situationships, and she, too, is getting sick of the dating environment.
“It’s fun until it’s not. You go in assuring yourself that you don’t want anything more until you realize you’ve gotten to know the person so well, and now you have committed feelings,” Korasick said.
Let’s be honest: We all play the game, but to play it, you are also being played by it. We let ourselves reject true love, true connection, and a true relationship just to get a quick fix in the moment.
What I want us to think about is what are we doing to the true meaning of love, the kind we grew up romanticizing in stories and movies.
In middle school, relationships looked a little different, and in my opinion, they were much more genuine. You would hold your crush’s hand in the hallway or maybe pass notes back to one another. Although your love for each other may have been asserted a little early on, at least it was real.
On a college campus like the UI’s, it seems people refuse to commit because there are so many options, ones they know about and ones they don’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s OK to play with the feelings of others while you wait for the ““right one”” to come along, if they ever even will.
Kyla Klein, a 20-year-old student at the UI, shared some advice from her parents.
“You’ll never find love in college,” Klein said.
Her parents make this statement following her experiences of pain and hopelessness due to today’s loveless culture.
After talking to someone for several months and getting committed signals from him, Klein believed the relationship would develop into love. Unfortunately, she fell victim to the cruel and, sadly, common moment culture when her love interest claimed he meant none of what he said.
“It’s not healthy to become so close to someone just to become strangers again,” Klein said.
We’ve normalized accepting extreme displays of love from people and then, once we are satisfied or bored, completely icing them out of our lives. This is fake love and deep affection, or more widely known as “love bombing.”
It not only ruins our perception of affection, but teaches us new, detrimental ways to express it to others.
Korasick has seen this in play.
“I wouldn’t recommend [situationships], especially if you value relationships and hope to be in a meaningful one someday. It confuses your brain and heart simultaneously and corrupts your standards and ability to trust, making future love that much harder to obtain,” Korasick said.
There’s also the matter of what I’m going to call “ghosting culture.” Ghosting someone means to cut them off entirely with no explanation. A recent study done by Forbes Health found that 76 percent of respondents have either ghosted someone or have been ghosted themselves.
Unfortunately, this act of ghosting has become a cultural practice – something we do when we don’t want to face the reality of a romantic situation. Either that, or we are just done pretending. It shows we don’t value each other as human beings, and it shows we don’t value ourselves.
In my experience, I fall into both categories of having ghosted someone and being ghosted myself. The trick is that when you ghost someone else, it seems OK, like there’s nothing wrong with it because you know the justification of behind your actions.
The worst part about ghosting is that you can’t get an explanation. You have to take your good heart as all the closure you will recieve.
The use of dating apps only exacerbates this cultural issue. Apps like Tinder and Hinge allow people to curate the best versions of themselves while hiding behind a screen and waiting for others to take the bait. But that’s not how the apps market themselves.
Instead, they paint a rose-colored picture for lonely singles.
For example, Tinder has been pushing a lot of sappy ads out on YouTube. In “Taxi | It Starts with a Swipe,” a beautiful girl asks an equally attractive guy, “do you believe in love at first sight?” to which he responds, “I do now” twice, because he double sent the message.
That would be cute and all if Tinder conversations even remotely transpired like this. Instead of finding connection and enjoying romantic flirtations, the humans behind profiles are entirely lost because they are reduced to meaningless swipes and notifications.
UI first-year Haven White has used several apps, and she’s noticed this distinct pattern with Tinder.
“I’ll get matches and then text them, but they won’t respond or unmatch me. Like at that point, it’s obvious you just want notifications,” she said.
White also admitted she’s been embarrassed to be on the apps. We’ve accepted these platforms as a part of our society, even seeing coworkers, family members, and friends on them. Still, talking about it is seen as embarrassing and strangely taboo. It makes couples cringe to say they swiped right on each other.
So, the apps no longer allow for a meet-cute. Maybe Hinge still has some potential because the prompts and voice messages actually hold some substance, and the logo isn’t a sensual, teasing pink flame.
“‘Tinder’s a lot worse than Hinge’, in my opinion. It says that there’s billions of matches on there, but I run out of people all the time. And I know I’m not that picky because I never have that problem on Hinge,” White added.
White is not wrong to call Tinder out for that. The app makes some bold claims, saying it serves over 50 million users a month.
How are there over 100 billion matches, yet less than a sliver of them make it past the first date? Hell, some don’t even make it to the date.
“To be honest, you’re lucky if you even get ghosted. A reply is hard to elicit nowadays, and that’s not just the apps,” White said.
There are a lot of issues with Tinder besides the limited dating pool, though. For example, the core act of swiping on real people based on looks and personality — and let’s be honest, no one’s actually reading about your guilty pleasure or favorite type of pasta — dehumanizes people. Personhood is abandoned in the wake of a matching game that gives us brief dopamine hits and confidence boosts.
It’s clear Tinder is aware of how people have started to stray from the app or just use it as hook-ups. They’ve started to resort to desperate — and false — advertisements.
If you happened to be in Fort Lauderdale over spring break, you may have noticed it was swarming with hot-pink Tinder cabs. Fort Lauderdale is not at all a place for love, so I think that’s confirmation enough. Day-drunk college kids loved getting in the cabs, and it was definitely a form of revenue for the company.
But at one point in time, love wasn’t capital gain or a symbol of self-assured status. Most of the generation before ours met each other much more authentically and naturally. There were no Snapchat “what you look like” warriors or Tinder “short-term fun” veterans.
How do we get out of this perpetual cycle of fake love? Can we?
To love others, to love yourself, you must leave the game, which also means losing all your own pawns and pieces. But how is your stake in the game really serving you?
Just because our generation seems to have given up on love doesn’t mean you have to as well, so treat love with a little more respect, and quit the game.