Alfred Schnabel
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Sorry. This was a terrible article. You aren’t pining for the 90s because things were better back then. You are pining them because you were a child back then. Many people view their childhood through rose-colored glasses. You didn’t have a mortgage, or car payments. No student debt. No job you hated. No kids that need braces or are struggling in school. You didn’t have to worry about your health.

Dating in the 90s wasn’t any easier. Just different. We didn’t have TINDER, or cell phones. But we had Chat and Email and (horror of horror) classified ads in papers for lonely singles looking for love (that wasn’t a 90s thing, but it still existed).

My friends and I played video games in college and joked that our default weekend activity was to send someone to Blockbuster to rent some movies on VHS. We once made plans to go to a “Tips for dating” seminar put on by the Res Life or Health Services Department at college, but didn’t go because we were too lazy.

I know no one who met their spouse on a plane. Or a bar. Or the grocery store. People complained that you got a girl’s number at a bar, but she never returned your call. Creepy men still hit on women with awful pick up lines and not know how to take No for an answer. People wanted hook ups and meaningless sex. Singles mixers were awkward and lame. No one met their soulmate by bumping into them in the hallway. People got stood up all the time. People broke up by email and by phone.

The internet makes modern dating a little different from dating in the 90s, but it’s still the same, miserable, stressful process. It wasn’t better back then. Just different.

Every generation romanticizes their past. Boomers miss the 50s and 60s. Gen X romanticizes the 70s and 80s. None of these eras was perfect.

I was a teenager and young adult in the 90s (graduated college in 99). Life wasn’t better back then. Just different. I sometimes pine for the “simplicity” of the 80s when I was a kid and MTV played music videos and the NES was high tech and Transformers were a cool, but kind of shitty cartoon, not a lame, really shitty live action movie.

The truth? The 80s weren’t perfect. The Wonder Years weren’t that wonderful. The Glory Days not so glorious. There is nothing new under the sun. Please don’t romanticize the 90s. They were fun but life was just as messed up then as it is now. The problem is not technology. The problem is us.

In 20 years when someone writes about how much easier dating and life in the 2010s was, pull this article out and laugh at them and say, “Oh, sweetie. You have no idea”

Alfred Schnabel

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