Why People Don’t Date Anymore
The dating landscape has drastically changed yet nobody wants to admit it. The classic prom night, drive in movie theatre, and dinner dates have long been gone. People who date nowadays especially in the millennial generation are more accustomed to the “hook up culture” where Netflix and Chill became prominent. On the flipside, two people who are technically “in a relationship” on Facebook aren’t really dating. Yes, they post publicly and one of them is bound to spam their friends’ news feeds with pictures of their partner with their favorite cookie cutter caption. However, don’t be fooled. Those are not real relationships. According to a study conducted by a Facebook Data Scientist in 2011, roughly half of all Facebook users who are “In A Relationship” do not last past 3 months. This goes to show that when your friend makes their relationship Facebook Official, take it with a grain of salt. Let’s face it…dating is different than it used to be and I’m here to explain why and what we can do to improve it.
1. Social media has made relationships more superficial
Facebook and Instagram users post pictures and statuses about their relationships all the time. They tend to use social media as a platform to glamorize their romantic lives instead of using it as a tool to show their deep spiritual connections for their lovers through meaningful and authentic interactions and even sometimes showing the hardships and stresses associated with a relationship. These components of a relationship tend to get glossed over on social media sites. Personally, I feel this can be changed by building stronger knit communities of couples who are not afraid to profess their love and hardships with their partners. Another option would be to keep certain couple’s romantic lives more private altogether and not give their friends a sense of false validation in their relationships.
2. Dating apps started to promote hook-up culture
Apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, Happn, OkCupid, and many others have flooded the mobile scene in the past 5–10 years. The problem is they aren’t “real dating” apps. The purpose of these apps is to find a person of preferred sex with attractive features and a witty description with the ultimate goal of having a sexual encounter with them. This whole purpose has created the hook-up culture we have today. These apps make it okay for “better looking” people to discriminate against “worse looking” people. These apps make it okay for people who don’t get matched to feel insecure and lower their self esteem. Don’t get me wrong, there is no problem with hook-ups. The problem is these apps have the false title of a dating app when that’s not the purpose behind them. These apps also don’t do a good enough job in equalizing the playing field for people with better personalities and worse looks or worse personalities and better looks.
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3. LGBTQ Community have encouraged us to question our sexual identities
In the 21st century, the LGBTQ movement became popular when LGBTQ communities started to protest and fight for their political freedom of creating social equality. Although there is still ways to go, progress has definitely been made. Most importantly, there has been many cases where people who claimed to be heterosexual have come out of the closet due to the impact of the LGBTQ community. In addition, people who were confused have felt more comfortable fortifying their sexual orientation. On a national scale, many people still seem to mock these communities and ignore that it’s even a problem in society. However, the fact of the matter is many millennials lack confidence in their sexual identity. This has caused many of them to not date as much as they used to. A potential solution would be to educate the public in classroom settings for teens and work settings for adults on sexual orientation.
4. Skyrocketing divorce rates
There was this false misconception that was put out about 20–30 years ago that the divorce rate was 50%. That’s not true and the fact is it is very difficult to get a correct statistic on divorce because the process takes so long. However, studies have a proven a few things about divorce. According to WeVorce, a legal technology company specializing in divorce mediation, published a study in 2017 that found that 80% of couples are headed in the direction of divorce within their first four to five years of marriage and 50% of all children in North America will experience parental divorce before the age of 18. While those statistics are astounding, one of the most surprising findings was that the leading cause of divorce was a partner cheating and that rate has been increasing dramatically because of dating sites. This has led to mental health complications such as depression, severe anxiety, and substance abuse for the other partner and the children after divorce. In turn, it seems that children would make the logical choice to not have relationships seeing that their parents got divorced and experiencing those mental setbacks. The solution seems obvious, tell our parents to stop getting divorced. However, bigger picture, entrepreneurs should build better tools to keep couples connected throughout their lives. There needs to be more dating sites that not only bring people together but keep them together.
5. Most of us are not ready for a relationship
Back in the day, if you lived a few blocks away from a cute girl, you would stop by their place one day, knock a few stones on their window, sing them a song on a guitar and the next day that woman would be your wife. No, it didn’t really happen like that. But believe me, ask your grandparents how they met. It wasn’t much different of a situation. Back then, people got married and had kids because it served a practical purpose. It provided people with security, shelter, food, and the ability to reproduce. Basically all of our basic needs were met. Nobody was thinking about love. In today’s age, all people think about is finding love. But what does that really mean? What does love mean? I don’t have the answer and there’s no way I could fit all of the research done on it in one article. That being said, One thing is for sure, most people are not ready for a relationship. If you talk to your friends and you ask them, “Have you ever read a book about love or relationships?” or “Have you ever talked with a couple that has a really good relationship?” More often than not, they will say no and the reason is we all still have to learn about love and experiment with it. So what are you waiting for? Start now.
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