I Started My Love Life Online
Perspectives on online dating from a Gen Z-er who never knew anything else
Remember when the phrase “I met someone” implied “I met someone — in person”?
Remember when it couldn’t mean “I saw a face on a screen and told the screen I liked it, discovered that the face liked my face too, decided it would be okay to see the face face-to-face and then had a pleasant time when I [finally] met someone — in person”? Remember that?
I don’t. I was a turn-of-the-century baby. By the time I reached adulthood, the internet had implanted itself into every bit of life, including romance. By the time I entered the dating game, dating apps were a popular play.
I’m part of an emergent generation of young people whose first date — and first hand-hold, and first kiss and first [insert romantic milestone] — is directly linked to downloading a mobile application, or getting “on the apps.” I’m a digital debutante.
We who abide in singlehood before adulthood are now faced with a decision when we reach dating app eligibility: will we launch ourselves into the world of love and lust with a profile?
Joining a dating app is this generation’s version of a coming out party; it’s the moment when we say “okay, let’s have a go at this” to love. But unlike our Victorian counterparts, we come out to the world quietly and with a few clicks, possibly while lounging in our sweatpants and certainly not after consulting our parents — rather than while donning a ballgown as mom and dad present us to eligible bachelors. Today we encounter not a few dozen local gentlemen but thousands of potential matches (the gentlemen few and far between) who reside anywhere from 5 miles away to 5,000 miles around the globe — that is, for those of us who pay for premium to plant our profiles abroad (because maybe men are kinder in Dubai?).
We who abide in singlehood before adulthood are now faced with a decision when we reach dating app eligibility: will we launch ourselves into the world of love and lust with a profile? When we do, we become digital debutantes. We choose to join the club and press go on dating. Dating, for us, is a choice. Dating has an “install” button.
When Harry Swiped Sally?
How we got here
Today’s digital debutantes have witnessed a transition in the dynamics of romantic engagements. People in their 20s in the 2020s can recall a time without dating apps (we can remember life without smartphones too, despite the lamentations of some of our older friends). Tinder, a major catalyst for popularizing online dating, launched in 2012. That was only ten years ago, around when smartphones were becoming ubiquitous. Teens at the time might have had smartphones, but few of us had dating profiles on them.
Never mind the fact that as minors we were too young to create an [honest] profile, we would also have been embarrassed to join what for a while seemed like a desperate plea for sex or an unromantic track to companionship for singles past their prime. Alternatives like Match.com or ChristianMingle were for later-in-life bachelors to find “the one” or for disenchanted divorcees to find, well, the second one. Since few teenagers are itching to nail down a life partner or advertise their sexual frustration online, we were not drawn to download the apps. We would either pursue romantic interests in school and social groups or leave dating for a few years down the line — when we hoped we’d be in spaces with people worth the effort.
But, somewhere in the interim, dating apps stopped being taboo. Soon after having a smartphone became the norm, having a dating profile become almost as common. Apps abound, and in 2021 admitting to being “on the app” is less a hushed confession than a resigned fact.
We’re resigned. But we’re also romantics.
Normalized as online dating is, it’s still not our ideal route to love. We’re happy to do it, but a part of us would prefer that it didn’t work — that we didn’t find our forever person on the app. We don’t want to tell our future children that we met online. We might be digital debutantes, but we’d prefer some other narrative for how we retire from the dating scene, something a bit more Hollywood. We yearn for the serendipity that we think romance involves. The chance meeting. The you-could-have-just-missed-each-other — but-you-didn’t. The moment when your eyes met.
This moment loses its charm when you’ve both contemplated in advance whether you’d like to make eye contact at all. Still longing for real-world romance and enchanting encounters, we’re not eager to sign up for a future of exclusive digital dating. We learned about the “meet cute” as kids raised on the remnants of 90s rom-coms, and we aren’t quite ready to let it go; such ideals remain with us and temper our faith in online dating.
And while we publish our profiles and start swiping, we sometimes worry: as the hunt for a mate online becomes more mainstream, will we be more afraid to chat up strangers off-screen? Are we getting lazier in the streets because we know there are thousands of potential matches at our digital disposal? Are our suitors hiding behind screens? And the most haunting thought of all: what if our the one isn’t on any app, and it’s all a waste of time? After all, how could our Mr Right engage in such unromantic gimmicks?
For the late bloomers of today, dating apps are an option that grew on us as we grew to maturity, allowing us to come out to the world through the internet— as digital debutantes. But the apps occupy little space in our romantic imaginations. We entered the dating world online but long for something to spark offline. We quietly hope Harry still meets Sally in a car ride to New York.
