Has The Digital Age Ruined Dating?

The verdict is in—it has been unanimously agreed upon that regardless of race, religion, creed, color, or gender, dating in the digital age is horrible. Many of us lament this fact at every chance we get, gathering around our various social campfires, regaling one another with cautionary tales and familiar horror stories. Where crushes once sparked a kaleidoscope of stomach-fluttering butterflies, now, with game playing on expert mode, crafting each text message becomes a fight to the death to see who can appear the “chillest” and least invested.

You can bring your kinks to dinner and lay them on the table before your entrée comes, but monogamy has become a clandestine yearning—a humiliating secret best kept tucked under your hoop skirt, lest you drive away potential admirers. We avoid emotional investment like the plague, and the risk of wounding or being wounded often leads to the preemptive pre-wound (i.e., cutting a growing relationship off before anything has a chance to bloom). Most often, whether newly single or a long-standing veteran, the quest for companionship feels like an impossible journey through a world on fire.

We seem to identify the cause of this problem as a pathological, deeply rooted issue with “everyone else”—presumably, the unhealed, morally bankrupt masses rising from the second circle of hell to torture those in honest, faithful pursuit of a relationship, both mentally and spiritually, for not but their own amusement. While this very well may be true, it seems more likely that we have collectively created this scourge of disconnection—stuck in the cycle of criticizing behaviors we cannot help but perpetuate ourselves.