Technology Is Killing My Ability To Believe In Love

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I know I’m not the first person to feel this way, nor shall I be the last. Technology has killed romance.

I recently had a lovely breakfast with my parents, who as always, simply questioned, “So are you dating anyone?”

“No, mother and father, I am not.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because I am 24 and the vast majority of men I have met still believe they are in college or they think they are too old for me.”

“Have you tried online dating?”

Truth be told I tried it once in college. Hated it. Hated every aspect of it. Now, I know there are people who have been very successful online and I commend them for being the very small percentage that have been able to pluck out their desired mate in a large pool of terrible human beings. But for the vast majority, I have witnessed that online dating has ruined modern day romance.

Your online profile acts like a resume and every potential interested partner must “interview” you to see if you as a candidate would work. If it does not, he/she can hide behind his/her keyboard and lash out at you for “not taking a compliment” or “not being able to find anyone better.” We’ve let technology determine our worth, depending on how many matches we get. We’ve become so desperate that we can’t enjoy free time without constantly checking our online dating profiles to see who has responded and who has not. We are so scared of rejection IRL that we cower behind a username and a carefully filtered photo so that when we are rejected online we can delete the conversation like we delete an old document we no longer have any use for.

That is not dating, that is not romance. Dating is going through the ups and the downs. Finding your perfect someone isn’t supposed to be easy and you shouldn’t be able to dismiss him or her with a simple click. It takes time and patience, but most of all it takes getting to know someone in real life to determine if you have chemistry. Because after all, how many times have you “clicked” with someone online only to meet him or her in person and find you can barely formulate a conversation with them. We are so used to this systematic swipe left, swipe right, that we forget what it feels like to actually interact with people in the real world. We should be going outside and doing things we love in hopes to find someone with similar interests instead of sitting around waiting for someone to message a crude picture.

And it isn’t just online dating; texting has ruined romance as well. No longer can we express emotion and get to know each other through the pitches in our voices or the by seeing the light in one another’s eyes. We rely on getting to know each other through typed words, which allow for very little to no emotion. We have become systematic robots to this void and cold technological world that even if one has a date planned he/she will STILL text “So what do you do?” as if this cannot be asked in person, face to face, looking into one another’s eyes. We date through texting and not through experiences together.

This is not true for some, I am aware. It may be my age as to why I am so cynical and I have taken that into account. But seeing so many friends, coworkers, and strangers who have gone through these issues and how hopelessly attached they are to a device that they fail to see the people around them make me question if we have become so used to this void of romance that we are substituting it for a lesser feeling of love and therefore settling.

So no, I’m not online dating. And why is that?

Because online dating is not dating.