Is Hanging Out the New Dating?
Rebecca Holman back in 2013, put it this way,"21st-century singledom is a baffling realm of non-date dates, non-relationship relationships, crossed wires and failed semantics."
The Times questions whether or not the word dating itself has changed over the past 12 years. I'll get back to why I quote the number 12. The New York Times questioned whether traditional courtship was over, and whether ‘hanging out’ had replaced ‘dating.' Is "Netflix and Chill" the new "Let's Go to a Movie"? Is Facetime the new calling the house phone and talking for hours? Has Texting replaced the love letters in years of old? Has the ability for ease of access to social media changed how we choose to identify a potential mate?
These are a few questions that we need to answer so that we can guide ourselves through the next 10 years of whatever dating and relationships morph into.
A Short History Lesson
In 1995 Match.com was launched however random dating services predate to personal ads in the newspaper from 1690. In 2000 eHarmony came on stream with Dr. Warrems patented personality metric. In 2004, Mark Zuckerburg and few friends founded what is now the world largest social media site, Myspace predated Facebook by a year. In 2007 Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, which opened access to the internet to all smartphone users, with apps that could connect everyone. Apps including Twitter(2006), Whatsapp (2009), Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2012)...etc.
The point of the history lesson is to reveal that now more than ever we are connected or have the ability to connect much faster than ever before, but yet dating in 207 is dismal and has no true to form definition from the old world adage.
Why are Dating and Relationships so hard to forge?
The Economist answer to this one may send my current professor cringing back to the textbook and may even incite an argument. In 2017 we face a scarcity problem, but not lack of resources. What do I mean by this? The objective of dating for both sexes is one two fold, sex, and companionship, with so many options and strategies to sift through many of the traditional messages once shared between individuals become lost in translation through the web of different media.
We then try to sift through the signals which we send and the once that we eventually receive.
15 years ago when you got a girl's number it was a big deal, chances are it was her home phone number, which she obviously shared with her parents, siblings, etc. to call her sent a clear signal that you were interested, if you kept calling her then even more so. Now when a girl gives out her number, it's usually a cell phone one where she controls entirely which calls to receive or not. But who calls anymore? Many of us have resorted to texting/Instant messaging as our dominant form of communication with each other and here signals actually get mixed up. 10 years ago you still had to take girl out on a date to get to know her now the primary form of interaction in the getting to know you process is texting or worse Voice notes (these imply I'm too lazy to actually type)
What is traditional dating? My generation doesn’t know how to or even how not to. If like me, you’re a ‘millennial’ (born between 1983 and 2000) you will have never known adulthood – or adult relationships – without a mobile phone. The traditional dates have more or less been replaced with hanging out when Netflix was introduced Netflix and Chill became go-to for many modern couples. We like to keep it vague instead of dating, we're seeing someone, hooking up, or just chilling.
At the same time, we are a generation of contradictions, social media makes it easy to broadcast our lives and our feelings as well as show the world what we're doing in real time( How many of you have gone live before?). This too sends mixed messages, if a guy can see every move a girl makes and almost every part of her body, leaving little up to the imagination, it's only inevitable that the core focus of dating based on online interaction is just to hookup. Social Media makes stalking easier on both sides. (Yes Girls Stalk guys!). Some people struggle when it comes on to vast information they have available and thus send wrong messages. For e.g. Compliments may be misconstrued as thirty comments, we use likes and follows and comments to indicate our interest. We fail to let the girl/guy we're interested when we send random texts back and forth, etc.
The Single Guy's Perspective
For some guys, the new world order is simply, the text game is on point, their social media image is on point and not to mention their other game appears to be on point if you count the number of "dates," some of my friends go on. But what about those who still find it hard to maneuver the digital world of dating. I read recently that many guys don't get beyond the getting the number, and that getting the number is the easy part, it's now what you do to differentiate yourself from the other 100 guys chasing after that one girl. Men are biologically attracted to what we see, and social media only exacerbates the variety. The guys that struggle to maneuver well enough are touted as lame, boring, and the stalking doesn't help either.
In 2017 there is also the uncuffable phenomenon where a girl/guy with more than 2000 followers is relatively uncuffable. Reason being it's not that you're not good enough person, but it's that you disappear on their radar. High chances are you don't get a follow back etc.
What's the point of this article
Dating, Relationships, and Friendships are harder to acquire and maintain now than they were in the past. All the tools that we have at our disposal only make it harder to communicate how we feel, who we're interested in and most importantly how we interact with each other. In other words, our problem is not scarcity but relative factor abundance, and we just don't fully comprehend either reality
#CollegeEconomist
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