How to personalize dating in the digital age? It's easy, do it face to face.
Hello. It is me and I am back…between the packing, the travel, the packing and then traveling again, my follow up posts to my on-air segments have fallen to the bottom of the important things to do list. So, just in time for some cozy weekend reading, here are three that have been in my writing folder since Sunday.
Dating in the digital age. Ahhhh so many feelings, so many thoughts. I don’t know about this first hand, but I do listen to my friends who are on the dating scene, and my girls talk about it at length. It seems so odd to me that it is possible for people to never leave their homes, or to put in little to, in some cases, no effort at all to “date” somebody. All they need to do is turn on their phone, open an APP, swipe one way or the other, click like, match up and then, VOILA, you’ve got nudes in your inboxes to masturbate to/with.
And you don’t even need to leave the house!?!?
These are definitely wild times for single people. Hell, these are wild and “available” times for people in committed relationships who want to cheat. It used to be that you had to leave your home to interact with people, to engage with them, to get to know them, to you know, be human with a fellow human before any form of intimacy was an option. Not these days, now you don’t even have to leave to get food.
Everything, and I mean everything, especially sex comes to you.
Everything you could possibly imagine, or need comes to your front door, into your home and into your bedroom. The way people date has changed so profoundly that I’m not sure I’d even bother should my relationship with Yannick end. I doubt that I would ever do the online thing, because from how I hear it told, most dating apps/sites have the bulk of people on them who just want sex. They’re not looking for a relationship. And you know what, after thirty years I can assure you that the way I feel right now is should I end up back in the dating pool, that might be all I’d be interested in too. Perhaps I wouldn’t want somebody new snoring next to me night after night. It’s hard to say since I’m not there. But, I do know one thing for certain, even the sites that are supposed to be for people looking for high quality people to meet, get to know and you know have a relationship, are mostly people just looking for hook ups. It is daunting watching women I love trying to wade through the masses to find one person, just one who might want to have dinner, get to know them, and romance them before jumping into sex.
It all makes me sort of sad, and it makes me long for simpler days. Most of my inner circle laughs at me because I still go to the bank to deposit my money. They cannot believe that I don’t just scan it through my phone. They also think it’s hilarious that I still get mail delivered to my house, and that I buy stamps at the post office and mail letters and put stuff in post boxes. I can’t help that I do this, I do it because people need jobs, and I do it because I like to leave my house, I like to go to places and meet and talk with real live people doing real jobs. I don’t want a completely automated life. I wish there were still receptionists who answered the telephones of companies, asking me what I am calling about rather than a recorded message telling me to press 1, 2 or 3, and then telling me that they didn’t understand my request. No shit you didn’t understand my request, you’re only a computer program.
Ugh.
And now this has seeped into how people date. People not understanding what the other person is looking for because the art of dating is seemingly lost in the convenience of the digital dating age. I’m not sure what can be done to get back to the way things used to be, for people to meet in organic ways, through common interests, activities, organizations, friends…but I’m hopeful that it will. I’m hopeful that in the same way people are now growing some of their own vegetables in their own backyards, the way more people are invested in climate change, the plight of the less fortunate, that they will also start to realize that we need to stop allowing the digital age to make our lives so small. That we begin to understand that what happens inside our phones, on social media sites and dating apps is not even real. That the only way to really get to know another person is by spending time face to face with them. Listening to the things they say and watching their eyes as they say them. You can’t know a person through photos, and video chats. You must spend time, leave your house, put in the effort, if you want something worth having, you must be something worth having.