Are Gen Z Still open hearted when it comes to dating?
I’ve spent many a ‘girl dinner’ discussing dating with my friends. We normally lead with how bleak the outlook is, how dire the situation, and how tired we are of the rigamarole that is postmodern dating. Over New York style slices of pizza on flimsy paper plates, nestled in a cosy booth whilst late-2010s RnB music blares, me and two friends enquire about each other’s respective love lives. We talk about attachment styles, recommend non-fiction books that explain the behaviours of men we’ve encountered or situations we’ve inadvertently put ourselves in and catch each other up on who we’re seeing. “Please tell me it’s over with so and so?” followed by “are you talking to anyone else?” Our greasy hands leave oily marks on a copy of the new trending dating book one of our friends is currently reading, as we take turns reading the blurb and flicking through the contents page. It serves as yet another how-to guide to equip young folk as they journey through the parade of modern dating. As she speaks more about it, I question whether I want to read another book like that, imagining the growing pile of dating/pop-psychology books filling my personal library, slotting neatly in between my copy of Why Men Love Bitches and Attached: Are you Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? Whilst she is only a little bit into the book, it seems promising, so maybe I’ll give it a go.
And then the dreaded question pops up, “are you on the apps?” This almost always prompts the same monologue from me along the lines of, ‘I hate Hinge, meeting in real life is just way better’. What follows this discussion in which we posit that meeting someone organically (not mediated by technology) is the best and only way we want to explore dating from now on, is the subsequent gap of silence. It hangs in the air, feeling somewhat silly to say. It’s a pipe dream. How can you expect to meet someone if you’re not on the apps? After our seemingly anti-technology rant, we joked that our friend who has been going strong for about a month with a guy she met on one of the apps has inspired us to redownload. Maybe it isn’t so bad. Perhaps we’ve been exaggerating the state of dating apps a tad, catastrophising even. This guy seems great, she’s having fun, its going swell! In a somewhat pensive tone, she replies “But guys, I’ve been on there for years.” And swiftly, we change topics.
This experience of exhaustion with dating apps, and modern dating in general is not unique to me and my friend alone. Research has highlighted somewhat of a gen Z exodus from dating apps, and even dating in general with some young women opting for celibacy after choice feminism−disseminated through quirky quotes on our Tumblr dashboards−repackaged self-objectification as empowerment, championing for women to ‘play by men’s rules’ under the fallacy of supposed liberation. Sex positivity, yes! Pushing for a culture of casual sex because ‘that’s what men do so why can’t women do it to’ no. Tumblr, you will pay for your crimes. Reports of dating burnout, dissatisfaction from endless hook ups and a general distaste for the state of dating can be explained by our tiredness with frivolous exchanges which typically lead nowhere. There are more hoops now in comparison to the dating climate our parents traversed through. We’ve somehow created a new subsection of dating that you must pass through to reach the ‘in a relationship’ stage. A purgatory in which if you are not careful, you will remain in forever: the talking stage.
Unlike its name suggests, even once you’ve left the ‘just talking’ segment of getting to know someone and met IRL, gone on a few dates, and done what adults do, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have emerged from the talking stage and graduated to relationship status. Oh no. This has instead been merged and conflated with what once was simply called ‘dating’. Next comes the exclusivity stage, in which you anxiously hope they are also not ‘talking’ with anyone else. After this crucial step (one hopes), and if it is what you desire, you are now in a relationship. However, if one skips this stage, staying in blissful ignorance in the hopes the other person will bring up the talk of exclusivity (they won’t), you instead enter into a situationship. This has all the core tenants of a talking stage but is punctuated by even more time invested and harrowingly less hope.
I think where we have gone wrong is that we’ve bureaucratised dating. It’s no wonder we’re burnt out and tired, there are too many steps, and too much confusion. When each stage comes with a lack of clarity, underscored by a pervasive tone that your replacement is only a click away in an unlimited supply of options, it’s easy to sack off the dating process altogether. As new methods of dating were born alongside technological advancements like dating sites, and its (eviller) reconfiguration, Tinder, the dating space has become gamified. It is now rendered merely as a leisure pursuit. When profiles on dating apps are configured to resemble that of a pack of game cards, it’s hard not to perceive this new dating ritual as a game. We flick through images of floating, disembodied faces until we strike gold and score a match, talking for some hours, maybe a few days. Then a shiny, new, more striking set of matches come along, and we abandon our previous one(s) until the cycle continues again. All our prior matches remain as detached faces in the chat column of an app we now sporadically check. On both ends of the phone screen, we’re left feeling dehumanised and exchangeable.
Subsequently, our hearts harden. We become harsh critics of romance itself, questioning whether pure loving relationships, unburdened by games, are still out there. Of course, our generation isn’t the first to succumb to these feelings. I’ve watched Sex and the City enough times to know that encountering ‘avoidant’, emotionally unavailable people is not uniquely a Gen Z issue, or that people never struggled to decipher the world of dating before us. But what makes the dating hardships of our generation unique is that the ways in which we communicate and socialise is in some part shaped by technology. Our globalised digital culture has affected the ways we view ourselves, others, and the ways in which we connect. It influences reflections on gender, sexuality, and the self, permeating the social realm in full effect. Ultimately, the inclusion of digitality into the everyday has altered generational perspectives on dating. Which begs the question: in an ever-connected world where we are more reachable than ever before, why does it feel that much harder to seek true, authentic connection? How do we remain open-hearted?
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