A Perspective on Dating in the Age of Social Media

I have spent an obscene amount of time watching TikToks over the course of the past week. I’m not proud of it – I am well aware there is life to be lived beyond these four bedroom walls. 

In the parking lot outside, children are laughing and riding bikes; a mother observes from a distance, fanning herself with a catalog and sweating profusely in the lingering presence of a seemingly endless heat wave. Beyond the parking lot, further still, the city of New Brunswick pulses in the throes of rush hour traffic. Commuters are making their returns home from work, friends are catching up over happy hour, a girl nervously touches up her lip gloss in the car before making her way to a restaurant for a first date. 

On the outside, society beckons me to join the masses; there is love to be felt, wars being waged, there is laughter, there is anguish. And here I am, absorbed in this pixelated microcosm that exists behind the screen of my phone. Somehow, this infinite loop of moving images has seemed greater than life itself lately. 

See, while life requires me to be productive, to contribute, to be present, TikTok demands nothing of me but to consume – to laugh when something is funny, to cry when something is sad – wash, rinse, repeat. And the minute a clip starts to bore me, I click onto the next. I am an explorer in a digital jungle, perpetually in search of the next 60-second thrill.

I find it dangerous when I allow myself to be dragged too deeply into this cycle of consumption. I had a conversation with a friend recently about how social media is altering the chemistry of our brains and changing the way we absorb information. In the social media world, all of the content presented to us has been trimmed of any excess details or imperfections and condensed into just the good bits, the final product at the tail end of hours of trial and error.

Even my latest guilty pleasure, TikTok, has been carefully curated by an algorithm that appears to have taken residence inside my brain, as it always knows exactly what content to present to me. In the world of social media, there is no slow burn, no delayed gratification, no effort needed to digest the information being presented. It is a film with no beginning and no ending, just the climax, over and over again.

All of a sudden, real life’s daily events begin to feel redundant, like watching a movie with too many filler scenes. I find my eyes glazing over in conversations and in meetings, struggling more than ever to focus on anything when it doesn’t get straight to the point.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, I think this blog was intended to be about dating, but it’s sounding more like the beginning of a Black Mirror episode. Let’s recalibrate.

A couple of months ago, at a restaurant, I sat across the table from a man I met on a dating app. We exchanged bits and pieces of surface-level information over a drink, things like our careers and our families and hobbies. Our expectations lingered invisibly in the air between us, unseen but deeply felt. There was an impalpable tension surrounding every detail shared, making us terrified to say the wrong thing, even more terrified to hear the other person say something worse. We were two strangers playing dating roulette, in the hopes that by some miracle, a connection could be formed out of thin air just based off of a highlight reel of our best pictures and a few witty Hinge prompts. 

Spoiler alert – it wasn’t a love connection. And shortly after that night, I found myself sitting across the table from someone else. And then someone else. And someone else…

All of a sudden, I was starring in my own real-life season of The Bachelorette, a much less glamorous version where each episode usually ended with me going home alone, drinking on the couch, and ordering Uber Eats because I was too nervous to eat in front of my date. 

I had the dating ritual down to a science, but I must admit that the repetitive nature of the whole thing was starting to feel like a turn-off. I found myself getting icked out by the smallest details, approaching each date with such low expectations that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy for me to leave disappointed. The minute I felt like this person wasn’t checking off all of my boxes, I’d tell myself I could find someone who would. And hence, this is what I find to be the problem with my generation (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.) 

Dating apps, and social media in general, have created the illusion of an infinite number of options, making us more susceptible to stop a connection in its tracks before it has even had a fair chance at developing into something more. This is not to say that we should ever settle for someone who we’re not truly compatible with, but I do feel that dating apps are desensitizing us to forming connections. It becomes increasingly difficult to put in the time and effort necessary to foster a healthy and balanced relationship with someone when we approach them with one foot already out the door, ready to run the other way the minute we’re turned off by something. 

I think about our generation’s fascination with Instagram and TikTok, our addiction to seeing information condensed into 60-second clips or less, our need for immediate gratification, our inclination to show our followers filtered versions of ourselves. All of a sudden, it seems we’re coexisting in an alternate universe where life moves fast, everyone is shiny and plastic, and all of the skeletons remain hidden in closets. 

Have we lost our ability to put aside the superficial and foster a connection with someone that is genuine and real? To have the patience to accept uncertainty, to embrace it as a part of the process of getting to know someone, and to trust that a slow burn is superior to love at first sight?

These are the questions I battle with as of late. My dating app marathon was short lived, I wasn’t very good at it anyway. At present, I’m taking a break from TikTok in an attempt to restore my own balance of consume vs. create; it is imperative that we all do from time to time. Write something down even if the words don’t flow, cook an elaborate meal that might come out terribly, cook it again, meet someone in person and embrace the awkward, messy ordeal of it all – it is real life in its unfiltered form, the way it begs to be experienced.