Millennial Dating Life

Dating.

One of the few things in life that instil an excitement and a pure fear in most people in their early 20s.

Getting dressed up, going to a nice restaurant or for a walk on the beach or even, for some of the more adventurous people, maybe an afternoon of rockclimbing. The flirting, the butterflies, the goodnight kisses.
It's all very lovely, if your date goes well.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's always the possibility of it being awful. That feeling of wanting to climb out of the bathroom window and run, the knowledge as you walk away, that you will never see that other person again. And then the best part of any bad date, laughing about it with your best mates for weeks afterwards.

But dating is quite different for my generation, as a lot of social constructs are, with the advances of technology and the take off of social media. We are still in the beta phase of a lot of this stuff, the stage where the software is complete, but there are still many bugs that we are yet to find out.

The difficult thing about dating as a 20 something these days is that we really are, in some ways, completely on our own to figure it all out.

None of the older generations have experience to draw on to give us advice as we troll through tinder and bumble and the vast array of other dating websites out there. The countless men and women that are accessible to us with the simple swipe of a finger.

A lot of people argue that in this day and age, with the introduction of all of these dating websites and apps, that we are the most shallow than we have ever been. We're told growing up to never judge a book by it's cover, but is that not EXACTLY what these websites are based around? You see a photo or two, read a bio (effectively a blurb) and then make a choice whether or not you would like to give that person a chance to be your life partner. Just like that.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us as a group of millennials looking for love with Jane Austin and Nicholas Sparks in our heads, wanting our meet cute, wanting our romantic story of meeting someone in our favourite book store, or out walking in our favourite parts of the city. Falling in love and having an epic love story like those we watch, read and hear on a
daily basis.

But that just isn't how it works anymore. Why would it?
Why would people put themselves on the line in real life, approaching another person to try and connect and potenitally ask them for dinner when we can just sit in our beds, on our phones, and get the same thing. The difference being that feeling of that safety net, that distance that social media gives us?

It's an interesting thing to think about. Just a few years ago, internet dating was something so stigmatised, so looked down on, and now all of my single friends get amongst it. It'll definitely be interesting to see how much more that evolves over the coming years.

Will my generation be telling their teenage kids about how many ex partners they met through tinder? Will parents be sitting down at dinner to tell their children about their first conversation, after they matched on bumble?
Will the romance novels and films in the future be based around this way of meeting?

I for one, am really excited to find out.