Online Dating Isn’t Dating

With conviction, I believe that the conception of online dating occurred at romances funeral. If you are one of those lucky ones, who managed to swipe left and right enough times to find your hunnie… congratulations, you’ve managed to pluck out your desired mate in a large pool of terrible human beings. It’s a harsh statement, but its true and I can no longer handle hearing horrifying online dating blunders.

I have online dated. I hated it. I hated every aspect of it. I still hated online dating while I was dating someone I met online.

I get it; life is hard. Dating is hard. Dating in today’s culture is excessively painful. So utilizing the advancements of technology theoretically sounds like a terrific idea. But somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong. Online dating has created multiple ways for us to experience rejection at any given moment. Rejection lurks when we open our emails, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts. At any point of the day, a truth bomb could be waiting for us. One that could detonate our fragile state of self-worth.

Our self-worth has become so fragile because we’ve let technology determine our worth. Our online profile acts like our resume and we value it more than our real resume. We now calculate our value as a partner on how many matches we’ve collected.

We’re so desperate to be loved that we pour obsessive energy into creating a presentation of ourselves online that isn’t real. We create the unique username and flawlessly filtered photos in an attempt to deflect rejection and hide our insecurities. But hiding our flaws, blemishes and less desirable sides comes at a cost.

It comes at the cost of valuing ourselves through our online profiles and at the even higher cost of disallowing the people we meet to connect with the real, raw, and unedited us. We are no longer authentic in our encounters because we aren’t authentic as people, first. The lack of realness has created a lack of romance.

Courtship, dating, and falling in love require us to be vulnerable and emotionally attuned. We no longer know how to hold someone’s hand through both the ups and the downs because our thumbs, consciously or unconsciously, miss swiping left and right.

Online dating has created the misconception that finding someone is as easy as a click or swipe. And because we believe that finding someone is easy we falsely believe that the entirety of the relationship should be easy too. But finding someone shouldn’t be easy and nothing about relationships should be easy either. Real romance requires real work.

Love takes time, patience and ultimately experiencing someone in reality. We need to give ourselves the opportunity to be authentic and physically present with people for the presence of love to appear.

In our technological and superficial era we now rely on getting to know each other through texts and if we are lucky emojis. This has forced us into becoming systematic robots who no longer know how to be face to face and look into one another’s eyes. We no longer date through felt experience and instead date through text translations.

I am aware that some of you out there have made it work. It may be my age or the fact that in one week; one friend was ghosted, another stood up, another asked to keep their dating a secret and, yet again, a friend had the unfortunate experience of meeting a married man online.

I’m sick of these stories. I’ve had enough of hearing and experiencing the lack of authenticity and connection in our culture. I’m tired of seeing my generation be shamelessly attached to their cellular device waiting for that sexy new swipe to fill the void of romance. We are all disconnected and craving love, when will we finally admit it?

When we utilize online dating, we are substituting it for a lesser feeling of love. We are all settling.

If you don’t believe me ask yourself, would you rather meet the person you come to love while doing something you love or meet your future love while swiping left and right in line for the bathroom?

You won’t find me online because online dating is not dating — it’s settling.