I Don't Date Because I Tweet

On HBO's "Girls," a hook-up turns into a relationship.
Which almost never happens in real life.

I was looking through the most popular article on the "New York Times" (because I have a subscription and I like to make the most of it) and one came up which was: "The End of Courtship?" The article posits that texting and Facebook has turned dating and courtship into "hangouts and hook-ups."

Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, [millennials] rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend. 

Another day, another article talking about how millennials such as myself are ruining courtship and making the good ol' days of wining and dining as dead as the dodo. And another article using the TV show "Girls" as an example of how millennials date, even though that show is only representative of a very narrow, very specific slice of 20-somethings (aka trust fund babies with artistic ambitions who live in Brooklyn).

I'd also recently read an "Atlantic" piece which claimed that dating sites, such as OKCupid, threatened monogamy. It followed one man, Jacob, who blames his lack of commitment on the binders full on women on display online. But you only needed to read the opening of the article to get a clue into why Jacob is still single:

“I’ve never been able to make a girl feel like she was the most important thing in my life,” he says. “It’s always ‘I wish I was as important as the basketball game or the concert.’ ” An only child, Jacob tended to make plans by negotiation: if his girlfriend would watch the game with him, he’d go hiking with her. He was passive in their arguments, hoping to avoid confrontation.I'm sure his inability to have a real relationship doesn't stem from him "not putting his girlfriend's needs first."

Jeez ladies, why wouldn't you want a gem like that? So it's not Jacob's infantile behavior that's the cause of his dating woes. Nope, it's all the Internet's fault. You hear that love? We don't need you anymore! We have Facebook...


Well lucky for you readers, you are looking at someone who probably spends more time on Twitter daily than with real people (it's my job). And I've also dated and been in relationships. I'm here to tell you to not worry: social media is not out to ruin your relationship. If anything, your relationship is ruined because societal norms are changing! Not that that's any better.

People are staying in school longer, getting married later, traveling farther from their hometown, have a wider network of mates to choose from. And women are outnumbering men at university and in the workforce.

Not to mention that we're in a recession and many people are not swimming in money. Unless you're a hedge fund manager, in which case I would not feel bad about you paying for dinner. But at some point, going for a coffee date is a lot more practical than a fancy dinner date, especially if it's the 2nd or 3rd date you've had that week, and it's the first time you're sitting down with that person one-on-one.

Casual sex, aka hooking up, was not invented with the millennial. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Woodstock was just one large bacchanal with a really good soundtrack. Sex without a relationship has been in existence ever since men and women figured out that you could have sex with someone and not have to marry them (I think that's what mistresses and prostitutes were for). Not that I'm comparing sleeping around to being a prostitute, but to act like having sex without any obligations is a conceit born of feminism and technology gives way too much credit to feminism and technology.

It's true, the dating landscape has changed. And it's not because of Facebook, Twitter, iPhones and OKCupid. People are not shirking from commitment because they initiate hang-outs via text message. They're shirking from commitment because:

1. They don't know yet what they want from the person they are seeing
2. They are not really interested in the person they're seeing but don't want to be alone
3. They would rather focus on their studies/careers than a relationship
4. They have been recently heartbroken so are very cautious
5. They want to get laid but don't want a relationship
6. They haven't met anyone that they would want a relationship with

The great thing about growing up in a generation who were told that "you could do anything" and "take your time to figure out what you want out of life" is: you are free to do just that. There's no rush to meet the love of your life at 16 and get married. Instead, the emphasis is on test the waters, figure out who you are, there are more fish out there, YOLO. And when 20-somethings do just that: take their time to figure it out, to discover who they are and live through the mistakes that come with experimentation, suddenly "dating is dead" and "monogamy is finished" are the trends.

To blame technology for the death of fancy dinner first dates and old-school chivalry is lazy, and doesn't take into account how gender roles are changing, the LGBT dating scene (interesting to note that there no gay or lesbian daters were interviewed for both articles), or how people are delaying marriage until later.

The norm is no longer: find your soulmate and get married. Instead, there are many norms. There's the fuck buddy norm. There's the friends-with-benefits norm. There's the casually-dating-multiple-people norm. And there's the relationship norm. Some people are comfortable with living many of those norms at once, some people are not. The trick is to figure out what norm you are, and what's the norm of the person you're dating. When you both want the same things, it works out for both people. When you don't, you end up, in the words of "Sex and the City"'s Carrie Bradshaw, "alone on a Friday night waiting for some guy to all."

And I've gone through all of those norms in the past two years of being out of school. And the relationships I have had, they died not because of Twitter, but because we weren't compatible in the long term. Just like in the old days...

So the lesson is, it's not technology that's changing the landscape of dating. It's people changing the norms. Of course, that makes for a less compelling headline than, "Facebook is killing your relationship."