Digital Romance

Digital Romance. Is dating in 2023 harder now compared to the 90's?

I sit here in my Los Angeles valley apartment, a simple moonlit walk away from Ventura Blvd., and I wonder; is dating harder now compared to the 90's? Or was romance always a difficult feat. I see movies and TV shows from that decade, where the woman waits all night at home for him to call, he never does. A man gets stood up (ghosted) might I even say, on a first date. The actions seemingly similar to today's dating scene. The options however, are far more.

Maybe romance is a 2023 tragedy. My friends complain about men, and the men I know say they are not good enough for the women. We have run circles around each other for decades. And for any queer readers who wind up subscribing to me, please excuse my heteronormative dialogue,  but this is the perspective I am most familiar with. Alas, despite your sexuality, love is daunting. And we all want to figure it out.

We all crave it. Half of us are products of divorce, so we don't trust it. The rest of us got lucky I suppose. There are high school sweethearts, and loving couples alike who have been swept into the barrel of trust and stayed there. For them I applaud, but my weary heart also feels a slight ting of envy. I imagine a world where one of the first, if not the first, person you fall in love with winds up being your synergy. They do not know the stabbings of the heart and all that it brings. Maybe they have quarrels such as lovers do, but to be constantly let down, that is a different pool of pain I do not wish upon anyone. 

We are all familiar with it. Swiping and double taps. DM's and text paragraphs. We wait for them to view our story, and hope they will text us something that isn't completely corny. It is all a big performance by one an other, hoping we are not the first one to loose. It's exhausting. The purity of meeting someone by chance has been saturated by the concept that thousands of people are accessible at your finger tips.  While I do not believe online dating  is inherently "bad" I do believe it has changed the way we dance with one another. 

Before cell phones and social media, you had to give someone a call at home and hope they were there to answer it. You had to make real plans, and not talk between them and trust the other person would show up at that restaurant at 8pm. If someone didn't call you back, you had no way of creating unnecessary anxiety by checking to see if they text, swiped up, read, replied, reacted, liked, or commented. 

Which leads me to my next question: is dating harder in 2023, because we create more anxiety surrounding the way we communicate in a digital world? Perhaps it is not people who have killed romance, but technology. We are living in a digital romance. A world filled with mixed messages, and ghosts who leave graves of tears and confusion and crippling anxiety. A world where people post quotes on their Instagram story instead of communicating how they feel. Deep conversations happening through blue bubbles instead of face to face. We are all wearing a blanket of protection that separates us from deeper intimacy. The illusion of choice has us all afraid to pick someone and work at it. 

So, if technology is the issue, how do we bridge the gap? Do we just keep leaving the house, hoping to bump into somebody? I could tell you to delete the apps but that is a cliché and I won't discount the people who have found true love on tinder. But this all leads me to believe that maybe, maybe they really did have it better in the 90's. So, I guess the real question is: if we can bring back 90's fashion, can we bring back 90's dating?