Arguing Against Online Dating: Something Needs to Change

Life

Nov 19

Finding happiness while keeping your dignity is possible

Often, we put into the world the things we want from other people, meaning what we find attractive in others tends to stem from what someone desires in us. It’s taken the prioritization of social media on our social interactions for us to realize how easy it is to sell an idea of ourselves, a mere extension of our personality that isn’t as untrue as it is self-serving. We see narratives like this every single day (see MTV’s Catfish and Ghosted) and somehow haven’t learned that what we say can be used against us if we don’t manage what we allow to be seen.

Every day, becoming more numb to the responsibility of maintaining an online presence, I find myself clinging to the privacy I still have so I know no one, especially myself, can get hurt. Hearing stories from friends, and even recounting my own, is discomforting and make it harder for me to believe that virtual platforms serve a purpose other than for temporary satisfaction. I’m sure we can all attest to the fact that rebuilding trust after being taken advantage of is strenuous and bothersome. Yet, we willingly put ourselves in scenarios where, time after time, the outcomes are the same.

The biggest misconception people have about online dating is that it frees us of the boundaries we’d normally have if we weren’t constantly in the public eye. If anything, profile and bio restrictions are self-imposed and force us to omit things we don’t want others to know right away. Whether from fear of appearing show-offy or insecure, we slip into the ease of our personas rather than present what’s real or what people will actually like about us. The idea that we somehow have to be appealing to a majority, if not all people, is not only unrealistic but begs the question of whether searching at all is worth it.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that online dating is the be-all-end-all for every relationship venture going into the future; surely if there were more accessible ways of broadening our horizons, we would’ve done so by now. The way I see it, too many of us have become reliant on chasing what’s constantly attainable and won’t know how to remove ourselves from such when real life comes calling. Those of us who don’t know the things we should about where and what to look for feel too much pressure to show an interest in meeting people when that’s already so difficult. Online dating shouldn’t be filled with horror stories to get us interested in what the internet has to offer. Change sounds all too easy in this context, but until the culture can shift in favor of its opposite, we’re gonna have to work a lot harder to make the idea of online dating, if not more palatable, less of a death trap of inevitabilities.

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