I’ll be honest: some parts of modern dating are exhausting.
Swiping right or left on dating app users you’ve never met feels uncomfortable and vaguely mean. Asking half a dozen strangers how many siblings they have or what their major is or what kind of music they like kind of feels like banging your head against a wall. Monitoring your phone for a text back from someone you’re actually interested in is nerve-inducing.
But these are just modern forms of the same romantic troubles that have plagued people for decades.
Instead of waiting for a text back, members of past generations often idled by the phone, waiting for that special someone to call. They had the same confusion over relationship statuses; they just used slightly different lingo:
Are we going steady? Are we exclusive? Are we dating?
Awkwardness still permeated their first dates, and anxiety over the right thing to say or wear or do still clogged their thoughts. What they didn’t have, though, were the many advantages that come alongside modern dating.
First, technology has made it easier than ever to meet a compatible romantic match. Dating apps form connections between people who would otherwise never meet. Instead of hoping to stumble upon a stranger you happen to like (and who happens to be single), you can connect with someone online from the convenience of your own home.
This is especially important now, given the increased social isolation caused by the pandemic.
This has also allowed for increased circulation of important information around sex and dating. While the internet isn’t always the best place for advice, it’s good that people have someplace to turn to fill in gaps left by inadequate public school sex education classes.
There is also greater access to expert advice on building and maintaining healthy relationships, supplying people with the skills and knowledge they may have been unable to obtain on their own otherwise.
Evolving social attitudes also put modern daters at an advantage.
For hundreds of years, non-heterosexual relationships were criminalized. Laws prohibiting sodomy weren’t declared unconstitutional until 2003 and same-sex marriage wasn’t fully legalized in the U.S. until 2015.
It’s important to remember how recent these changes were, and for how many people the dating scene of the past was more like a nightmare. Social progress has allowed more people to celebrate love today than in decades prior.
And for women, fading “traditional values” has led to greater autonomy in dating. Women feel less pressure to marry young and have children. Women rightfully expect to be treated as an equal by their partner. Female sexuality, though still stigmatized in many ways, is at least more widely acknowledged and less fervently suppressed.
For all these reasons, I find myself skeptical of claims that dating was so much better “back in the day” or that our generation has somehow “killed” romance.
It’s easy to imagine how love and relationships used to be simpler, but they weren’t. There was no Golden Age of dating that was all meet-cutes, flowers, slow-dancing and love letters. Yes, smartphones have made dating look different, but at the end of the day, it’s just as confusing and wonderful as it’s ever been.
Finding romance has and always will be about finding the right person — the person that you can laugh with, be serious with and be yourself with. Modern dating conventions make it easier than ever before to find that person.
Claire Sullivan is an 18-year-old coastal environmental science freshman from Southbury, Connecticut.