Online Dating: The Apocalypse Of Old School Romance As We Know It
It was late at night. She thought it was time. Time to go on Tinder again. For another round of swiping lefts so she could find the perfect one. Occasionally she would come across someone who was pretty close to her definition of Mr Charming. But hey, there were plenty of other choices. Sometimes, the choices were so overwhelming that she would just get lost…
That, my friends, is the story of you and me. The story of tech savvy millennial singles who have thousands of profiles on the brink of their fingers. Who have so many choices that resorting to a single option is never good enough. They could be going out on a date with three backups, just in case. Now, nobody can deny the benefits of technology that are bestowed upon us. From ordering stuff and being handed everything at our doorstep to becoming millionaires with cryptocurrencies, life has changed. But it did radically change romance as well.
With time, people never really understood when and how social media took over their lives. They started measuring our lives in numbers. Number of likes, comments, shares, followers and what-not. So much so that people quit their day jobs to go follow their dream of becoming an ‘influencer’. The never-ending race made everyone believe that the lives of their friends and colleagues is much better than their own. With this, began a search. A search for their own adventure and their own sets of perfection. Their love life is merely a part of puzzle. An essential one though.
The same can be seen in popular culture as well. Take Netflix’s You, for instance, a TV series where an obsessive stalker controls his potential love interest by hacking into her private life. While people are seeking validation of their own attractiveness and running towards the hookup culture, the number of women feeling unsafe on these dating apps has skyrocketed. Did you know, only 26% of users on dating apps in India are females?
Indian men are known worldwide for their creepy DMs and infamous passes. Plus Bollywood, since always, has made it seem pretty okay to keep bugging women until they say yes. “Na mein hi toh haan hai”, it believed. Take DDLJ, for example, where King Khan easily makes a move on the lady by shoving her lingerie on her face. Similar attitude might be relevant in online dating as well. But hey, this doesn’t mean that it’s only men who are in the wrong. Movies like Pyaar Ka Punchnama show how females end up using men for their own gains. Anyway, this whole culture change has been evolving for quite some time, with online dating merely adding fuel to the fire.
Social media is definitely helping everyone for better communication but at what cost? The issue here is not with online dating but the potential harm that one can face because of such free access to information. Neither is the issue about monogamy or polygamy. Online dating might make one night stands easier but choosing a life partner? The race is yet to be won for this one.
