Is Talking Stage Culture Ruining Romance In The 21st Century?
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
By Maya Ford
'WDYLL.’ *Sigh*. I sit there, pondering the glowing cuboid in front of me, wondering what my life has come to. For any non-Gen Z readers out there, this is common text lingo for ‘what do you look like.’ Charming, I know. But typical of the Snapchat approach to dating, where many of us are locked in a ‘talking stage’, sharing messages on social media.
How have we gotten to a place in society where the first thing we want to know about a person is what they look like, not about their personality, what makes them tick and what they want to do in life?
Aside from the sheer oddness of opening a conversation asking me what I look like, the worst is yet to come. What if they don’t like what they see? What if I collate several of my best photos (bonus points if they’re airbrushed to perfection) and I see the dreaded ‘pending’ symbol next to their name? This person I have never met has decided to end a conversation before it has even started purely based on my physical features, that they haven’t even seen outside of a phone screen. I must tell you, it's great for my ego. If anything, it keeps me humble.
A Forbes article puts it best; ‘Decades ago, you might’ve called this [the talking stage] the “wooing” stage: commonly, where a man offered a woman gifts, flowers and attention in the hopes of gaining her affection. Practices like these were considered normal in terms of courtship.’
But now, these so-called ‘gifts’ are photos of half of a face in a darkened room, a blurry photo of a football game, someone holding up some sort of gang related sign, or something even more unsavoury. Where we used to show attraction to each other, show desire through ‘wooing’ as Forbes so eloquently says, or to that effect any kind of emotion other than straight lust, we now have half-hearted ‘snaps’ and the ‘delivered’ symbol looming for hours on end. And we question why, according to the BBC, 51% of adults in the UK are single?
While it may be a choice to be single, and quite frankly in this day and age I don’t blame anyone for avoiding the nightmare of online or technology-driven dating, I believe that part of the reason for this growing singleness in the UK are our standards.
As a teenager or young adult living in the 21st century, we have witnessed the likes of The Notebook, 50 First Dates, The Wedding Singer and When Harry Met Sally all throughout our lives. As such, we have particular expectations. For instance, ‘If my man doesn’t build me my dream house, I don’t want him,’ type standards. We may not all be hopeless romantics, but the idea that we went from these insane love stories (even if fictional, no smoke comes without fire) to speaking to random people on Snapchat in the hope that they will find us attractive enough to get to know beyond photos that were probably - definitely - taken months earlier.
Overall, I think that ‘talking stage culture’ is the reason for a drop in relationship rates. While it can be argued this would only affect teenagers (or, namely, those who use Snapchat), I think dating apps come in the same category, as both feature inorganic methods of meeting someone new and judging them purely based on appearance before you have even met. This is damaging to self-esteem, to standards and expectations, and could greatly impact the ways in which we go about seeking connections and relationships throughout our lives.
We need to be optimistic as well as realistic, perhaps acknowledging the fact that not every man will build us a house, or go on 50 first dates with us despite having amnesia and being unable to remember a single one. But we also need to acknowledge there is more to the dating world than a phone screen and, ‘yo, you’re lookin kinda leng styll’ (translation: ‘you look rather pretty’). There’s hope… somewhere.
