Love in the modern world
By a Love Better contributor
We’ve all become a bit codependent on those phones, man, let’s just admit it.
It’s not betraying your generation to say that aloud. We — as humans, as a wider society, as a planet — have gotten a bit too reliant on our lovely battery-powered tech we carry in our back pockets, and it’s okay to say it. The first step to healing is to admit you’ve got a problem, anyway.
What strikes me most about our usage of phones is how comfortable we’ve gotten with online dating. Back in our parents’ times, the concept would feel like a setup to a horror film. Never having met in person, trading stock-standard pickup lines over the phone and immediately organising a time and date to meet one-on-one. Terrifying.
Not only is the convenience of it all rejigging our minds, but the constant comparison of other profiles to ours is messing us up, too. It’s easy to become envious of what others look like, or what they have. And pair that with your relationships — suddenly you’re stealing his phone to stalk his following list, seeing photos of your partner with people prettier than you (even if those pictures were from before you even met), blocking them just so they have to reach out over the phone. It isn’t healthy, but it hasn’t been for a while now. It’s not like people didn’t display insecurity and fear before the internet, it’s just become easier to be self-conscious.
There is nothing wrong with adapting and changing to the times. And in some ways, it can be safer. There’s a lot that you can gather from a person’s Hinge profile that shows you whether or not you guys would have a happy cottage life together, or sometimes you don’t want to face that rejection when you ask the cute girl in your class out on campus, then have to bump into her again the next day. But the death of romance is on the rise.
We can’t really control how people perceive us, no matter how perfect your Instagram grid looks.
We’ve become a lot more scared of making mistakes, and being awkward, now that we’ve hidden behind our screens long enough. Every carefully curated text has a slew of notes-app drafts behind it, every song posted to your story comes with its own mental breakdown… There’s a lot of pressure being put on you by, well, everyone. Wait, that means that everyone’s thinking the same way? Even if we think of the positives of online dating and meeting people over Hinge, it’s easy to glance at other couples and become jealous of how organically they might’ve met each other. Do they look down on you? Are they laughing at the fact you had to plan your relationship into fruition?
We can’t really control how people perceive us, no matter how perfect your Instagram grid looks, and so you can’t really control someone else’s feelings, either. There’s a certain selfishness that comes with our obsessions with ourselves — thinking everyone must be looking at us and judging us at all times. When we remove ourselves from the equation for a minute, and step out to look at the bigger picture, you realise all your peers are just as worried about themselves as you are. Insecurity isn’t an issue in and of itself, we’re all human and have insecurities, but allowing yourself to become an insecure person off the knowledge people are online and watching is doing yourself a disservice.
The world gets bigger and bigger, but if we’re using these terrifying weapons of intellectual warfare to foster connection, it should be the least of our worries. At best, you create lifelong bonds through them. Take the time to step outside and breathe in the air, stumble over your words and have a real conversation with a stranger, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with admitting our phones have a huge sway over us. What matters is our perspective.
