vacuum
18th February 2013, 02:58 AM
21st-century singledom is a baffling realm of non-date dates, non-relationship relationships, crossed wires and failed semantics. Rebecca Holman, a possibly single 29-year-old, reports.
I have called myself single for the past decade. Strange then, I realised recently, that I have rarely been properly on my own. I haven’t lived with a boyfriend, introduced anyone to my parents, or been on a mini-break. Yet even without an official ‘boyfriend’ there are normally several text conversations with potential beaus buzzing away on my phone.
I also tend to have a few guys on a low-level stalk on Facebook, and there’s always that frisson of excitement when an attractive man retweets one of my ‘LOLz-ier’ status updates. I might be missing out on love, but I’m never short of intrigue, and right now intrigue seems more fun.
Some of this intrigue even becomes actual, real-life, human interaction and perhaps… more. But mostly I’ve found myself in a perpetual state of limbo – stuck somewhere between first encounter, a hook-up and a full-blown relationship. It’s thanks in part to social media. Twitter, Facebook and Google have turned the dating world upside-down, changing how we meet people, what we know about them before we do – and introducing a new layer of ambiguity into single life that generations before us never had to contend with.
I am not in a relationship – or in what someone 20 years older than me would consider a relationship – yet rarely am I definitively single. There is not quite a word for what I am. Our vocabulary is straining as much as we are to encompass the world of modern dating.
Take the word ‘date’ itself. Recently The New York Times questioned whether traditional courtship was over, and whether ‘hanging out’ had replaced ‘dating’. Sounds familiar. Last Friday night I met four girlfriends for drinks after work. I was hoping also to hear from Paul. We’d met at a mutual friend’s party around Christmas, and had seen each other a couple of times since with friends. All week we’d been texting, messaging and emailing. We’d made vague plans to see each other that night. But by 7pm he still hadn’t texted.
Finally, at 8pm, my phone buzzed. ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘Drinks with the girls.’ ‘Want to meet us at my local?’ Reader, I went. I schlepped all the way across the city – only to spend the next three hours with Paul and about six of his friends. Dinner and drinks à deux it wasn’t.
Traditional ‘dating’? My generation doesn’t know how. I wasn’t the only one of my girlfriends to leave early that night. In fact, I can’t remember the last night out with my single friends where we all stayed until the end, or where we weren’t joined by a special guest at some point. And it isn’t simply a case of women being on the receiving end of the latest incarnation of male dating fecklessness. We follow the new rules as assiduously as they do, are just as uneasy about being pinned down, just as likely to be the texter as the textee.
If, like me, you’re a ‘millennial’ (born between 1983 and 2000) you will have never known adulthood – or adult relationships – without a mobile phone. Like me, you are probably so used to keeping your options open – and not deciding what you’re doing on a Friday night until about 6.59pm that evening – that the idea of ‘dating’ seems pretty foreign. Actually phone someone up to ask them out and agree on a date at some point in the future and put it in my diary? Unthinkable. What if I get a better offer? Instead, millennials like to keep it vague. Instead of dating (an American term anyway) we might be ‘seeing someone’, ‘having a thing’, ‘hooking up’. Increasingly, we ‘hang out’ – and not necessarily as a twosome.
Ours is a generation of contradictions. We bravely (recklessly?) let the rest of the world into our online world with gay abandon: you’d like to see 50 pictures of me on a bikini on the beach? Go ahead! Want to know how I’m feeling at this exact moment? Here you are! But in the world of endless options, where nothing seems permanent, and you never have to interact with anyone face to face if you don’t want to, me actually picking up the phone, telling someone how I feel about them, or even asking them out for dinner seems like too big a risk. Why make a phone-call or suggest a date when you can send a non-committal text that merely dangles the possibility of meeting? If they’re keen, you’ll see each other; if not, they’ll plead prior plans. No one’s feelings get hurt.
But at least one of you can end up feeling confused. The social psychologist Ben Voyer warns that while texting and online messaging are perceived to be easier than face-to-face contact or a telephone conversation, in the medium to long term they can make things more difficult. (Was last Friday a ‘date’? Your guess is as good as mine.)
‘Face-to-face contact is much richer. We have more visual and audio cues to help us form an impression of someone.’ Of course endless texting will never offer the same insight into someone’s personality as even a single face-to-face conversation. The I-don’t-know-what-is-going-on phase of a proto-relationship can continue far longer now. You can become vastly experienced in the heady yet confusing dance of Early Days – I have had years of it, and know all the steps – yet remain an ignoramus about the mysterious state of proper Girlfriend and Boyfriend.
Yet it’s so easy to get carried away with texting or instant messaging. Having just counselled a friend through an ambiguous ‘relationship’ characterised by furious text conversations and the occasional meet-up, I then found myself helping another friend decide what to wear when she met up with a man whose activities she’d been obsessively following on Facebook for months. So, how did it go? ‘It wasn’t as thrilling as I’d hoped it would be…’ admitted my friend afterwards. ‘I think he was a little tired.’
Such disappointment shouldn’t come as a surprise, says Emma Weighill-Baskerville, a psychotherapist and relationship specialist. ‘The person may not fulfil the fantasy created through literary communication alone – this is only one piece of an individual. With texts, you are allowing a large space for fantasy to take over.’
The common business of ‘researching’ potential dates on Facebook, Twitter and Google can lead to similar disappointment – especially for a generation like mine, who curate their Facebook pages to PR-worthy standards. One friend furiously edits her Facebook page when a man she likes accepts her friend request. ‘I don’t bother to use Facebook the rest of the time, but when someone interesting pops up I’m all over it, uploading flattering pictures, subjecting my friends to a barrage of witty status updates.’
As Voyer explains, ‘People are increasingly constructing two identities – their online identity, and their offline identity.’ He points to Twitter in particular, saying that ‘new ways of interacting have widened the gap between our actual selves – who we actually are – and our “ought” selves – who we think other people want us to be.’
So, proper, honest, face-to-face communication is key. Unfortunately, for a generation practically weaned on telecommunication devices, person-to-person communication is not exactly our strong suit – as evidenced by a stand-up argument I recently had with a man I was seeing. We were having a drink in the pub when I referred to him, to his face, as my boyfriend.
‘I’m not your boyfriend – I never said I was!’ he exclaimed, panic rising in his voice.
‘Well, what are we then?’
‘We’re friends – you’re my friend.’
At this point, I’d been sleeping with this man for… well, far longer than I care to admit; yet most of our communication was via text message or drunken conversations at the end of the night. In retrospect, it was clear that our ‘relationship’ was no such thing, that he wasn’t willing to give me what I wanted and deserved.
But I’d missed this fact entirely because I’d read what I wanted to into his messages – and because we were in constant communication. To my mind, I was never that pitiful caricature of a desperate woman, waiting by the telephone for him to call; we texted, Facebooked or emailed every day. He always seemed available, even when he wasn’t.
It’s not all bad, of course. Plenty of couples owe their entire relationships to technology. Anna Williams, a 29-year-old writer, met her boyfriend on Twitter. ‘I’ve met a few guys that way – it’s much easier to take a risk because you can pass it off as banter if you get rejected. I met my boyfriend when he started “following” me. We started messaging each other and, eventually, I invited him to a night out I was already going to.’
For Anna, the constant tweeting and messaging took the stress out of the first date. ‘It felt more like fourth-date territory when we met. I’m not sure we’d have got together if we’d met randomly in a bar – if I hadn’t already known he was a nice guy, there would have been nothing to separate him from some random bloke trying it on.’
My current problem is less about the new men in my life and more about the men who just won’t leave it. Occasionally, I’ll see someone once or twice, then decide they’re not for me. But instead of politely disappearing off the edge of the earth and never being seen again as in the Olde Days (1996), these men are now my Facebook friends. And their numbers are saved on my phone and in my iCloud and probably engraved on my spleen until the end of time. In a world where we can stay in touch with anyone we ever meet, indefinitely, it’s easy for quality control to go. If I’m bored or lonely, there’s always a temptation to reconnect.
Perhaps among all those frogs there was actually a prince? Some experts worry that technology and the ‘hook-up’ culture it supports are producing a generation that doesn’t know how to form proper relationships. I’m finding it hard to get too worked up about this just yet.
At 29, I’m very happy with my life – it’s fun and fulfilling and I rarely feel lonely. But I do wonder why my relationships (or whatever we’re calling them this week), fizzle out so easily.
I’m definitely as much to blame as any of the men I meet – I’m often unwilling to make the space in my life a relationship needs inorder to thrive. Maybe this will all change when I meet the right man (after all, chemistry’s got to count for something), or maybe my brain has just been rewired to expect every interaction I have to come with minimum effort and no real depth.
Emma Weighill-Baskerville believes we risk becoming emotionally stunted by our reliance on texting and instant messaging. ‘As a nation we’re learning that it’s better to dismiss uncomfortable feelings and take an avoidant approach. Whereas learning to deal with uncomfortable conversations and not avoid them are fundamental parts of growth and emotional maturity.’
Which is partly why I decided this week to stop all text communication with the man I’m sort-of seeing, unless it was to arrange a date. And it seems to have worked. As soon as I finish writing this, we’re meeting for dinner. Just the two of us.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/9850549/The-difficulties-of-21st-century-dating.html
I have called myself single for the past decade. Strange then, I realised recently, that I have rarely been properly on my own. I haven’t lived with a boyfriend, introduced anyone to my parents, or been on a mini-break. Yet even without an official ‘boyfriend’ there are normally several text conversations with potential beaus buzzing away on my phone.
I also tend to have a few guys on a low-level stalk on Facebook, and there’s always that frisson of excitement when an attractive man retweets one of my ‘LOLz-ier’ status updates. I might be missing out on love, but I’m never short of intrigue, and right now intrigue seems more fun.
Some of this intrigue even becomes actual, real-life, human interaction and perhaps… more. But mostly I’ve found myself in a perpetual state of limbo – stuck somewhere between first encounter, a hook-up and a full-blown relationship. It’s thanks in part to social media. Twitter, Facebook and Google have turned the dating world upside-down, changing how we meet people, what we know about them before we do – and introducing a new layer of ambiguity into single life that generations before us never had to contend with.
I am not in a relationship – or in what someone 20 years older than me would consider a relationship – yet rarely am I definitively single. There is not quite a word for what I am. Our vocabulary is straining as much as we are to encompass the world of modern dating.
Take the word ‘date’ itself. Recently The New York Times questioned whether traditional courtship was over, and whether ‘hanging out’ had replaced ‘dating’. Sounds familiar. Last Friday night I met four girlfriends for drinks after work. I was hoping also to hear from Paul. We’d met at a mutual friend’s party around Christmas, and had seen each other a couple of times since with friends. All week we’d been texting, messaging and emailing. We’d made vague plans to see each other that night. But by 7pm he still hadn’t texted.
Finally, at 8pm, my phone buzzed. ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Not much,’ I replied. ‘Drinks with the girls.’ ‘Want to meet us at my local?’ Reader, I went. I schlepped all the way across the city – only to spend the next three hours with Paul and about six of his friends. Dinner and drinks à deux it wasn’t.
Traditional ‘dating’? My generation doesn’t know how. I wasn’t the only one of my girlfriends to leave early that night. In fact, I can’t remember the last night out with my single friends where we all stayed until the end, or where we weren’t joined by a special guest at some point. And it isn’t simply a case of women being on the receiving end of the latest incarnation of male dating fecklessness. We follow the new rules as assiduously as they do, are just as uneasy about being pinned down, just as likely to be the texter as the textee.
If, like me, you’re a ‘millennial’ (born between 1983 and 2000) you will have never known adulthood – or adult relationships – without a mobile phone. Like me, you are probably so used to keeping your options open – and not deciding what you’re doing on a Friday night until about 6.59pm that evening – that the idea of ‘dating’ seems pretty foreign. Actually phone someone up to ask them out and agree on a date at some point in the future and put it in my diary? Unthinkable. What if I get a better offer? Instead, millennials like to keep it vague. Instead of dating (an American term anyway) we might be ‘seeing someone’, ‘having a thing’, ‘hooking up’. Increasingly, we ‘hang out’ – and not necessarily as a twosome.
Ours is a generation of contradictions. We bravely (recklessly?) let the rest of the world into our online world with gay abandon: you’d like to see 50 pictures of me on a bikini on the beach? Go ahead! Want to know how I’m feeling at this exact moment? Here you are! But in the world of endless options, where nothing seems permanent, and you never have to interact with anyone face to face if you don’t want to, me actually picking up the phone, telling someone how I feel about them, or even asking them out for dinner seems like too big a risk. Why make a phone-call or suggest a date when you can send a non-committal text that merely dangles the possibility of meeting? If they’re keen, you’ll see each other; if not, they’ll plead prior plans. No one’s feelings get hurt.
But at least one of you can end up feeling confused. The social psychologist Ben Voyer warns that while texting and online messaging are perceived to be easier than face-to-face contact or a telephone conversation, in the medium to long term they can make things more difficult. (Was last Friday a ‘date’? Your guess is as good as mine.)
‘Face-to-face contact is much richer. We have more visual and audio cues to help us form an impression of someone.’ Of course endless texting will never offer the same insight into someone’s personality as even a single face-to-face conversation. The I-don’t-know-what-is-going-on phase of a proto-relationship can continue far longer now. You can become vastly experienced in the heady yet confusing dance of Early Days – I have had years of it, and know all the steps – yet remain an ignoramus about the mysterious state of proper Girlfriend and Boyfriend.
Yet it’s so easy to get carried away with texting or instant messaging. Having just counselled a friend through an ambiguous ‘relationship’ characterised by furious text conversations and the occasional meet-up, I then found myself helping another friend decide what to wear when she met up with a man whose activities she’d been obsessively following on Facebook for months. So, how did it go? ‘It wasn’t as thrilling as I’d hoped it would be…’ admitted my friend afterwards. ‘I think he was a little tired.’
Such disappointment shouldn’t come as a surprise, says Emma Weighill-Baskerville, a psychotherapist and relationship specialist. ‘The person may not fulfil the fantasy created through literary communication alone – this is only one piece of an individual. With texts, you are allowing a large space for fantasy to take over.’
The common business of ‘researching’ potential dates on Facebook, Twitter and Google can lead to similar disappointment – especially for a generation like mine, who curate their Facebook pages to PR-worthy standards. One friend furiously edits her Facebook page when a man she likes accepts her friend request. ‘I don’t bother to use Facebook the rest of the time, but when someone interesting pops up I’m all over it, uploading flattering pictures, subjecting my friends to a barrage of witty status updates.’
As Voyer explains, ‘People are increasingly constructing two identities – their online identity, and their offline identity.’ He points to Twitter in particular, saying that ‘new ways of interacting have widened the gap between our actual selves – who we actually are – and our “ought” selves – who we think other people want us to be.’
So, proper, honest, face-to-face communication is key. Unfortunately, for a generation practically weaned on telecommunication devices, person-to-person communication is not exactly our strong suit – as evidenced by a stand-up argument I recently had with a man I was seeing. We were having a drink in the pub when I referred to him, to his face, as my boyfriend.
‘I’m not your boyfriend – I never said I was!’ he exclaimed, panic rising in his voice.
‘Well, what are we then?’
‘We’re friends – you’re my friend.’
At this point, I’d been sleeping with this man for… well, far longer than I care to admit; yet most of our communication was via text message or drunken conversations at the end of the night. In retrospect, it was clear that our ‘relationship’ was no such thing, that he wasn’t willing to give me what I wanted and deserved.
But I’d missed this fact entirely because I’d read what I wanted to into his messages – and because we were in constant communication. To my mind, I was never that pitiful caricature of a desperate woman, waiting by the telephone for him to call; we texted, Facebooked or emailed every day. He always seemed available, even when he wasn’t.
It’s not all bad, of course. Plenty of couples owe their entire relationships to technology. Anna Williams, a 29-year-old writer, met her boyfriend on Twitter. ‘I’ve met a few guys that way – it’s much easier to take a risk because you can pass it off as banter if you get rejected. I met my boyfriend when he started “following” me. We started messaging each other and, eventually, I invited him to a night out I was already going to.’
For Anna, the constant tweeting and messaging took the stress out of the first date. ‘It felt more like fourth-date territory when we met. I’m not sure we’d have got together if we’d met randomly in a bar – if I hadn’t already known he was a nice guy, there would have been nothing to separate him from some random bloke trying it on.’
My current problem is less about the new men in my life and more about the men who just won’t leave it. Occasionally, I’ll see someone once or twice, then decide they’re not for me. But instead of politely disappearing off the edge of the earth and never being seen again as in the Olde Days (1996), these men are now my Facebook friends. And their numbers are saved on my phone and in my iCloud and probably engraved on my spleen until the end of time. In a world where we can stay in touch with anyone we ever meet, indefinitely, it’s easy for quality control to go. If I’m bored or lonely, there’s always a temptation to reconnect.
Perhaps among all those frogs there was actually a prince? Some experts worry that technology and the ‘hook-up’ culture it supports are producing a generation that doesn’t know how to form proper relationships. I’m finding it hard to get too worked up about this just yet.
At 29, I’m very happy with my life – it’s fun and fulfilling and I rarely feel lonely. But I do wonder why my relationships (or whatever we’re calling them this week), fizzle out so easily.
I’m definitely as much to blame as any of the men I meet – I’m often unwilling to make the space in my life a relationship needs inorder to thrive. Maybe this will all change when I meet the right man (after all, chemistry’s got to count for something), or maybe my brain has just been rewired to expect every interaction I have to come with minimum effort and no real depth.
Emma Weighill-Baskerville believes we risk becoming emotionally stunted by our reliance on texting and instant messaging. ‘As a nation we’re learning that it’s better to dismiss uncomfortable feelings and take an avoidant approach. Whereas learning to deal with uncomfortable conversations and not avoid them are fundamental parts of growth and emotional maturity.’
Which is partly why I decided this week to stop all text communication with the man I’m sort-of seeing, unless it was to arrange a date. And it seems to have worked. As soon as I finish writing this, we’re meeting for dinner. Just the two of us.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/9850549/The-difficulties-of-21st-century-dating.html