Leaving Room for Wonder: The Strange Death of Modern Dating

Why we should stop looking at our date's LinkedIn

Often when people go on a date in this age they first conduct a little research, what is their occupation? financial situation and of course how attractive are they?

Instead of being left in the dark about a person and gradually getting to know them we start making a profile about them right away: engineer, 110 followers, 8/10 looks. It is so easy, it can be so comforting and relieving to place a person in these categories. You never have to bother dealing with any of the contradictory or paradoxical parts of them, at the end of the day they’re just a doctor, right?

This, to me, is kind of sad. It doesn’t look that harmful at first glance, but when compared to how dating was approached before, the damage can truly be seen.

Imagine 2002, you just saw someone in the hallway of your university and had a little chat. The girl you were talking to had a weird black jacket on which intrigued you and a hairstyle you haven’t really seen ever. You talk with her about life at uni, but are mostly intrigued by the way she acts: her sudden moves and interesting comments. After you start wondering who she is, not what her job title on LinkedIn is, but who she actually is, what her internal life looks like.

Because we now have instant access to a person’s life, there is no or very little room left for this wonder. We can start to think we know them, but we just know the labels they identify themselves with and because that’s all we see of them, that can be all we start to focus on. Making dating not a journey in which you find your soulmate, but rather a search for an ideal LinkedIn match, hoping to find someone with whom you share conveniently enough a similar following on Instagram as well!

Instead of finding out their passions we see that they play in the second highest hockey league of their school, again these superficial rankings. All these measurable facts: career, followers and college ranking give us an almost measurable way of finding our ideal partner. There is only one catch, love isn’t measurable. We may know who this person poses as or what they wrote in their bio on insta, but we don’t actually know anything about who they are; the manner in which they speak, the way they listen, the type of questions we ask.

Another thing which makes this all the more crushing is the fact that this information makes us focus on our image even more as well. This starts to reinforce itself, until we only pay attention to the labels. We only see the way people show up to the world and for all we know that’s just who they are.

But this misses a crucial point of being interested in someone, which is not only being interested in the way they show up, but being interested in their internal life.

Let’s go back to the example from earlier, the girl with the weird black jacket. After the conversation is over, that’s all you know, a girl who talked in an interesting manner about her life at this university you both go to. This will probably leave you interested in her internal life, what goes on inside her? Why does she act this way? These questions. You’re being left in the dark with the only thing you’ll be able to do is just to wonder.

There are millions of people with whom you would be statistically compatible with, but none who awakened this curiosity within you, a curiosity which transcends practical matters like their career or social status. Perhaps you start daydreaming about the way she might act or what her dreams might be. I think this is a much more human way of getting to know a human. This is how you gradually build up an accurate image of a human, by concerning yourself with them and their daily and internal life.

This is, I think, the tragedy of the algorithmic age. We tend to operationalize, monetize and analyse everything measurable, which of course has its upside in technological development. However, it leads to complete neglect of our non-measurable but often much more beautiful qualities.

We don’t only do this with other people, we do this to ourselves too. We identify ourselves with labels regarding our career or professional endeavour and completely forget who we are holistically. You miss the beautiful parts about yourself, like the way we behave around your pets or the manner in which you greet the old lady who lives next to you. Like these things are not a crucial part of who you are.

The reason this matters is because you’re not going to fall in love purely because of someone’s looks or professional qualifications, those pieces which can possibly explain your craze about them lie in the small things: the way she plays with her dog or the interesting vocabulary she has. I think when you have this unexplainable feeling, the explanation lives in hundreds of these small observations, in these small pieces of the puzzle of the person you have fallen for.

Perhaps we can look at self love from this light too. Not to judge ourselves by these superficial standards, but by the way we treat our friends or made a funny comment in that conversation.

This is a way too unrecognized problem for people who concern themselves about the death of modern dating: The death of wonder about the other, the mystery.

This explains how dating shifted from a slow process of falling in love to a market running on supply and demand. A deep bonding becomes impossible when you look at the labels instead of the actual person behind them. But we still do, they give us a sense of control. Making us forget that the parts which are most beautiful about them and inconveniently for us, the most unmeasurable.

So perhaps this death of dating didn’t start purely because one gender is worse than the other. It all started with the death of wonder about the mysterious other.