Social Media and the New World of Dating

"Dating is now just to hook up and take selfies."
--A 13-year-old girl interviewed by Nancy Jo Sales in the book American Girls


I went out on one real date in high school. It was a blind date with a boy from a neighboring school, set up by our friends. After a few phone conversations, this boy borrowed his dad's monstrously large car, picked me up, took me to dinner and a movie, and brought me home. I don't recall even talking to him ever again, although both of us had a fine night. Before the date, my dad, the football coach at my school, had contacted the football coach at the boy's school to make sure this was a decent kid. Edward (I think that was really his name) came in and made polite conversation with my parents before we left my house. Although nothing ever came of it, it's a sweet memory, especially how he nervously ran us over a few curbs in his dad's car.

Contrast that picture with teenage dating today, which happens mostly over cell phones. In her book, Nancy Jo Sales paints a picture of dating today that looks the same across the country, among junior highers, high schoolers, and college students. It goes something likes this: Boy meets girl over social media. They may or may not know each other in person. They share pictures. The pictures become more provacative. He is expected to follow and like what she posts. She is expected to follow and like what he posts. At some point, plans are made to "hook up." This often takes place at a party and involves some kind of sex. Also key is the taking of selfies, so that the "couple" has proof of their relationship to share with the rest of the world. Both are very likely carrying on similar relationships with others at the same time.

The college dating scene described in the book is even more perfunctory. Sales quotes the research of journalist Donna Freitas, who interviewed 2,500 current college students and found that hooking up, without the foundation of any kind of relationship, is the norm on their campuses. Here's how she describes it:

"Sex is something you’re not to care about. It’s almost like their job to get it done. One word I keep hearing from students is ‘efficient.’ They’re so busy, so overscheduled, hooking up is an efficient way to ‘get sex done.’ And you have to show that you’re doing it. The reason for hooking up doesn’t seem to be pleasure, fun, or intimacy; it’s all about performance, gossip, and being able to update about it on social media. Social media speeds it all up. Students hook up with someone after friending them on Facebook or following them on Instagram. They wake up the next day in bed with someone they  haven’t  had a conversation with.”  

The more this journalist talked with students, however, the more she began to unearth their true feelings about hook-up culture. Most college students, 83 percent of females and 63 percent of males, said they would prefer a traditional, committed relationship. Freitas writes, "The more I talk to students, the more the culture of hooking up seems really problematic for them. Both young women and young men are seriously unhappy with the way things are; they’re really ambivalent about the sex they’re having. According to everything they see in pop culture, they’re supposed to be having a great time, but it’s rare that I find a young man or woman who says hooking up is the best thing ever. In reality it seems to empty them out. There’s this sort of soullessness fostered in hookup culture; there’s a learned callousness."

Freitas says that alcohol becomes the way to numb their feelings: "I’ve got to drink so I can gear up to do this thing. I’ve got to get this over with, and alcohol is the way to get through it.” Porn becomes the model for sexual encounters, because it's got to be more exciting, more edgy to keep them engaged. The young men, and many of the young women, are well versed in porn activities and techniques, having viewed hundreds if not thousands of hours of it online.

Are these accurate descriptions? I don't know. My teenagers aren't dating yet, and I don't talk with the few college students I know about their dating practices. What I do know is that I can't open a newspaper or watch TV news without reading about the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. Freitas's research suggests that the mix of alcohol, porn, and the social media-driven normalcy of hook-up culture play a key role in what I'm seeing on the news. It's eye-opening, and that's why I share it here. While the idea of "free love" has been around for decades, this goes even beyond that. This is not your mother's college experience.

I write with the hope that we'll teach our kids another way to date. And yes, I still believe in dating, although I know some have followed the 90's trend to "kiss it goodbye." Healthy dating is a great thing if we can teach our kids that it involves personal, intentional, face-to-face communication and respect and romance instead of lust and sex. How about we teach our young men not just to text a meeting location to a girl, but to actually call her and make arrangements to come to her house and pick her up. To knock on her door and talk with her parents. Our daughters are valuable; they deserve to be treated kindly and honorably. They deserve more than incessant requests to send nude pictures of themselves to boys they barely know. Our boys were designed for something so much better and more fulfilling than alcohol-induced efficiency sex. Our kids need to know that they are worthy of being known and being loved.

Sales ends her books with a sobering story. She spent a weekend night with a group of college girls who lived together off-campus. She followed them as they hopped from bar to bar; she heard their stories as they went from one hook-up to the next. Some of the girls had several in one night. The next morning, most of the girls got up and went out for coffee. One stayed home. In her sweatpants, glasses, and messy bun, she looked nothing like the confident, vampy girl Sales had seen the night before. Her night had been full of hook-ups, but instead of talking about that, she talked to Sales about a very different kind of night she'd had in high school. She'd had a real date. A boy borrowed his dad's car, picked her up at her house, and took her out. They sat at a restaurant, and she was terrified and thrilled at the challenge of making real-time conversation. She didn't have time to come up with witty texts. This wasn't a selfie; she couldn't find her best pose or angle. She had to be herself. At the end of the night, the boy took her home, walking her to the door and saying goodnight with no expectations.

When Sales asked her how she felt about it, she said this: "It was awkward as hell because I’d never done it before, but it was a real-life thrill. It’s not like texting. Like you’re here, this is live, this is now. I need that. I want that. But that doesn’t happen anymore."

Sales ended her book with this 19-year-old's parting comments: “Do we even know how to fall in love anymore? Do we even know what being in love is? Will we ever get there because we have such a screwed up notion of what it should be, or how you should get there? Everyone wants love, and no one wants to admit it.”

Fascinating, isn't it, to those of us who dated in the 80s and 90s? So much to think about. I'll write on this book next week with some final thoughts, but I hope you'll keep thinking with me long after that.