(slow techno music)
- Human beings have been finding partners
since as long as we've been human beings.
It was really in sort of the late middle ages
and for sure after the industrial revolution,
when people started moving instead
to what were often called love marriages.
They would find partners
because they were attracted to them,
because they loved them.
This partnering process has moved online.
The advent of digital technologies
and particularly smartphones, have changed dating
as much as they've changed anything else.
People have their phones physically on their bodies
nearly all the time.
They're generally communicating via text
rather than by a phone call,
and they're dating increasingly
on online apps that exist on their smartphone.
So now when you talk about dating,
people sort of automatically make this finger movement
because dating online means swiping.
It's still at a deep emotional level, kind of the same thing
as seeing somebody across a crowded room.
You're looking at a picture,
it's still a visual clue and you connect or not.
I think we're in the middle of a revolution
and we're in that revolution even before COVID hit,
but certainly with dating as with everything else,
COVID has crashed us into the future.
The future was coming anyhow.
It's just made us get there so much faster.
The pandemic has reinforced how important
human contact is to us, all forms of human contact,
but particularly that we wanna spend time
with those we love.
And I think people who aren't partnered,
there may be an increased urgency to find the ones they love
and put themselves in a geographical space
so that they can spend more time with those people.