It would be hard to find a group of people more insulated from in-person
interactions than Millennials today.
Seamless delivers dinner.
Tinder makes matches. Headphones discouraged chatting.
We also grew up
with things like caller ID and automated customer service that took the stranger
interacting out of a lot of everyday errands.
Less interacting with strangers
in public means less flirting with strangers in public.
How did young people become so stranger-averse and what does that mean for dating?
This is Ashley. She reports on trends and relationships
and families, so she's interviewed a lot of people about their experiences dating.
People who are pretty young in their 30s in their 20s. Some who were in college.
Technology has made the act of meeting people offline almost obsolete.
With Tinder's estimated global user base at nearly 50 million, many people rely on apps as the primary
way to date.
Today's dating pool I think has a different skill set, being good at
flirting in a way that translates to a text message.
We can manage a lot through
asynchronous communication. I can look at a text from you, and I can really think about how I want to respond.
I might pass my phone around to my friend group and have them weigh in they think
I should respond.
And there's a reason you never want to put your phone down.
The apps are designed to be addictive which makes it even harder to stop
swiping once you're hooked.
One thing that the founders of Tinder said about
founding it was that they wanted it to feel like a game. They designed the app
itself to feel like a deck of cards where you were flipping over one and then
you kind of weigh in on it, approve of it, or discard it,
then you can move on to the next one and they wanted it to feel like something
you could just do forever kind of for fun to entertain yourself.
When more and more people are finding dates from the comfort of their couch, the experience of
dating becomes siloed from the rest of social life.
I've heard people say
sometimes they will have a good interaction or like kind of catch the
eye of someone who's cute and then not say anything just hope that they find
them on the apps later when they're swiping, whereas like I think in prior
generations people had much more of half an eye turned out toward finding
potential mates, potential partners, potential dates, just kind of during
everyday life.
It's hard to make a date offline when no one wants to talk to
strangers. An entire generation of kids was once taught to fear them.
Starting when we were little, we had the stranger-danger philosophy among parents that really kept us away from
people we didn't know because they might be out to harm us. Things that are very
valid when you're a small child but when you're an adult maybe those aren't,
aren't as appropriate.
Stranger danger PSAs were popular in the 80s and 90s when Millennials were
growing up. The campaign's were developed in response to infamous child abductions
at the time.
Even today their impact lingers.
When I've talked to young people
about what happens when they get approached by people who want to flirt
with them in a public space is that they just sort of don't know what to do with
that interaction.
Ultimately perhaps it's our priorities that have shifted making
the search for a mate less important. More people are delaying marriage
meeting someone in any capacity is not necessarily the goal.
There's a fear of
falling in love that young people come by honestly because they often have been
given a message from the time they were this big it's education first, it's
performance first, it's achievement first, it's ambition first. I have to put all
these sorts of boxes checked off before I can even imagine bringing another
person into my life.
So what is all this meant for love and partnership?
For one, traditional social networks are broadening. We are much more likely to
date across a significant cultural difference than we were in years past,
and so one in six new marriages bridges a significant socio-demographic
difference like race like ethnicity like faith.
But while some things have changed
others remain the same.
People forget it was always hard to meet someone now
there's just different problems. People are still looking for the same
and the milestones are the same, the big questions are the same. How people find
each other is the thing that has changed.
Thanks for watching the Idea File and if
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