For all their awesomeness, smartphones have one major downfall. They’ve allowed us to get away with avoiding human contact completely and changed the way we interact with one another. Single females everywhere (including me) will lament the change in the dating game and I think smartphones play a big role in this.
For the single girl you’re no longer going out and meeting people. You’re finding them on your phone. Twitter is the worst kept dating secret of all time, with people following one another based purely on a well shot profile pic (I’m not even getting in to Tinder in this piece). After a few random interactions you’re DMing and then you’re adding each other as Facebook friends. Then the stalking begins! You can go through years of photos and hunt down mutual friends to question. Ex girlfriend tagged? Great, let’s stalk her too. By the time you actually meet someone in real life you’ve created an image of exactly who they are based on some pieces of information you pasted together from social media.
I’m not going to lament about how social media is merely a snapshot of our lives as selected by us. You’re not an idiot.
For the girl in a new relationship there is no doubt you might feel a stab of jealousy when you see the same girl tagging him in photos and status updates and writing on his wall. You’ll question why his What’s App profile said online at 11pm after telling you at 9pm that he was going to bed. He gets tagged at the local watering hole after telling you he is working late? Cue all the psycho girlfriend tendencies.
You’re constantly picking up your phone in the middle of dinner because your side business is booming and you cannot ignore that email. The beep of your phone is magnetic, you’ve got to check it because the FOMO is real. How often have you sat in front of the TV with your significant other while he reads emails and you’re checking your twitter timeline… ignoring the film and ultimately each other? Are you jumping into bed tangled around one another or is he climbing into bed while you untangle your charger’s cable?
Maybe it isn’t all bad. You trust each other. You’re in a happy relationship. But your relationship status still reads single on Facebook. Can you tag him in Instagram pictures? At what point do you announce you’re now a “couple”? Maybe you make the decision to make things Facebook official… and then you break up. Your high school classmates write “I’m so sorry” on your wall. You begin mass untags and start sending subtweets directed at him. I’ve seen some hysterically funny and awfully sad stuff go down online. I’m guilty of some of it. We need to make a change.
Your phone is ruining your love life. Put it down right now. Unless you’re that cute guy I’ve been eyeing out on Twitter and you’re mustering up the courage to send me a DM… then don’t do that.
