It's no secret; our generation has become less about face-to-face interactions and more about how many followers you have on Twitter. I love my social media as much as the next person, but there's no denying the one thing that all of this technology has impacted: modern romanticism.
Although this is not true for everyone who is involved in the dating world, the age of technology has changed the name of the game when it comes to dating. Now, your eligibility is dependent on how much cleavage you're showing in your selfie on Facebook, or how well constructed your tinder biography is. Besides the obvious lack of face to face interaction, this generation is missing out on one of the oldest parts of dating: the romantic side.
In order to fully explain this concept, I need to paint you a picture. Let's say that Daisy and Johnny are both attending the same school, but have not met each other until taking the same freshman English course. On the first day of class they sit next to each other, so for the next week they have casual but flirty conversations. Daisy decided that there could possibly be more between her and Johnny so she starts to do some "investigating". After English class, she goes home and looks at Johnny's Facebook profile, so she can figure out if he's single or not. Although his profile says that he is single, his last two profile picture have a girl in them, and they are looking nice and cozy together. In order to do some more investigating, Daisy looks at Johnny's Instagram and Twitter profiles. After going through all of this, Daisy finally decides that she does not want to get to know Johnny any better. His tweets weren't funny enough, and his Instagram wasn't desirable.
The next day in class, Daisy doesn't talk to Johnny the same way that she used to because of the things she found on his social media pages.
Now let's run through another scenario. In order to get to know each other a little more, Daisy asks Johnny to get coffee with her after class one day. While talking and getting to know each other, they find out things they could not have figured out by looking at each other's social media pages. Daisy learned that Johnny had a good sense of humor, and a girl cousin that he was really close with. She couldn't find these things out by looking at a page online.
With this new version of romanticism, girls think that when a boy texts her first it is romantic, or when he talks to you in front of his friends, it's romantic.
This is not romantic.
This is what being a normal human is like, and being friendly to other classmates is like.
Romanticism is going out of your way for another person, and letting them know that they mean more to you than other people do.
The creation of Tinder, although fun at times, was not created for the intention of romantic feelings. Tinder is based off of looks and wittiness, which is not what dating is supposed to be about.
Although convenient and fun, the social media world has impacted the dating world and romanticism (or lack thereof).