From the snowflake
Is there a young person in your life who frequently has you scratching your head? Fear not, as every month best’s Millie Gooch, 27, is here to tell us what the 20plus generation is REALLY thinking…
‘To my lovely 60-year-old mum, meeting up with perfect strangers from the internet is, in her words, a “risky business”. But for me and thousands of other millennials, it’s both a regular occurrence and a necessity, if we don’t want to end up “on the shelf” (another one of Mum’s phrases)!
The most infamous dating app, Tinder, launched in 2012 – and just two years later was registering more than a billion swipes a day. Since then, hundreds of new apps with a “quirky millennial twist” – sigh – have launched, but the basic concept remains: swipe left for no, right for yes, and if you both swipe right – hurrah, a match!
But why are we scouring the internet in the pursuit of true love? For starters, we’re doing less partying, and when your life consists of binge-watching Blue Planet in your PJs, the odds of meeting a potential partner are, well, slashed drastically.
Online dating is also way less embarrassing. I’d rather eat my own arm than approach someone I fancied – and I’m pretty sure that most guys feel the same! Why risk the face-to-face rejection, when you can hide behind your screen?! Finally, dating apps are logistically foolproof. Filtering by location eliminates the risk of a doomed, long-distance love affair.
The older generation tends to think the main drawbacks of online dating are certain death, or at the very least an unpleasant STD. But is it really any riskier than “the good old days”, when women would hand out their number to strangers from a bar stool?
Besides, little do they know the real pitfalls of finding love online are actually ghosting (a guy disappearing on you without so much as an “it’s not you, it’s me”); the sudden impulse to prove you’re the sexiest, most intelligent girl ever, who also has amazing hair; and, my personal least favourite, repetitive strain injury of the chosen swiping thumb.
I must confess, I am yet to find “the one”. I have resigned myself to the fact that I probably swiped left on him by accident, while trying to answer my phone and extract reheated pizza from the microwave… That said, plenty of friends have got their ’appy ending. My mate Lauren has now moved in and had “cat babies” with a guy she met on Tinder, because, yes, that is another thing we millennials do. We have kittens until we can afford kids.
For us, fairy-tale romances don’t start with a lingering look in the local or a dodgy dance down the disco. They can, quite literally, begin with a swipe in the right direction…’