No-Risk Dating: We Are Unsatisfied

The blunt commentaries on the modern dating scheme are emerging frequently these days. Take this one, “18 Ugly Truths About Modern Dating That You Have To Deal With“. This list includes the sad reality that making phone calls is a dying art, and “let’s chill” or “wanna hang out?” are likely thinly-veiled invitations to hook up. The most striking:

If you get dumped, it’s probably going to be pretty brutal. People can cut ties over the phone and avoid seeing the tears stream down your face or end things via text and avoid hearing the pain in your cracking voice and sniffling nose. Send a lengthy text and voilà, relationship over.

Another article on this topic is particularly attention-grabbing: “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too” Its focus is how women have adopted what was once mainly attributed to men: hooking up with no emotional costs. Nobody has time for the messiness of relationships anymore. Here’s an example taken from the article:

At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep. Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls.“We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”

Devastating. What’s in common with these articles is that the desire for intimacy with another soul remains, it is simply being satisfied and stifled in the most convenient and unattached manner. That says something. Perhaps it’s that our humanity can never be totally lost. Whatever it is, the statue we have erected to Venus isn’t cutting it, it isn’t satisfying us, and it is leaving us emptier than ever. There’s something wrong, and articles like these show that we might just be experiencing the rude awakening that has been in the making for a long time.