Modern Day Dating: Seriousness is out of the window

To a lot of people out there modern dating is quite the utopia, with countless opportunities for a casual fling or dinner date anytime you want along coupled with apps like Tinder etc. making a sexual partner just a casual swipe away from you. Yet with all this, enough people feel that romance has taken a crippling hit in the bargain with the alarming rise of the hook-up culture as well as the glaring fact that we as a generation are only interested in instant gratification from every single aspect of life. Forget earning or working hard towards something, we simply need it right here and now. Here are some of the reasons why: - Long term dating and relationships have almost become non-existent: - Nowadays it’s become a competition just to see who can sleep with most number of people in a day or a week by constantly swiping pics on dating apps every walking second of your life. Basically, it’s only become about the sex. Enough people have blatantly stated “Why commit to one person when you can have sex with different people?”. People that actually care about a meaningful relationship are shunned and left behind in the wake of this new world hook-up order. It’s not uncommon to find both guys and girls alike who don’t even remember the person they hooked up with the night before. Most of us are simply too scared to commit ourselves to a proper relationship: - With so many online dating apps, trusted dating sites in Sydney and literally no one looking for any commitment, most people out there have outnumbered the people who would like to find a committed partner. A lot of people born and brought up on social media have almost never had the experience of talking to someone face-to-face and are much more likely to form an impression of a person based on say, his/her profile picture of Facebook than anything else. With that comes the fact that most of us are just too afraid to tell the other person what we actually feel in the fear that we might lose them. So in self defense, we keep things perpetually casual, as if that’s actually going to solve anything. Dating and hook-ups have almost become like a to-the-point recipe that needs to be followed: - With the advent of the internet and dating apps, the unholy combination of the two seem to have created an unprecedented wave of casual dating and flings across the board. With it came its own set of rules, where you are supposed to act calm and detached from the other person, avoid getting too clingy, completely avoid using the dreaded L word and only indulge in casual texting with almost no phone calls being made. Oh and you have to wait a certain number of days before seeing the person again and in most cases, the guy should initiate contact. Sounds like a lame and lousy deal? Well, those are the rules apparently. Most people are never honest about their true intentions: - With the rise of the Internet came another problem that reared its ugly head - The lack of genuinity in people. Hard as that may be to believe, it’s true. We simply love playing “hard to get” whether we actually are or not, because that’s supposedly the “in thing” these days. Looking at it from that aspect, playing desperate is obviously a strict no no. In this mayhem, you can almost never be yourself for even a second. Unfortunately, a lot of movies colour our perception of what a relationship actually is: - It’s not to say anything is wrong with romantic movies in an inherent sense, but we just can’t seem to draw a fine line where the on-screen romance and ends and where reality actually begins for us, concerning a relationship. These movies slowly feed their way into your brain till they actually become a part of your psyche with you thinking that that must be how you find “true love” and make a relationship work. And of course, that’s usually the time when a little something called reality decides to give you a painful kick in the head. So you thought you knew enough about relationships? Think again! Ultimately, you as a person need to figure out what your cup of tea really is - a casual hook-up or a serious relationship. But the bottom line is that we truly owe it to ourselves and the other person to be honest about our intentions. If you’re interested or not interested in someone or whether you’re looking for something serious or not, at least have the basic courtesy and decency to tell them so. Don’t leave people hanging. Everyone want to be happy and content and we’re all just trying to understand one another in the tangled web of confusion that the modern dating world seems to have turned into. You could definitely play your part in making things a little more clearer in that regard.