Online dating, love it or hate it, is a real way people find their forever person. Either on a dating app or through an unrelated dm, people are meeting. But that’s the thing—they’re meeting, but are they really falling in love?

Is it Love or Is It Lust?

Let’s start out with the basics: definitions. Love is defined as “an intense feeling of deep affection.” Lust is defined as “a very strong physical desire for someone or something.” But do people actually know how to differentiate the two, or are they just mistaking physical attraction for true love? How does this apply to dating in a digital world? 

Let’s look at the very premise of online dating. What’s the first thing you see if you open a dating app? Pictures. Pictures of the person and their age. Yes, you could read the bio and meet the person, but that’s not the focus: it’s the images. Let’s even go a step further to something people our age are more familiar with: Snapchat and Instagram. While they may not be originally intended to be dating apps, there is a strong culture around dating on the apps. 

When you open Snapchat to look at people’s profiles, the first thing you see is a Bitmoji or picture depending on the profile—either what the person thinks they look like or a picture. Going a step further, we can see that unless they have a public profile with more pictures, the only defining characteristic to tell you anything about this person is the tags and groups they are in. Yet, people will still go look through them and add random people just knowing that they go to the same school. Even if they do start talking and snapping and the person does turn out to be real, how are they even learning anything about them? 

The app isn’t designed for long conversations. While DMs are possible, the majority of people send pictures back and forth with small strings of text. And that is not an effective way to communicate because of the lack of information in each string. It doesn’t seem likely that anybody can truly know someone enough to love them if they barely know anything about them. And that’s one of the defining differences between love and lust. Love is having a deep understanding of the person you are talking to and carrying deep feelings for them iin every aspect. But lust is simply physical attraction. There is little focus on personality or none at all.

Eternal Situationships

People aren’t just meeting in unconventional ways but are also getting into unconventional relationships. Consider the traditional dating couple: for most, the image that comes to mind is of two people who are monogamous and committed to each other and love each other unconditionally, at least ideally. But now there is a new term being thrown around, one that’s fairly common for most people who are in high school or college-aged—a situationship. 

A situationship is “a romantic relationship between two people who do not yet consider themselves a couple but who have more than a friendship.” It is defined as a sort of in-between stage when people either aren’t ready for commitment or aren’t quite sure if they like each other or not. Usually, this stage would be short and sweet and either end in a relationship or a split. But now it’s as if people don’t know the words boyfriend and girlfriend even exist. People are more often staying in this phase rather than making a commitment. Whether it’s because they are too scared to make it official, or if it’s from a lack of effort these stages are becoming longer and more frequent. 

We can even see this represented in trends this Valentine’s season with the pink, red, and white trend. The trend requires people who are single to wear white, people who are in a relationship to wear red, and people whose situation is “complicated” to wear pink. While it’s a lighthearted and fun tradition, the trends shine a little light on how normalized these not-quite relationships are. While they may be a good way to pad out feelings and be sure in your decisions, prolonging these periods often leads to hurt feelings and misunderstandings. Because it’s not uncommon for one person in these “relationships” to develop stronger feelings than the other, which is never good. While these situations have always existed, they are more prevalent and well-accepted as a cultural norm now.

Meet Cutes 

Adorable meetings taken straight out of romance novels, do they even exist anymore? We all know the stories, ones where people drop a book and lock eyes, or they get partnered up in a random class but end up growing together, realizing they have more in common than they thought. They’re sweet and perfectly cliche, but do they even exist anymore? While nothing about the idea of meet cutes themselves has changed, what about the people in them? After the pandemic and increased use of electronics, people have generally become less likely to talk to other people that they are unfamiliar with in person. While I do understand that we are forced to meet people everywhere we go, we do not always make connections with them. A study by the Mental Health Foundation found that in the years leading to 2020, there was already a 4.4% increase in anxiety diagnoses. As the years go by the number is only increasing. 

So how can you meet someone romantically if you can’t even form a sentence or go out to meet them? You just can’t unless it’s a special circumstance like what occurred in the “Nassie” situation. While people can meet online, it’s not effective and isn’t the traditional meet cute. While they have occurred and will continue to occur, overall, they are less frequent.

Is True Love Dead?

Short answer, no. True love is not dead. While it might be harder for people to meet when they have a tendency to be more socially anxious, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Ultimately, people still have to go outside, and that’s, after all, where the people are. And if somehow, some way, you manage to never go outside with the way technology has developed today, we have a million different ways and apps to meet people. And while those relationships may not be stable or honest, they can still lead to true love. 

True love, and love in general, can never and will never be eradicated because it’s a human emotion. People with emotions are going to feel them and you can’t just stop them from guiding your choices unless you have a lot of training. So the emotion itself and people finding other people who they love with their whole heart and share the same feelings will never cease to exist. 

While it may be hard, or the means to get there have changed, love still exists. So this Valentine’s Day, if you’re more inclined to be cynical and stay consistent in your opinion that “love is dead” or “love is disgusting,” give it a second thought and understand that everyone’s situation and reasons are different, so you should approach everything with a little more nuance.