Modern Romance (4 page)

When we talked to the older people who were in happy, successful marriages, the way they had met sounded quaint and simple, with much less stress than singles go through today. Sure, they met at a young age and probably weren’t as sophisticated then as they later became, but as one woman told me: “We grew up and changed together. And here we are in our sixties, still together.”

People from the older generation there that night had almost always asked each other out immediately over the phone or in person. This is how a gentleman named Tim described the first time he asked out his future wife: “I saw her at school, and I said, ‘You know, I have these tickets to see the Who at Madison Square Garden . . . ’”

That sounds infinitely cooler than texting back and forth with a girl for two weeks only to have her flake on seeing a Sugar Ray concert.

When I talked to the people about dating back in the day, they said they’d go to one bar or a mixer, which was like a community dance, usually put on by a church or college or other local institution, where young people could talk and meet. They’d stay there the whole night and have one or two drinks.

That seems more pleasant than what I see out in bars today, which is usually a bunch of people staring at their phones trying to find someone or something more exciting than where they are.

What about all our options? We can find the perfect person now, right? The old folks actually saw all this choice as a
disadvantage
. They expressed sympathy and concern about their children’s situation—and gratitude that things had been simpler, albeit far from perfect, when they were young.

“Something I have to say in defense of the young folks today is that there’s just so many choices out there,” one mom said. “When I was growing up, there was a mixer and there was a bar, and that was about it. But now—my god. I would really hate to be single nowadays.”

“Why do you think it’s so bad for them?” I asked. “Think about all the options young people have now, all the doors that are there for them to open.”

The older folks weren’t buying it. They understood that they had had fewer options when they were growing up, but, intriguingly, they didn’t seem to regret having fewer choices. As one woman explained, “You didn’t think about the choices you had. When you found someone you liked, you jumped into a relationship. I don’t think we thought,
Well, there are another twelve doors or another seventeen doors or another four hundred and thirty-three doors
,” she said. “We saw a door we wanted, and so we took it.”

Now, look at my generation. We’re in a hallway with
millions
of doors. That’s a lot of doors. It’s nice to have all those options.

But—a hallway with
millions
of doors? Is that better? Is it terrifying?

On the one hand, you have so many doors to try. And that sounds better than being shoved into a door when you are really young and maybe not quite ready to be an adult. On the other hand, maybe people in those earlier generations were ready to open a door on their own. After all, think of Amelia, Victoria, and all those other women who were dying to get out of their parents’ houses for good and pretty happy to race into the first door they saw. Sometimes the marriages they raced into wound up being lonely and difficult. But often they blossomed into something loving and fulfilling.

Today we want a bunch of doors as options and we are very cautious about which one we open. The emerging adulthood phase of life is basically a pass society gives you to hang out in the hallway and figure out what door is really right for you. Being in that hallway might be frustrating at times, but ideally you grow and mature, and you find a door that really works for you when you’re ready.

People who are looking for love today have an unprecedented set of options in the search for an amazing romantic partner or, ideally, soul mate. We can marry pretty much whomever we want to, regardless of their sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, or race—or even location. We’re more likely than the generations that came before us to have relationships in which both partners are equals. And, unlike many in prior generations, nearly all of us will only marry someone we love.

The thing is, with all these new possibilities, the
process
of finding that person can be seriously stressful. And, unlike the days when most everyone got married by their midtwenties, today the search for love can go on for decades.

No more marrying the upstairs neighbor or the girl next door.

No more going steady (forever) with your high school sweetheart.

No more “Hey, Mom and Dad, that person in the living room seems nice. Cool if we get married in three months?”

Instead we have a whole new romantic culture based on an epic search for the right person. A search that can take us through college and various career stages. A search that also takes new forms, because in today’s romantic climate a lot of the action happens on our screens.

PHONE WORLD

In 2014 the average American spent 444 minutes per day—nearly 7.
5 hours—in front of a screen, be it a smartphone, tablet, television, or personal computer.
That’s higher than the numbers in most European countries, where people spend “only” 5 to 7 hours per day with screens, yet it’s not nearly enough to put the United States in the top five nations: China, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines, and, in first place, Indonesia, where people spend 9 hours per day staring at a screen.
8

That 7.5 hours number is really high, but I charted my own use and it doesn’t seem too implausible. Today is a fairly normal Sunday morning in Los Angeles for me. I woke up and spent a while texting with my friends Nick and Chelsea about a potential brunch destination. I then hopped on my laptop to research the suggested restaurants. I went on Yelp and the restaurant pages to peep the menus and did random browsing in between (reading whatever silly headlines caught my eye on Reddit
*
and watching highlights from the previous night’s
Saturday Night Live
), then eventually, after about twenty back-and-forths that lasted an hour and seven minutes, Chelsea and Nick decided they just wanted to go to a casual diner nearby. I didn’t feel like going there. We didn’t even end up getting brunch together.

Instead I went to another place, Canelé, with another brunch crew. During that brunch, a Nelly song came on and I researched the Nelly Wikipedia page, as one must do anytime Nelly-related questions plague one’s mind. After brunch, on the way home, I texted with a few other people about potential dinner plans.
*
And now I’m at home on a laptop again, typing out stuff for this chapter that you are reading right now, possibly on a screen as well!

The way I spent the day trying to plan brunch is remarkably similar to how my tenure in the single world went as well: making or attempting to make plans on my phone with whoever was in my dating orbit at the time. Like my brunch with Chelsea and Nick, many times these plans would eventually fall through. And in the same way I cautiously researched these restaurants, young singles are researching one another—on dating sites or social media sites or even just doing general Googling to get a better sense of a potential date.

As I’ve come to see it, we’re spending so much time with our digital devices because we’ve all developed our own personal “phone worlds.”

Through our phone world we are connected to anyone and everyone in our lives, from our parents to a casual acquaintance whom we friend on Facebook. For younger generations, their social lives play out through social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, Tinder, and Facebook as much as through campuses, cafés, and clubs. But in recent years, as more and more adults have begun spending more and more time on their own digital devices, just about everybody with the means to buy a device and a data plan has become a hyperengaged participant in their phone world.

Phone world is the place you go when you want to find someone to see a movie with. It’s where you go to decide what movie to go see. It’s where you buy the tickets. It’s where you let your friend know you have arrived at the theater. It’s where your friend tells you, “Shit, I’m at the wrong theater,” and where you say, “What the fuck, man? You always do this. Fine. I’m off to see
G.I. Joe: Retaliation
alone, AGAIN.”

And now that our phone worlds are integral to even the most mundane of tasks, of course, they are also a big part of where we live our romantic lives.

 • • • 

Today, if you own a smartphone, you’re carrying a 24-7 singles bar in your pocket.
Press a few buttons at any time of the day, and you’re instantly immersed in an ocean of romantic possibilities.

At first, swimming through that ocean may seem amazing. But most modern singles quickly realize that it takes a ton of effort to stay afloat, and even more to find the right person and get to shore together.

There’s so much going on in those waters, so many quick decisions and difficult moves to make. And of all the challenges, there’s none more daunting than figuring out what to do when you find someone who interests you.

As we saw in my example with Tanya, no matter how simple it may seem, the initial ask can be plagued with stress and frightening ramifications.

A
sking someone out on a date is a simple task that frequently becomes a terrifying conundrum of fear, self-doubt, and anxiety. It’s full of tough decisions: How do I ask? In person? Phone call? Text? What do I say? Could this person be the person I end up spending the rest of my life with? What if this is the only person for me? What if I fuck it all up with the wrong message?

Though technology has added a few new, modern quirks to this dilemma, asking a new person to go on a romantic outing has never been easy. It means declaring your attraction to someone and putting yourself out there in a huge way, while risking the brutal possibility of rejection—or, in the modern era, even an unexplained, icy-cold silence.

For the modern dater the first decision is picking the medium to use: call or text. Some people even throw e-mail or social media messaging into the mix. Just a generation ago the landline or even a newspaper classified ad would have been a first stop to finding romance. Today, though, we look at our screens almost immediately. In fact, for many daters a large chunk of their romantic world lives in their phone world.

A quick note: The numbers show that men are still overwhelmingly the ones expected to initiate the first ask. In 2012 only 12 percent of American women had asked anyone out in the previous year. So when discussing this, I use the situation of a guy asking a girl out. The issues discussed generally translate both ways (minus the issue of girls hating dudes initiating with penis photos).

All right, let’s see what the overall trends are.

In 2013 the Match.com survey researchers asked Americans: “If you were asking someone out on a first date, which method of communication would you be most likely to use to get in contact?” Here’s what they found:

Two things to note here. First, the drop in phone calls as a preferred method when you change age groups (52 percent to 23 percent) is stark. Among teenagers the percentage who use text messaging is even higher. In a 2012 textPlus survey, 58 percent of Americans between ages thirteen and seventeen said they’d ask someone out with a text message.
1
It’s clear that younger people, who are growing up in a more text-heavy culture, are much more comfortable living their romantic lives via text.

Second, over time, so are all of us.

In 2010 only 10 percent of young adults used texts to ask someone out for the first time, compared with 32 percent in 2013. Asking out someone via text is on course to be the new norm: The phone call is quickly being phased out.

It’s worth pausing here to note that this is an insanely fast transformation in how we communicate. For many generations young people used telephone calls to reach out to possible romantic partners. It was a harrowing experience that we all could relate to. Before the initial ask, you would hear terrifying rings and then an answer. It could be the object of your desire or a roommate or even a parent. At that point you would ask to speak with the person you wanted to ask out.

If they were around, the person would finally say, “Hello,” and a mild panic would ensue. You would have to spend some time chatting them up, trying to form a bond while also setting things up for a possibly awkward segue into a date ask.

“Hey, so yeah, anyway, I lost the pie-eating contest . . . You wanna see a movie sometime?”

This phone-call ask required some bravery to initiate and some skills to execute properly, but over time you’d get better at it and you would strategize these calls.

Let’s say you were a young man named Darren. At first, your calls might be something like this:

DARREN:
Hey, Stephanie. It’s me . . . Darren.

STEPHANIE:
Hey, Darren, how are you?

DARREN:
I’m good.

DARREN:
[long pause]

DARREN:
Okay . . . Bye.

But soon you’d get better. With time, you’d realize how to be confident on these kinds of calls. You’d have a funny anecdote or conversation piece ready. Witty banter would be at the tip of your tongue, and soon you and Stephanie would be two verbal fencers parrying and riposting it up like this:

DARREN:
Hey, Stephanie. It’s me, Darren! [confident, energetic]

WOMAN:
Hey, Darren. This is Stephanie’s mom. One second . . .

DARREN:
Shit. [quiet]

DARREN:
You got this, Darren. You got this. [quiet]

STEPHANIE:
Hello?

DARREN:
Hey, Stephanie. It’s me, Darren! [back to confident, energetic]

STEPHANIE:
Oh, hey, Darren. What’s up?

DARREN:
I just got an umbrella!

STEPHANIE:
Cool . . .

DARREN:
All right, bye!

 • • • 

Well. You’d get better than that.

The skill that went into making a phone call to a romantic interest is one that younger generations may never need or want to build.

As our technology becomes more prevalent in our lives, romantic behavior that seems strange or inappropriate to one generation can become the norm for people in the next one.

For instance, in a recent survey 67 percent of teens said they’d accept an invitation to prom by text.
2
For older generations the idea of getting invited to something as special as prom by a text message may sound cold and impersonal. It seems inappropriate for the occasion. But younger folks live in a text-heavy environment and this shapes their perception of what is appropriate. For example, in a topic we’ll revisit in more depth later, breaking up with someone via text seems pretty brutal to people of my generation, but when we interviewed younger people, several said their breakups happened exclusively by text. For younger generations, who knows what texts lie ahead?

THE RISE OF THE TEXT MESSAGE

Texting, otherwise known as Short Message Service (SMS),
was thought up by Friedhelm Hillebrand, a German engineer, in 1984 and achieved for the first time by Neil Papworth, a young British engineer who messaged his friend “Merry Christmas” in 1992.
Alas, his friend didn’t reply, because his mobile phone didn’t allow him to input text.
3

Sure it didn’t. That’s the same shit I hear from friends who don’t respond to my mass “Merry Christmas” text. I even throw in a custom image every year; peep this one from 2012.

That said, can you imagine how insane that must have been—to get
the first
text of all time
? When no one knew what a text was? It would have been like “WHY ARE THERE WORDS ON MY PHONE??? PHONES ARE FOR NUMBERS!!”

In 1997 Nokia introduced a mobile phone with a separate keyboard, setting things up for the BlackBerry epidemic that would soon afflict most of the global yuppie community, but it wasn’t until 1999 that text messages could cross from one phone network to another, and after that usage began to rise. In 2007 the number of texts exchanged in a month outnumbered the number of phone calls made in the United States for the first time in history. And in 2010 people sent 6.1 trillion texts across the planet, roughly 200,000 per minute.

Technology companies have introduced all kinds of new services to help us exchange short messages, and we’ve responded by tapping away like never before. And of course, this has translated to a vast increase in the number of romantic interactions that are being carried out over text.

One reason for the spike in asking people out by text is that far more of us have smartphones with big screens that make messaging fun and easy. According to consumer surveys, the portion of all American adults who owned a smartphone went from 17 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2014, and they’re most prevalent among those emerging adults between ages eighteen and twenty-nine, 83 percent of whom carry a smartphone wherever they go.
4
When we’re not doing traditional texting, we now have apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and direct messaging on Twitter, which allow us to message for free. Throughout the world a growing number of people are using SMS for basic communications, and young people in particular have adopted texting at the expense of old-fashioned phone calls.

That said, we haven’t given up our old habits altogether. Many people, including young adults, enjoy an occasional phone call and even think that it can signal something special in a budding relationship. But when we first started talking to people about how they ask one another out, we learned that with all these technological transitions, our feelings about when to use which medium have gotten pretty mixed up and confused. How do we figure out when to call, when to text, and when to just drop everything, stand outside someone’s window, and serenade them with your favorite nineties R&B tune, perhaps “All My Life” by K-Ci & JoJo?

For that we had to investigate.

CALLING VERSUS TEXTING

“A phone call? The WORST.”

—FEMALE
FOCUS
GROUP
PARTICIPANT

“If you want to talk to me, you’re going to have to call me.”

—ANOTHER
FEMALE
FOCUS
GROUP
PARTICIPANT

[Dumbfounded]

—EVERY
GUY
IN
THAT
FOCUS
GROUP

The issue of calling versus texting generated a wide variety of responses in our focus groups.
Generally, younger dudes were
fucking terrified
of calling someone on a phone. This didn’t surprise me that much, but I was surprised that younger women also expressed terror at the thought of a traditional phone call. “Phone calls suck and they give me anxiety,” said one twenty-four-year-old woman. “Since texting started, an actual phone call feels like an emergency,” said another. Other girls thought it was just too forward for someone to call as the first move and said that a text would be more appropriate in general.

However, other women said receiving a phone call from a guy showed he had confidence and helped separate those men from the pack of generic “Hey wsup” texts that normally flood their messaging programs. To these women, the guys who call seem brave and mature. The phone conversations helped create a rapport that made them feel comfortable and safe enough to go out with a person they didn’t know all that well.

A woman who came to one of our focus groups discussed how she got so fed up with text messaging that she cut off her texting service and could only be reached by phone calls. This woman never went on a date with a man again. No, she actually started dating someone soon afterward. She also claimed the guys who did work up the courage to call her were a better caliber of man and that she was, in effect, able to weed out a lot of the bozos.

But with some women who loved phone calls, things weren’t that simple. In a rather inconvenient twist for would-be suitors, many said they loved phone calls—but had no interest in answering. “I often don’t answer, but I like receiving them,” said one woman, who seemed oblivious to how ridiculous this statement sounded.