In between researching African Peace and Security Architecture and finding the best rooftop happy hour spots, I spent my summer reading 40 Days of Dating. The blog is a social experiment in which two graphic designers, Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, agree to date each other exclusively for 40 days in order to learn more about their “relationship selves” and see if they can change. The two friends’ dating stories are updated daily, allowing the world to see a play-by-play of their evolving romantic relationship.
The concept is interesting and, despite the seeming intrusion into their private lives, it feels natural. Reading it, I was not at all disturbed by their revealing the intimate details of their relationship, such as the first time they had sex. While this sentiment may appear to be a function of my own voyeurism, it actually points to society’s perverse interest in people’s intimate lives that has evolved from social media.
The site was created for 20-somethings, the original consumers of social media. We were the first to use social media in the contemporary sense—as a way to not only connect with friends, but to also share experiences with the global community. We were the first to challenge the social norm of maintaining private lives, trusting the internet with every detail from our favorite song of the moment to whether “lyfe was complic8ed.”
From the day that MySpace and Facebook launched, they became spaces for us to invite others into our lives. Now, 10 years after MySpace’s inauguration, this level of intimacy has become natural, and almost expected. As a culture, we have become voyeurs.
What started as a naïve use of technology has become the norm. My newsfeed is inundated with wedding pictures or breakup quotes or “boyfriend and I at a BBQ :).” We expect to know things about the people we’re romantically involved with almost instantaneously—just stalk them on Facebook! The information that our parents’ generation kept closely guarded is now available with the click of a button. Stories that used to require intimate knowledge of someone are now chronicled on Instagram.
At this point, we’ve become so accustomed to this level of access that having an online dating profile filled with such details as our last long-term relationship is not a new phenomenon. We are all too eager to share and connect with others.
And this voyeurism is, to a large extent, a question of how we connect with each other. The “challenge” of 40 Days of Dating was that they had to see each other every day, but we virtually see each other every day. We’re constantly connecting, whether it is on social media or by text message. We have come to expect a level of contact that would have been unprecedented for those born 20 years earlier.
This constant connectedness means that relationships are played out online using our thumbs. Couples are ended by one wrong tweet and relationships started by a “like.” The minutiae of these virtual interactions become more important than face-to-face interactions because an iMessage doesn’t have facial expressions—unless you decide to use Snapchat, that is. Our romantic relationships and even our friendships have left the realm of “private life” and entered the nebulous realm of “public life.” This is particularly clear in the fact that the season finale of The Bachelorette this August was the most watched television show this summer.
To some extent this voyeurism improves relationships, since it’s easier to identify common interests at the outset and get out of bad situations before they occur. However, it also creates a certain sense of false intimacy. You “know” someone and make assumptions about them on the basis of their curated online profile instead of how they act in person. The traditional courtship and time that it took to get to know someone is now somewhat antiquated because you already saw on LinkedIn that they majored in art history. Stalking has become a prerequisite of a date, because everyone in our lives can help us interpret a Facebook profile when a strange glance over dinner is too hard to describe.
Ultimately, this means that we’re much less likely to give people a chance. A distasteful post online or a misused three dots in a text message is enough to prevent a relationship from going further. Instead of allowing people to explain themselves in their own words, we predicate our feelings towards them based on a profile that they may not even check. We have taken some of the personal parts out of relationships as they have transitioned into our public, online personas.
My takeaway from 40 Days of Dating is that we need to give people a chance. They are often more than that drunken tweet last Tuesday, despite what your roommate might think.
