We all remember the end to those stories..”and that is how we met.” Whether it was at school, a neighbor, or even at the ice cream shop, prior generations found their partners through living life on their own, eventually stumbling across someone they wanted to share it with. 

We are the first generation with much different stories. With cell phones, technology, and social media taking over our lives, relationships will never be the same. 

One day our children will ask how we met our spouse, and the responses for so many will be the same. “Snapchat” one says, “Instagram” another, “Tinder” mentions the last couple. 

The issue with our dynamic of dating now is that we have no sense of what a genuine relationship looks like. We take things like Snap Score and the amount of Instagram followers someone has, and use that as a justification of their character. 

Instead of caring about people and learning about others’ stories, we send a quick “hey, what do you look like?” and hope for a response. It’s a light-hearted game until we start fantasizing about people we have never met. 

Maybe you two are dating for real. Maybe you FaceTime every night. Possibly you have been best friends on Snap for a couple months. 

But tell me, do you know about their family? Do you know what they want in a partner; what they want for the future? 

Exactly. You don’t. You truly only know the surface level of the person you claim to “love”. 

The trickery with technology is that anyone can be whoever they want to be. That may seem like a good thing at first glance, but that suddenly changes when the sixteen year old cheerleader turns out to be a seventy year old man. One of the scariest parts of it all… we have lost our ability to identify what is real. 

Our expectations have lowered so much to a point where we allow ourselves to fall for people who simply know what to say. Instead of waiting for the person who cares, the person who accepts us for who we are, social media has infected us with the plague of blind love. 

As the first group to go through this, we must make it our priority to set the standards. We need to show people what it means to love others, despite all of the false realities we see on our phones each morning.

It has become difficult for people to sit down and have a conversation. It has been stressful for teenagers to actually go on a dinner date. And for what? So we can pretend we know someone? Yeah right, “you know them.” The only thing you know about them is their most recent Instagram caption. 

That’s the thing about these cell phones. We are not afraid when we are hiding behind a screen. We can express our feelings over text because we are alone in our room, not face-to-face. 

But what happens when you finally meet someone in person? You won’t even know what to say. And trust me, it’s a lot different expressing how you feel when you are vulnerable without the safety of your screen. 

We are the foundation. Technology and media are always going to be advancing and taking over life itself, but it’s important that we don’t allow something as strong as ‘genuine love’ be forgotten. Prioritize what’s important. Set your phone down and take a look for a second; you never know what you might find..or who you might meet.