No One Seems To Want A Real Relationship Anymore—It’s All Casual Sex & It’s Super Lame

Am I crazy or are we going through the dark ages of dating right now? The millennial generation seems to love to keep things up in the air, half committed and confusing as hell. We don’t like labels and we definitely don’t like to talk about how we feel to our partners, so how are we supposed to form actual relationships?

  1. Aren’t relationships supposed to be about growing together? I feel like our generation has completely forgotten what relationships are actually for. They’re not for staving off temporary loneliness or scratching our itch for physical intimacy—they’re for growth. The most rewarding part of a relationship is when two people are open enough to discover new things together, either about the world or about themselves. Unfortunately, we never seem to stay together long enough to even reach that point of comfort with each other.
  2. What are we all trying to avoid? It could be that people of the millennial generation have been spooked out of intimate relationships, which I think is mainly due to living through the divorce boom. If our own parents didn’t get divorced, our aunts, uncles or best friend’s parents did and it affected us. We’re afraid to let someone in. We’re also afraid to commit to just one person in fear of making a huge mistake and, well, getting divorced.
  3. Traditional courtship feels like a waste of time and money. The fact that we have the option to swipe on hotties, makes chasing after someone we like IRL seem kinda pointless. Why pursue someone in the traditional way when we can get just as much satisfaction from flirting with someone through an app? It makes us feel good and wanted and we don’t have to wear pants. Simple.
  4. “Flings” can now last for months on end. Yeah, y’all know what I’m talking about. Those on again, off again, kinda sorta relationships that are never defined but you’re just together…and you have no idea where it’s going. The sad part is, is that these prolonged flings eventually fizzle out in the same way a short summer fling would—either through a ghosting or you both just stop talking to each other.
  5. Calling someone your boyfriend or girlfriend is uncomfortable. Why is our generation so weirded out with labels? We don’t want to be someone’s girlfriend and we don’t want to call someone our boyfriend. Could it be that we don’t feel secure in it? Could it be that we’re thinking of all the other people on our apps we COULD be dating, so we want to wait as long as we can before locking it down? My friends usually call their BF their “person” or their man-friend. It’s like having a boyfriend makes you lame or square somehow…
  6. There are too many fish in the sea. These dating apps are great, but did we ever stop to think that having too many choices is actually bad for our mental health and general perspective on relationships? Do you think that maybe if you’re swiping through people all day, you’re going to start treating the real people in your life with less respect? I’m not saying that dating apps are brainwashing us into seeing people merely as objects to be judged…oh wait, yeah, I am actually saying that.
  7. We’re throwing each other away over petty things. People my age seem to be REALLY good at coming up with excuses to move onto the next person. They’re either not old enough, not tall enough, or said one thing that offended us. When we DO find someone we like, we have this inkling in the back of our minds that we can do better, so instead of treasuring what we have, we string out these long casual sex sprees and then when we’re ready for someone new, we drop them because they had a weird haircut.
  8. Potential dates are losing their value. Remember when going on a first date was actually super exciting? You’d be thinking about it for literally an entire week and you were nervous but also hopeful. Now, I’ve noticed that when a friend says they have a date, they’re already a little ho-hum about it. Maybe it’s because it’s the third one this week and it’s already getting old. We’re going on dates just for the sake of it, not because we’ve met someone amazing. It’s killing our spirit and turning all of us into bitter cat ladies and we’re only in our twenties.
  9. We don’t NEED relationships like we used to. The value of relationships has plummeted. Relationships used to be a necessity if we wanted to move out of our houses and get on with our lives, but obviously that’s no longer the case. Because of this, we often question what the point of being in a relationship even is anymore. Everything we used to need guys for, we can now take care of ourselves. Why bother?
Jennifer is a playwright, dancer, and theatre nerd living in the big city of Toronto, Canada. She studied Creative Writing at Concordia University and works as a lifestyle writer who focuses on Health, B2B, Tech, Psychology, Science, Food Trends and Millennial Life. She's also a coreographer, playwright, and lyricist, with choreography credits for McMaster University’s “Spring Awakening,” “Roxanne” for the Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival, and “The Beaver Den” for The LOT, among others.

You can see more of her work on her Contently page and follow her on Instagram @jenniferenchin.
close-link
close-link