intimacy and indifference

cool girls are deleting their dating apps and making snow angels!!!!

Yesterday in Raleigh, we were expecting snow for the first time in years. As I chatted with students in the hallway during the day (which was set to be a half day, providing early release so that students could make it home in time before the winter weather moved in), I was met with an interesting response regarding the snow: they were indifferent. Now, I know that an early release day is not nearly as magical as a full-blown snow day, but even still I couldn’t wrap my head around the lack of excitement the teenagers embodied. I remember countless nights spent sitting on the ground in my family living room with my younger brother, anxiously waiting to see our elementary school name flash across the bottom of the news channel the night before a blizzard. While perhaps the adults in our lives were not so thrilled at the thought of shoveling feet of snow off of driveways and doorsteps, I can only imagine that seeing our pure joy brought even the smallest feeling of excitement into their chests.

As I continued through the day, I pondered what the reason could be for this widespread indifference – granted, we were talking inches, not feet, of snow… but it still felt so bizarre to be in this space of some weird role reversal. Suddenly, I was the one trying to stir up excitement in my students, urging them to make snow angels and drink hot chocolate with their friends, even if they felt silly. As I write this, all of the snow (not even an inch) is melted off of car windshields and treetops, and all that is left is wet pavement and the remnants of salt that was generously sprinkled on my front stoop. However, I still have this uneasy feeling – the feeling that for some reason, excitement is not so easy to come by in our world today. In a world full of mobile ordering and self-checkouts, internet searches and viral TikToks urging you to buy a workout set that “costs less than a pizza!”, almost all of the consuming that we partake in in our modern society happens instantly and without acknowledgment. As attention spans grow shorter due to rapidly scrolling through 12 second videos, so does our desire to take part in any habit or hobby that requires extended, sustained effort. One of those “habits or hobbies” that seems to be struggling as a result? Dating.

Now, I am not here to slander the phenomenon that is online dating… I am just as guilty as the next person for falling victim to loneliness and turning to dating apps to fill a void with scrolling, swiping, and liking. This being said, I think that is why I am a qualified subject to speak on the matter. In my life, it seemed that dating apps really rose to their peak during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, people craved companionship more than almost anything else. So, because we couldn’t leave our couches, we took to searching for soulmates on our smartphones. And for a while, it wasn’t so bad – I actually ended up meeting one of my long-term boyfriends back in the day through Hinge. But as time has gone on and society has begun to return to a time of socials, mixers, and mingling, it seems that dating has stayed in 2020. Each week, I swing by new coffeeshops – a place that all of my relatives and coupled friends frequently cite as a “great place to meet someone.” Upon entering, I see the same sight (with some variation) no matter which establishment, city, or zip code I am in: twenty-somethings with earphones hugging their skulls, anywhere between 1-3 screens in front of their faces, and a perspiring iced vanilla latte leaving rings on the table – not exactly screaming “I am looking for someone to approach me!”

This isn’t specific to coffee shops, though. The real crisis lies in our lack of “third spaces,” an idea that I ironically learned about from a stranger on the internet. The concept of a third space is that we should all have a space that is not 1, home, or 2, work. For some people, this third space might be the gym, a favorite cafe, a bar where they meet friends at 2x a week for a beer, or a book club that meets at a wine bar. While it is true that people may continue to physically enter the aforementioned spaces, the overwhelming majority of people do so in a bubble of personal space. Headphones at the gym or coffee shop signal that you don’t intend on listening to others, scrolling on your phone at the counter while the bartender crafts your “something to take the edge off” signals that you aren’t interested in entertaining conversation. It is no wonder that people refer to the time we are living in as an epidemic of loneliness – we can’t even manage to go into public without isolating ourselves.

Where we have found comfort and company, however, is in our phones… with strangers. I have no reason to believe I am the first person in the world to use the term “intimacy burnout,” but for the sake of this piece, let’s pretend I am telling you something Earth-shatteringly new.

For those of you who have ever had the pleasure of being a user of any dating app, you know that at any given time, you may have upwards of 10, 15, even 20, viable “matches” who sit in your inbox until you decide you’d like to engage with them. Let’s say you finally send that message and hit it off with one of your matches. Then, they ask for your number, so you send it over their way on some sort of dystopian virtual-bar-napkin that is Hinge messages. This is where the damage begins.

You may end up meeting up with someone that very same day, or, more commonly, you may engage in a game of ping-pong of “good morning” and “how’s your day?” which eventually may continue on for so long that they actually know more about your day to day schedule, your workout routine, and your work stressors than they know about the color of your eyes or your go-to drink at the bar. And this is where my idea of “intimacy burnout” comes into play: we so quickly and so casually connect with total strangers about our taste in music, our career anxieties, our comfort shows, and sometimes, even go so far as swapping trauma stories, before even meeting our suitors face-to-face. But this isn’t just specific to dating apps, millions of people indulge in this false sense of closeness every day on apps like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., by posting vulnerable and personal content. For years during a global pandemic, we had to find a new way to connect with each other and, during those years, the internet was the perfect place for us to do this. Now that the world has begun to function normally in many ways, we have failed to catch back up with it – trapped inside our one bedroom apartments, our faces illuminated by phone screens. It is a true tragedy, yet I remain unsure how to fix it… part of me wonders if there will ever be a time where the cute guy from across the bar brazenly cuts through a crowd to ask for my number. There have, in fact, been times where I have been sitting feet away from a previous dating app match at a restaurant or directly across the room from them at a coffee shop, and not a word was exchanged between us, despite making frantic and knowing eye contact.

I am not fearful that “love as we know it” is dead; I have seen enough successful love stories unfold in my life to know that there is no absence of love itself in our world. That being said, I worry that many twenty-somethings simply lack that same excitement and vigor my students were lacking in our conversations about snow days. Perhaps we, as a society, simply suffer from an intense pessimism after being scorned so many times by violence, terrorism, disaster, and hate, and our way of coping is by numbing ourselves with mindless scrolling and consumption (sorry, heavy)... but does that mean our zest for love has to suffer too? There is something artificially comforting about an exciting text conversation that keeps you up in bed past midnight, grinning from ear to ear like a lovesick teenager… but at what cost? I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice by pacifying our deep desire to be known and seen with meaningless banter and false perception of connection.

In 2025, I am making the executive decision for us all that dating apps and hours of fruitless scrolling are, indeed, out of style. The antidote to indifference might just start with the thrill of leaving your number on a napkin and hoping for the best. And even if that unknown number never texts you, isn’t it just the thrill of possibility that reminds us of the exhilarating opportunity we have to be alive and experience unanticipated snow days?