Orange and Boo: Dating then and now

With all of the changes the world has endured as of late, it’s no wonder plenty of people have moved back in with Mom and Dad. And by plenty of people, I mean me. All this time spent around them allowed me to look at their relationship and consider it’s beginnings. As their story goes (which they love to tell), the two met at work. Dad asked Mom what she was doing later that day as to gauge how free she’d be for a work-related task. Her response? “Why? Are you taking me out tonight?”

OK, Mom!

Katelyn Wahl, a 20-year-old UF biomedical engineering junior, told me a similar story about her parents.

“My parents met by the pool at a gym when my mom was in college,” she said. “After meeting, my parents went out to dinner, to a movie, and even a concert all within a day or two of meeting each other.”

“I think today, many college students meet online through dating apps and talk for a while by texting first whereas back then, you always had to meet people and ask them out in person.”

Alas, a lot has changed since the early ‘90s. Of course there’s often still your quintessential workplace romance or poolside meet cute, but the internet changed the game. Forget just dating apps, today you can meet someone in any online space that allows for communication. Seek like minded lovers on a special interest site, scroll through Instagram until you find “the one” or discover events you wouldn’t have known about otherwise so you can feel better when you tell people you two didn’t technically meet online.

These anecdotal meetings paint a picture of what it was like to find love back then, but what better way to understand it then by going to the “source”? I spoke to UF professor Houston Wells all about how he met the Mrs. and just a warning, this is about to be extremely cute.

“Brenda and I actually knew each other when we were in fourth grade, but only in an ‘I am aware that this other kid exists’ sort of way,” He said. 

“What this means is that there is no chance for a meet-cute story. But this also means that when we finally started dating in college, there was no chance for me to lie about what a goofball I was growing up. She already knew.”

The two would grow closer and closer throughout middle school, high school and eventually both made the move to UF. It was in Gainesville where they evolved from friends and roommates to college sweethearts and life partners.

“Thus, anyone looking to our story for some sort of parallel to their own will most likely be disappointed since it's rare for someone to have known their spouse in elementary school,” he continued.

“Except I think that may be analogous to being able to study a potential partner's online presence nowadays. That is, it's much easier to know who you're dealing with before you agree to go out with them.”

He’s right: in that way, I guess dating and getting to know someone isn’t as different as I initially thought.

Finally, considering Houston has been married for years, I figured he’d have this whole relationship thing down. So many of us struggle in the realm of dating all while we’re still trying to figure out ourselves and our futures. A true veteran, I just had to ask him for some advice.

“The long-term success of a relationship has so much to do with how you experience life together and not as much to do with who you are when you're eighteen or twenty-four or thirty,” he told me. 

At this point I’m crying, but he continued until I was the human embodiment of the blushing with hearts emoji.

“I think the goal of dating is not to find the one perfect person for you; it's to figure out how to create and nurture a relationship. To be sure, I fell in love with Brenda thirty years ago. And I'm falling in love with her right now as she sips her tea. But all that time in-between takes emotional effort, and it's a willingness to commit to that effort that a person should be on the lookout for.”

I mean seriously, have you ever read anything cuter than that?

So, just as the world continues to change, the ways in which we curate our relationships will assuredly do the same. But, Professor Wells showed me that while differences are certain when it comes to dating then versus now, the foundation of a long-term, loving relationship likely won’t vary as much. Whether you connect over Twitter; dropping hints by liking each other’s tweets, or bump into them in a grocery store while a rom-com score swells in the background, it truly is the work you put into loving someone that will yield a fruitful, even fairy tale love story.

Forget just dating apps, today you can meet someone in any online space that allows for communication.