After a couple of failed situationships, awkward first dates and the occasional love bomber, the eerie existential feeling of dying alone starts to creep up. It becomes your chaser for the night — the bitter taste of realizing the guy you’ve been talking to just told you he never wanted something serious in the first place.
With Valentine’s Day around the corner and businesses selling Valentine’s paraphernalia, a lot of us are forced to flip back through our old relationships wondering why dating nowadays feels like a regional game of speed dating, hoping one of your Hinge matches is the one — or at least the one for the night.
With dating apps and globalization reshaping how we meet people, you’d think that finding a relationship would be easier, and maybe even more efficient.
But as a lot of us know, the majority of developing relationships are superficial at best, forcing us into the habit of settling for a false sense of intimacy with someone we barely know and ultimately leaving us with the worst case of limerence since Romeo and Juliet.
This might seem like some new phenomenon, but these cycles of fleeting connections and unspoken expectations aren’t just a byproduct of dating apps or modern convenience — it’s a symptom of something much older. At its core, this trend reflects a long history of gendered power dynamics, where men are conditioned to pursue and consume, while women are left to perform and accommodate.
Dating apps didn’t create the idea that men treat relationships like a game and women like prizes — they just made it that much more efficient.
Take my friend who recently fell into the trap that is the seductive allure of a frat man. Meeting him through mutual friends, they hit it off and spent the next four months developing a connection leading directly to a dead end.
Throughout this ordeal, she mentioned his friends slandered her with their opinions. He constantly shifted between being attentive and affectionate in private, and in public, he dodged public displays of affection and let his friends’ opinions of her dictate how he treated her.
To her, the relationship was developing into something real, but to him, it was secondary to the social standing of his brotherhood.
In her case, she blames frat culture, where hazing bonds men to be loyal while warping their ability to form healthy relationships. If your entire identity is shaped around enduring humiliation for brotherhood, it’s no surprise respect for others, particularly women, becomes an afterthought. Intimacy is harder to form when men are more invested in impressing each other than in actually connecting with their partners.
While frat culture might be a niche example, it's not the only way men are conditioned to detach from real intimacy. Outside of Greek life, the same dynamic plays out on dating apps.
My friend, who has some experience in dating apps, believes these apps combined with social media destroyed modern dating. It desensitized men to the point that the women on their phones simply become just another option, completely forgetting there are actual people behind the screens.
Social media and dating apps allow us to function with a mask, hiding behind our screens to develop a false sense of intimacy for a quick dopamine boost. When you combine how the patriarchy has socialized men and women into the instant gratification of modern technology, you get a dating culture prioritizing convenience over connection.
Underneath these unfulfilling connections is the conditioning of competition and conquest that men have socialized themselves around. A lot of women, like my friend, have experienced dating a man who places a lot more value on their friends’ opinions than their feelings — like prioritizing his relationships with “the boys” over you.
If his friends already fulfill his need for belonging and connection, was he ever really looking for it in you?
Women are being used as props, or rather, a symbol of their boyfriend’s success and status within their social circles. Hence why we have frat boy culture, hookup culture and flexing on social media as a means of garnering social clout among other men.
These men are what sociologists like to call homosocial. It's a term used to describe same-sex relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual and is mainly used in social dominance theory to develop the concept of men’s dominance in society. In other words, this organization of male social circles is built around excluding women from important realms of social life, unless of course as potential romantic partners.
Women aren’t seen in a communal aspect, but as more of a trophy than anything else.
Ultimately, we live in an individualistic society where people are afraid to admit their loneliness, and mask it with a nonchalant attitude. Love, like many other parts of our lives, is plagued by systemic issues whether we realize it or not. Remember that the real embarrassment isn’t getting love-bombed or crying over a failed relationship, but rather what’s embarrassing is toying with someone offering you real love and connection.
So if you’re sitting in bed, jammies on, takeout secured and fully leaning into the Valentine’s Day blues, just remember: the real tragedy isn’t being single — it’s wasting time on a man whose true soulmate is his Xbox party chat.
Eriel Pichardo is a UF English senior.
