How COVID and Technology Changed the Way We Communicate and Date

When COVID-19 hit I was a sophomore in high school AND felt nothing but gratitude for the fact I didn’t have to attend school in-person for the rest of that year. 

High school-me had PROBLEMS with social interactions and it was purely based on lies I told myself: One, that no one would want to talk to me, and two, that I didn’t deserve friends like everyone else did.

So for the last couple years of high school, I didn’t care about any kind of effect COVID would have on socialization because I didn’t want ANY part of that. 

Now, as a senior in college, I’m starting to think that era really threw everyone for a loop. It’s more than “We didn’t talk or see each other.” It’s more about the fact that during KEY years for socializing, I spent a chunk of that time being quarantined and told practically every week the world was ending because of a worldwide sickness. 

That’s not me downplaying COVID — that's me saying because a lot of us were living in fear, that forced us to self-isolate. 

I sat down with Dr. Bethany Gull, Utah Tech University assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences, to talk about how COVID changed the dating game. We also talked about how technology has changed face-to-face communication. 

COVID changed dating — less interactions in person

Bethany has training in sociology and said that in that field, there’s weak tie networks, where acquaintances and distant connections are all in a social network. Kind of like a friend of a friend. These ties previously provided opportunities for connections, a sense of knowing people, because it’s about the individuals OUTSIDE your normal/go-to connections. 

Because of COVID, when we physically weren’t leaving our houses, that created a disconnect where we weren’t getting to know people outside our bubbles. 

“I would say that my understanding of how relationships have changed since COVID is… that I think people are more isolated, less likely to find themselves in a group of people,” Bethany said. “People are spending much more of their lives today in singlehood than they ever have before.”

I wasn’t socializing before COVID, but I notice that since then, it feels like my generation is stuck, that some of us never learned how to create connections with people outside our bubble. Going to college has REALLY made me aware of how crucial those weak ties can be, because the more people I can wave to, or say “hi” to in passing, the more I feel part of my campus community. 

Even now, nearly six years after COVID, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out on key social interactions, and that the world is simply different than what it used to be. 

Bethany said the decline in socialization isn't unique to COVID, but rather for the past couple decades social interactions have been decreasing. “So it’s just harder in a lot of ways for people to form those long-term relationships,” she said.

We don’t have get-togethers like people once did, but rather we are shifting toward making connections online. 

Technology has changed face-to-face communication, dating apps

HENCE, one of the ultimate sores on my side, dating apps. Instead of meeting people the old-fashioned way, there’s tons of apps out there to form connections.

“It opens up the dating pool and the relationship pool to people that you would never actually meet through your own connections,” Bethany explained.

Now, I don’t want to say I hate dating apps, but I really do. I hate them. And the main reason why is there’s no accountability and it’s a lot of playing games — which I don’t like to play. 

What I mean by accountability is it’s harder to form a genuine connection with somebody because you have the mediator of phones. 

“You can think for a long time about how you want to present yourself, the words that you want to speak,” Bethany explained. “You can leave someone on read for a while and then get back and give them a really well thought out or snarky comment. And when you're doing that, you're not aware of the person on the other end of that. It's a lot easier to… dehumanize them and to forget that there are real consequences to our words.”

And that’s what I feel when I use dating apps and why I don’t like them. It doesn’t feel real — it feels fake and manufactured to me. Transactional. 

Not only does it feel fake, but I get TERRIBLE results. And no matter how hard I try not to take it personally, sometimes I can’t help but think “I’m the problem” EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT. Ghosting is an all too real reality. Bethany explained there’s so many options on dating apps that some individuals tend to always look for what may be better, always looking for what’s next. 

“If you ever go to Target, and go into the kitchen section, and there’s an entire wall of kitchen tools ​and you're like, ‘I'm not sure which one [to choose] because there are 12 versions of it at roughly the same price point.
How am I going to choose it?’" Bethany said. “So as these dating apps have opened up our world to meeting all these other new people, it also means ‘Maybe if I swipe, there's one more person that I have a little more in common with, or that's going to be a little bit better fit.'”  

Because our dating is centered around apps, despite my past aversion to socializing, I truly do miss face-to-face communication. It’s an undervalued and underappreciated form of speaking to one another. It provides understanding with body language AND makes people feel more real because they are answering in real time. Plus, I see TikToks all the time about nostalgia for a time pre-technology. I wasn’t alive then, but these videos make me wish for a time I didn’t personally experience. 

Moving forward

So I don’t socialize as much as previous generations did, and I have a GREAT distaste for connecting through dating apps. So what’s a girl going to do?

The truth is — I have no clue. But the blessing in that is I don’t have to worry about that right this second. With technology it’s hard to be present, especially when we can look at the past or heavily prepare for the future through our phones. 

But, it’s living in the present (whether that’s giving dating apps EVEN MORE TRIES or going somewhere/doing something I wouldn’t normally do) that matters most. Even just the effort to be present is a job well done. 

If COVID taught us anything, it’s that the future is unpredictable and the past isn’t coming back. What we do have is right now — and every time we choose to show up authentically, we get a little closer to building the real connections we all crave.