Face to face or screen to screen?

Online dating sights have been popping up in commercials and on billboards. With modern technology, people are finding new ways to meet their significant other. It could be a dating site, or through a few slick comments on Instagram. Now that finding a match is more efficient with the help of the Internet, it leaves people wondering if those pairs really do find love.

While a majority of teens do not resort to using a dating site to find a partner, they do have social media. According to Pew Research Center, roughly twenty-seven percent of young adults are online dating. Kids are finding their matches in all sorts of ways now, not just face-to-face. Olivia Dorsey, freshman at Etowah, found her boyfriend of four months on Houseparty. She was looking for friends, not expecting to meet that someone special, so their relationship began as a casual friendship.

“Houseparty is a great place to meet new people, and it makes for a good way to build things like friendships and relationships,” Dorsey said.

In some situations it seems like true love. For sophomore Kellie Little, that was not the case. She met her guy through a mutual friend, though they had not met in person before. While she was initially excited to go on a date with him, it did not go as planned. He hardly spoke to her throughout their time together. It was uncomfortable and awkward the entire date.

“He was not as funny of a person as he was online. He was just a totally different person than I expected,” Little said.

Some online dates lead to something better than imagined, but others simply do not. Others get into a relationship before they even meet their partner face-to-face, but the simple truth is that face-to-face dating is becoming the exception, not the norm. In a world where we post our moments everywhere and all the time, who knows what dating will look like twenty years from now?