My first impressions of the concept of ‘dating’ came from American sitcoms. First dates, double dates, blind dates were all ideas I was familiar with, but exclusively in the context of firang lives. In New York City, if I’m being really specific.
But back in desi reality, I didn’t know what a ‘first date’ looked like any more than I knew how How I Met Your Mother was going to stab all its fans in the face with its shitty finale years later.
The society we grew up in, didn’t give its 20-somethings preparation or scope for inter-gender interaction driven by romantic or sexual pursuit.
We all, admittedly, had very romantic and sexual pursuits, but they didn’t really manifest in our exchanges with the objects of our interest. At least not in the most deliberate of ways.
You see most of us (with the few unfortunate exceptions), admittedly, have dated people over the years. We’ve been in romantic and to a variety of extents, sexual relationships. But that was a result of casual friendships evolving into romances either thanks to long-term commitment to the romantic cause on the part of one of the people involved, or thanks to little drunken realisations and make-out sessions. You’d be surprised at how very many of the relationships we see around us started in this exact way.
To put it simply, we had relationships, but not many of us were ‘dating’. Casually or with the intent of finding a soulmate.
Awkwardly going up to a complete stranger that you find somewhat interesting, with the mission of charming them sufficiently and asking for their (possibly landline) phone number to eventually take them out on what the called a ‘date’ remained close to impossibly impractical for a long time.
Not only was it an alien and ineffably daunting task to execute in the first place, but the world we lived in made it more likely than not that the individual at the receiving end of such ‘blatantly’ romantic attention will be a range of things from painfully dismissive to downright suspicious.
But over the last couple of years, all of this changed. Tinder, OK Cupid, Truly Madly and the many little matchmakers of the tech world came along and suddenly, the world of dating was not all that inaccessible in India.
There was finally a place for those that wanted to pursue their romantic and sexual ambitions without having to don the garb of ‘doing friendship’ with those they obviously fancied. Here we found a host of others just like us who were neither unclear on what they wanted from our interaction nor ashamed about it in any way. The ambiguity being taken out of the equation has worked wonders, even in a society as conservative as India’s.
This wave of tech-supported dating has made meeting people with a more-than-friendly intent far easier, and consequently, more commonplace.
In fact, it’s given the average young Indian the kind of regular exposure and resulting confidence that one truly needs to thrive in the complex and at times brutal world of sex and romance, that someone their age simply did not have 10 years ago.
So, whether or not you choose to believe it, it’s thanks to the good folks running these dating apps that we’ve got far better odds of finding a suitable partner for ourselves than our 90s counterparts could’ve ever hoped to have.