There was something almost euphoric about staying up until 3 a.m., frozen in time, flicking through a new slow-burn, heart-crushing story on Wattpad. Those stories, whether good or bad, could ignite a fire of emotions, becoming turbulent worlds we obsessed over. We’d feel the gut-punching pit in our stomachs when one of the main characters inevitably stumbled into some disastrous misfortune before the resolution.
Hours and hours of my preteen and early teen years were spent in an almost parallel universe, where I could read any trope under the sun, from 5 Seconds of Summer fanfics to niche character stories and high school dramas. There seemed to be an entire community where teenagers gathered and invested in the hope of fictional romance, leaving comments begging for the next chapter to be uploaded and debating, often passionately, the undoubtable stupidity of the male lead.
I’m not sure if it’s simply a matter of getting older or a new generational phenomenon, but that sense of yearning and hopeless romanticism seems to have been diluted, even disillusioned, in today’s culture. Perhaps the intense investment young girls once placed in imagining what a relationship should look like was always idealistic and unreachable in reality. But lately, that optimism and sense of romantic fulfilment feels like it’s dwindling altogether.
This isn’t to discount that there are plenty of successful, happy relationships formed through dating apps, I met my wonderful boyfriend on Bumble a year ago. But for whatever reason, “talking stages” and “situationships” have become the new terminology, arguably the quintessential features of modern dating. Dates and courting have been replaced with “talking.” The idea of asking someone on an official date rather than suggesting a “chill at mine” feels almost impossible, let alone a boombox played outside your window or some other grand romantic gesture.
Now, relationships have to meet a checklist of credentials before they can even be defined as such, “the talking stage,” “the three-month rule,” and “exclusivity” that doesn’t necessarily mean being boyfriend and girlfriend. It all seems so difficult, suddenly. Relationships have always been messy, that’s a tale as old as time, but the almost clinical detachment we see in modern dating feels a world away from the hopeless romance we read about or watched on Disney Channel shows. These days, asking someone to be your boyfriend or girlfriend feels almost equivalent to a promise of engagement. Exclusivity doesn’t even guarantee commitment, it can just mean you agree to stop seeing other people… sometimes.
Showing genuine interest in someone now feels embarrassing, pushy, or weird. It’s encouraged to speak to several people at once, to keep a “roster” and scout out the field before fully committing or even admitting you like someone.
The definition of a situationship doesn’t quite equate to that of a relationship; instead, it exists in this strange vacuum where you’re desperately waiting for someone to text back but can’t be upset if they’re talking to someone else, because “it wasn’t a relationship,” and therefore didn’t mean anything. It’s tricky.
Maybe you’re thinking this is a pessimistic take – and maybe it is. I just feel conflicted. There’s such a stark contrast between the giddy idealisation of romance we once had and the soulless, repetitive small talk of dating apps, the endless scrolling, the ghosting, and the being ghosted as if it’s all completely normal.
I met my wonderful boyfriend on Bumble, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made – real love is out there. It just feels disguised and twisted by societal “norms.” When I began dating him a year ago, a friend was genuinely concerned that I hadn’t had a situationship with him first, that we should’ve waited at least three months before becoming official. She was horrified when we became boyfriend and girlfriend within two weeks of spending every day together. And maybe that’s a valid concern – each to their own. But what I’m getting at is that there’s this growing sense of pressure and confusion that doesn’t always feel genuine or individual. It feels imposed; the product of a culture that tells us detachment is desirable, that vulnerability is weakness.
And I do think there’s a strong argument that this modern way of dating is damaging our ability to connect, eroding confidence and belief in genuine partnership. Not because of what we’re doing wrong individually, but because of what we’ve been told to want, to expect, and to fear.
I don’t think we grew out of romance; I think we just stopped believing we were allowed to feel it. Maybe love doesn’t look like a boombox outside your window anymore, but it can still feel like it. Real connection is still out there; it just needs people brave enough to look up from the scrolling and reach for it again, even if it means getting hurt or rejected. Maybe we just have to stop confusing detachment with maturity.
Romance hasn’t disappeared, it’s just buried under layers of irony, fear, and performance. The Wattpad stories weren’t real, but the emotions they sparked were. And maybe that’s what we’ve lost, not the grand gestures, but the courage to care out loud. Dating culture might have changed, but it’s not beyond saving. We can still decide to date differently, to ask questions, to care, to be intentional. We might never return to the grand romantic tropes of our Wattpad days, but we can still write our own version of a slow-burn love story, justoffline this time. Because romance didn’t die with the apps – it died when we stopped caring.