He is Just Not that Into You

By Caroline Albert

Edited by Taylor Morgan

With the ever-growing influence of technology on our daily lives, our interpersonal skills have slowly started to decline. The comfort level with talking to a stranger has become more difficult as more than half of our interactions are now behind a screen. 

LINA / @linagrille on Pinterest

The screen makes it easier to find the courage to text someone you are too scared to talk to in person. You can overthink, rethink and rewrite every text to perfection to avoid nervously stumbling over your words. 

Filters, lighting and angles have the ability to blur the lines between perfection and reality, creating the ideal version of you. The person on the other side of the phone does not see the breakout on your chin or how messy your hair is because it is erased with the click of a button. 

Mainly communicating over the phone has been proven to reduce empathy and increase social anxiety due to an absence of nonverbal communication cues. Not being able to read these cues can be a precursor to social anxiety due to their unpredictable nature. 

On top of that, society has gotten used to the dopamine spike of the superficial interactions that are elicited through social media apps. When a potential partner likes your Instagram story or sends a picture of half their face on Snapchat, it has slowly become a dance of interest. 

You wait to see how long it takes them to "snap" you back, so you wait even longer. In a moment of weakness, you stalk their ex-partner on every social media site and compare yourself to their curated feed. 

This cycle of valuing and obsessing over these small interactions as gestures of interest has become increasingly more common. As dating apps and technology advances there will ultimately be more of a change in how we connect with others. Will we revert to in-person interactions, or will technology push us further apart?