Online dating: The quest for intimacy in the online world

Lola Cook on 8 March 2024

Dating apps have enveloped our generation. 

They suck users in with ego-boosting likes on hinge profiles, where you remain eternally sun kissed and stunning in the pictures from your girls holiday. You check your messages and matches, rotting away in bed, disheartened that the stunner of your dreams hasn’t popped onto your feed. You sigh, wondering if one-worded sexual compliments from unidentifiable strangers in group photos are really as good as it’s going to get. Your dream of bumping into and falling in love with Paul Mescal puts any potential matches to shame; but what is a girl to do when real life interaction and intimacy has started to feel unattainable.

The easiest place to find solace after a breakup or rejection is in the warm arms of the dating apps. The matches, messages and likes are quick validation, assuring us that we are attractive and appealing, when we can’t seem to muster up the love to tell ourselves. It doesn’t take long for the attention to become addictive, and when no one has liked your profile in a few days, we are left feeling as though we aren’t enough. When a match finally pings itself across your phone screen you allow the grip of validation to hook you. 

A huge issue with dating apps is that your profile is not representative of you. Instead, it is a contorted highlight reel of your life, designed to fit into a few prompts. What others see of you is a polished top trump card, and whilst this may make us feel confident, it acts as a barricade to intimacy. The bellow of your laugh and the passion you have for the things that you love are not what people see when they like your profile, and I worry that our interpretations of electronic gestures take us further and further away from genuine human connection. On top of this, the amount of choice that is available at your fingertips is so far from reality. We flick through profiles without so much as a second glance, discarding people at the first sight of something we don’t like about their physicality. Whilst it’s important to know what you’re looking for in a partner, I sometimes wonder if the array of choice leaves us always waiting for ‘the best’, running on a hamster wheel, determined to find a carbon copy of our ideal match. 

Dating apps make access to casual sex simple, and in my opinion, have been revolutionary for women’s ability to wield their sexual liberty. The freedom to choose to have sex with as many people as you please is not something that women should ever be shamed for, although I think it’s incredibly important that casual sex is engaged in for self-empowerment rather than in pursuit of validation or plastic intimacy. The danger of this never-ending access to casual sex is our desensitisation to the fact that these profiles belong to real people. The way that dating apps make us feel as though we’re playing a game encourages the idea that the people behind these profiles are disposable. My concern is that this further entrenches a harmful belief held by some, that users, specifically women, are sexual objects. Obviously, this is not an issue born out of dating apps but rather another factor that women have to navigate in the extensive web of misogyny that shrouds dating culture. The combination of not having to see someone in real life and having the freedom to message them whatever you want, leaves women open to experiencing gross sexual harassment and misconduct online, and constitutes one of the darkest parts of the world of dating. 

My biggest hope, especially for women who have been made to feel worthless and deflated after using dating apps, is that they never forget how truly lovable they are. Your dating profile doesn’t dictate your worth. Nobody can take that away from you.

Freshers Scaries

Lola Cook on 10 November 2023

On the 23rd of September 2022, my Mum moved me into my first-year halls. My mind raced for the
three and a half hour drive up to Leeds, anticipating the amazing nights out I was due to experience
and all the friends for life I was definitely going to meet in the first few days of freshers. With my room set up and my fridge shelf full, I waved my mum off as tears glazed my cheeks. Life as an adult had begun.

I hurled myself into fresher-life with an undying social battery, talking as much as possible to as
many people as I could, going clubbing and exploring the city. But as the end of the week crept
nearer, a cloud began to linger over me. The endless Instagram posts of other people’s idyllically
constructed freshers weeks bewitched me, and I began to question whether I had done freshers
week ‘well enough’. But my time was up, freshers week was over, and the realities of university life were becoming apparent. Suddenly, the tasks of everyday living hit me smack in the face. As I lugged my washing down flights of stairs, and the kitchen started to look a little bit grimmer than it had when I arrived, my freshers high began to crumble, and reality dawned.

As I reminisce about the very beginning of first year, I am amazed at how we all get through it. Only
this time last year, I was living the antithesis of my life now. Today, I am sat in my cosy front room
with five other girls that I will love and know for the rest of my life, secure and happy, a far cry from
the overwhelmed version of me that sat in her first-year kitchen.

Most of us come to university knowing how to cook, clean and take care of ourselves, but the
challenge is then doing this when you feel lonely or low, irritated by a flatmate, or just absolutely
exhausted. Then when everything seems like too much anyway, you’ve got to make your way round
campus, entering buildings that feel like rabbit warrens and engaging with your lectures (or not).
Tired, you trawl back to your accommodation where your flatmates await. I was lucky to have a
lovely group of people to live with, but still, the reality of living with strangers was something of a
shock. The atmosphere of the space that you come back to is incredibly important for your well-
being, especially when you are so far away from home, and managing your relationships with the
people you live with can be challenging sometimes.

As the leaves fall from the trees and the cold becomes even more biting, it’s only natural for the
homesickness to creep in. Missing your mum has got to be one of the most dejected states a person can endure, especially when you’re a week or two into university life. You are yet to form a bond with anyone which matches the deep and consolidated relationships you share with friends at home, a feeling I really struggled with, as my friends are incredibly important to me.

But as the days passed, I spent more and more time with a girl who today, I call my best friend. We
sat in each other’s rooms cackling and talking about our lives before each other. We went clubbing together, including a time when I got so drunk and sick that I cried to her in fear she wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore…

The friendship grew and so did my confidence in myself and my new life, and then everything else followed. It takes great courage to put yourself out there, but the more you do the more you grow, and I think that is how we transform from teenagers into adults.

The weeks leading up to Christmas felt so slow in my first year, but then I blinked and now I’m nearly halfway through my degree. I began my life here wishing away the weeks of feeling uncomfortable, but now I would do anything to stop time.