Welcome to the Twilight Zone

In conversations with some of my single girlfriends, we joke that being single and Christian in the modern world is like living in The Twilight Zone. We bolster each other with our humor, wisecracking and telling first-date horror stories from our ventures into the netherworld of online dating, but sometimes the reality of living in this odd parallel universe is anything but funny.

And then there’s the weirdness of getting back “out there” after years of being off the market, so to speak. Crass as it sounds, there really is a lot of truth to the whole “market” mindset, and you find that out fast once you enter this subterranean world of commodity shoppers—especially now that finding someone to date online has become mainstream, no longer a recourse only for the bolder among us.
 
To all those happily married people out there who met their spouses online, please don’t be offended by my words. As I said, the “tales from the front lines” make for good laugh sessions with your girlfriends or entertaining family members at holiday gatherings. Yet beneath all the laughter and eye-rolling, I find myself growing disillusioned by degrees, and my thoughts go something like this: Do I really want my love story to begin with ‘Well, there was this website, and he saw my photo and I saw his, and then he e-mailed me…’?

The happy couples who do end up together after an online “match” don’t seem bothered by this lack of mystery at the outset. Somehow, though, I think I was born one of those who must have mystery and romance and longing and finally longing fulfilled. I sit in darkened theaters watching the latest remake of a Jane Austen classic, and my eyes well up with tears. Call me odd perhaps, but there’s a whole subculture of postmodern women like me who can’t quite reconcile the flat, perfunctory nature of modern dating with the bittersweet tension of romances from an earlier era that we read about in books or watch on-screen.  We long for something more—and, fortunately, many of the guys out there do too.

Our challenge then is actually finding one another and stemming the tide of a culture gone awry. As it turns out, finding each other may be the easy part. Altering who and what we’ve become—and how the culture has changed both the inner and outer landscape of single adulthood—may prove to be the real obstacle.

Culture Wars

Certainly I’m not the first one to notice the difficulty today’s singles have in making long-lasting commitments, much less finding the one they want to spend the rest of their lives with (if we are even capable of such a commitment). Nor am I the first to write a book about it. In Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We’re Still Single, author Jillian Straus relates how she first became aware of this social pandemic.