True romance: “There’s a real need for meaningful connection beyond what we see, whether it’s on social media or tinder or anything like that.”
DATA revealed by dating app Bumble has shown that people are taking more time to get to know each other before meeting for a date – and one Brisbane Catholic was happy to hear it.
Real Talk presenter Sam Brebner has said it was good to see a style of dating familiar to Catholics and Christians finding mainstream attention, but that it was far from a novel idea as it was being characterised by some apps.
“They had sort of coined this term of slow dating to describe the different experience offered by this app as something as kind of new and novel, whereas slow dating is really what dating was prior to Tinder,” he said.
Revolution or renaissance – it had its benefits.
Mr Brebner said the first benefit of “slow dating” was about establishing friendship before dating, “establishing a level of connection and compatibility that goes beyond physical attraction”.
“The second would be not getting too physical too fast, obviously sort of all the emotional and physiological consequences that come with that,” he said.
“And (third), recognising that physical attraction is only one of many important factors for choosing a partner and the success of a relationship.
“It seems like COVID and not being able to physically get together has prompted a sort of accidental rediscovery of the benefit of a lot of those things.”
The benefits of slow dating naturally exposed the problems of Tinder culture, particularly objectification.
“Not just in the sense that someone is reduced to their body parts, but that you have this entire human person that really just gets reduced to the five photos they have as part of the profile and 160 characters or whatever it is description,” Mr Brebner said.
“That’s a very shallow way to encounter human beings.”
By taking more time, people could move past objectification and experience “a lot of the joy that comes with that”, Mr Brebner said.
Mr Brebner said something that people had been talking about at Real Talk was that people were – knowingly or unknowingly – realising a lot of the truths that the faith offered through Theology of the Body.
He said online relationships “just aren’t the same”.
“There’s a real need for meaningful connection beyond what we see, whether it’s on social media or Tinder or anything like that,” he said.
“We as human beings are meant for a community of loving and being loved that goes a lot deeper than that.”
