Wildcat Staff Writer Elléanna Vannarath (’26) and Feature Co-Editor Sofia Rodriguez (’26) dive into the evolution of dating. The duo contrast the “old school” dating methods of the past (like hand-written notes and phone calls), which involved community accountability and higher-stakes courtship, versus modern digital dating characterized by social media, dating apps, and reality television.
Co-Hosts: Elléanna Vannarath (’26) and Sofia Rodriguez (’26)
Producer: Evelyn Nethers (’29)
Sound Effect: Mauricio Póvoa from Pixabay
Elléanna Vannarath (00:00): Imagine it’s 1985; you’re a high school student. In order to talk to your crush, you have to pass a folded-up note in class. Then you have to find their home number in the physical phone book, and then there’s a likely chance you have to talk to their dad.
Sofia Rodriguez (00:13): Oh my gosh, that’s so scary. I would literally rather never speak to my crush again than talk to their parents on a landline.
Elléanna (00:21): Right? It takes so much courage, but today it’s just finding them on social media and sending them a DM. That’s way too easy, right?
Sofia (00:29): Exactly. We’ve transitioned from in-person meetings, casual dinners, and blind dates to finding love on an app with just a swipe. And if it’s not an app, it’s a reality show like The Bachelorette, Love Island, Too Hot to Handle. The list really goes on.
Elléanna (00:44): For this Valentine’s special, we’re taking a deep dive into the dating world. From trad to text, I’m Elléanna Vannarath and I’m co-hosting with Sofia Rodriguez.
Sofia (00:56): Let’s start with the old school material. We’re talking about arranged meetings or parental setups. And a lot of people our age think that sounds like a prison sentence, but back then, it was about vouching for someone.
Elléanna (01:07): Exactly. It wasn’t like today, where we just go off of Instagram Mutuals. It’s more like in your community circle saying, “I know this person, they have a good family, a good background, and they won’t disappear on you.” It was like your community was acting as a human-verified badge.
Sofia (01:21): 100%. It was a big safety net for people in the dating pool. And that also made the stakes a lot higher. If you acted like a jerk, your whole neighborhood would know. And there was no blocking someone and disappearing into the void because you’d see them at the grocery store or church the next day. So you really had to be a decent human being in order to go through the courting rituals back then.
Elléanna (01:42): That was like accountability, but now we can be anonymous. We’ve traded the clarity of a chaperone walk for the chaos of being alone in the digital Wild West.
Sofia (01:51): And that brings us to the algorithm matchmaker. We have gone from a pool of 20 people in a town to a pool of literally everyone that you could find on the internet.
Elléanna (02:02): And when we say everyone, it’s like everyone. It’s like someone in the next city or someone three states over. Or even in a guy or friend, who just happens to pop up on your for you page. You could just DM them right away and they’d be like, “Oh, have the option to respond to you back or ghost you.”
Sofia (02:16): Yeah. The creation of digital social media and websites has made dating so accessible. But even with billions of options, people still say that dating has never been harder, which is really odd. And I think it’s because we turn romance into sort of a bracket tournament where we’re thinking more about quantity over quality and we’re not focusing on truly getting to know someone face to face.
Elléanna (02:40): Yeah. As we mentioned back about the bachelorette or the bachelor, those type of dating shows, it taught us that love is more of a sport or something to compete in, and it makes it more content instead of making connections with people. And it’s like, if the date isn’t aesthetic enough to post your story, did a date even happen? Is that considered a date to people now?
Sofia (03:04): Exactly. It’s the paradox of choice. When you have 500 options, you don’t pick one, you keep swiping because you’re scared the next person might be 5% better. And back then, they didn’t have that option, but now we’ve turned people into a commodity. So you don’t feel bad about quote unquote returning an item you bought online, right? It’s pretty much the same with dating nowadays. You swipe left and reject them before you’ve even heard their voice.
Elléanna (03:29): Which is exactly why ghosting is like a national anthem of 2026. We aren’t just ending a relationship anymore. We’re just exiting out of their tab or closing their DMs because we only met them online. There isn’t like a real human interaction. So it kind of dehumanizes the person on the other side because to you, it’s like more of a profile picture of anything and not like a person with actual feelings, because you never met them.
Sofia (03:56): Which leads a lot of people to enter and exit into talking stages very frequently. I have personally heard of so many people having different talking stages, multiple at a time, trying to get into romantic relationships with certain people while still being like talking to someone else. And it seems like it lasts forever.
Elléanna (04:16): And then, that’s the same thing as a situationship. It’s like essential to high school. We stay in a talking stage for six months because we’re terrified of like the commitment label and getting together. But if you make it official, then you have to stop looking out for other people. You can’t talk to some certain people or you can’t hang out with some certain people and you have to take one for the team and be like, “Oh, I’m off the market. You can’t really talk to me anymore.”
Sofia (04:45): Yeah. I’ve definitely seen that a lot in high school where people have whole rosters on Snapchat or multiple people that they talk to at the same time.
Elléanna (04:52): Oh yeah. I have a friend who has a list of backups. Yeah. I don’t know. I feel like that’s so interesting.
Sofia (04:59): Yeah. It’s definitely way different than the way that people would date back then. And I think currently digital haunting is the worst part because if you break up with someone or you ghost each other, you never actually leave each other’s line of sight because you’re always seeing their location on SnapMaps or you see each other at the Starbucks you guys used to go to and you see what you’re listening on Spotify and see what they’re listening to. So it’s kind of creating this type of questioning even when you’re not in a relationship anymore. Is that a breakup song? Are they sad? It’s too real. It creates a lot of anxiety around adolescent relationships because there’s so many things that you could read into based on like an Instagram note update or anything else. So I think that it’s definitely very prevalent in our generation right now.
Elléanna (05:46): Yeah. We’re like haunting each other in a sense. We’ve never been so connected but disconnected at the same time because I think we’re like a little too scared to be alone, but we’re still like overstimulated by the fact of, like, getting with someone.
Sofia (06:03): So with all of that information, what do you think the verdict is? Do you think old-school dating is actually better?
Elléanna (06:10): To be honest, I don’t think we want their rules, but I think like what their intention is of like old school dating, like you getting to know the person is actually good than like finding them online, just swiping, “Oh no, just because they give me an ick, I’m just going to leave them on red and like ghost them.” I think like, old school has the right intentions of meeting someone correctly, but it’s not something I would go back to.
Sofia (06:34): I definitely think that the intention is something that we can learn from a lot. I think that maybe the most rebellious thing a high schooler could do in 2026 isn’t making a viral TikTok, it’s actually being vulnerable, both with platonic and especially romantic relationships, like maybe calling someone instead of texting or asking them out in person without checking how they’re feeling on Instagram first.
Elléanna (06:59): Yeah. If we keep dating, like we’re scrolling through a feed, we’re just never going to find like the right person in general. We’re just going to find more content and content doesn’t hold your hand when you’re having a bad day. That’s very deep, right? Yeah.
Sofia (07:14): Just deep enough to make us realize that we’re more than a data point on an algorithm.
Elléanna (07:19): Yeah. Well, that’s it for today’s podcast. If you’ve been ghosted recently or are in a situationship, just remember that it’s not you. It’s the evolution of society and mating strategies because obviously this world is moving a little too fast-paced.
Sofia (07:38): Very fast.
Elléanna (07:39): Yeah. Or they’re just a jerk and just leave them.
Sofia (07:42): Probably a jerk.
Elléanna (07:43): Yeah. Thanks for listening to the Wildcat podcast. Stay bold, stay real, and maybe put the phone down for your next date. We’ll see you on the next one.
