Thumbing Through Love

After Riley FitzGerald noticed Kelsey Reichart’s Twitter account, he messaged her and, shortly after, the two began dating.

“I thought she was cute, followed her, and seen that she had been posting for like two weeks just casually on my timeline and I ended up sending her message,” FitzGerald said. Now, the couple lives together and has been dating for two and a half years.

Licensed marriage and family therapist, Gregory Derderian, M.A., said meeting potential partners through social media platforms or dating applications could be a good way to get over an awkward boundary.

“It is cool that you can meet thirty or forty people whereas if you were to rely only on your social circle, you may not get to meet all those people,” Derderian said. “So it does open up opportunity.”

Having so many options of potential partners on social media and dating applications, this can cause some people to stop someone going up to a stranger in the real world all together, FitzGerald said.

“I guess I understand that people maybe have too much anxiety to go up to someone and talk to them,” FitzGerald said.

If people use these dating applications to develop and maintain relationships then the apps can be useful, Derderian said.

“If you use it to foster relationships, it can be wonderful,” Derderian said.

“You get to just know people a little bit based off what they’re, you know, able to post and share with us what they want to share with us. People want those things to be known about themselves,” FitzGerald said.

People are keen on finding common interests with potential partners, FitzGerald said.

However, this can be troubling when people put too much information about themselves out on the internet, 22-year-old Reichart said.

“It kind of gives you more of an idea of who that person is and what they are like,” Reichart said.

According to Psychology Today, it’s estimated that 70 percent of people will have met their partner online by 2040.

FitzGerald, a child from a single-parent family, said he thinks meeting a potential partner on a social media platform could lead to relationships that would become more successful than his parents’ generation because millennials and gen Z-ers are taking longer to settle down to make sure they are truly compatible with their partner.

“My advice or recommendation is to engage with people. Interact with people. Again, social media and email and text and video chatting are awesome in terms of getting to meet more people. The fact that you can engage with people that you would have never been able to engage with is amazing,” Derderian said.

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This article was previously published through Adobe Spark in Spring 2020 for my TTU Multiplatform Journalism class.