The current state of my love life can be described in two words: ”hot” and “mess.” I constantly find myself getting involved with and/or attached to emotionally unavailable guys.
Just as I was about to give up, have a good cry over a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food and carpet-bag my way to a convent in the Swiss Alps, I realized something very important: dating is dead, and it’s not us, it’s them.
And the funny thing is, the people who are actively murdering one of the oldest human processes don’t even realize what they’re doing.
“Dating is dead,” I recently said to a guy with whom I was hooking up.
“No it’s not!” he exclaimed. “Dating is so not dead. So. Not. Dead. I love dates.”
Silence for a minute.
“Wanna come over and fuck?”
And there we have it. Just one of the many delusional, emotionally unavailable people of the moment who claim dating isn’t dead, but only want to casually mess around and watch Netflix.
This death of dating is what’s sparked the creation of one of the newest and most popular websites for loveless and disgruntled Millennials: WTF Is Up With My Love Life. I talked to the creators over the phone and gained a breadth of knowledge about “dating” in Generation Y.
WTF Is Up With My Love Life focuses on the current date or non-date situation that so many Millennials find themselves in. With regular posts about issues raised by readers, guest blogs and so much more, the site has maintained a grasp on the reality of romance – plus, it’s fun to know that your “hot mess” love life is, for all intents and purposes, normal, and that you’re not alone.
The site was founded and is still run by Jessica “Jess” Massa and Rebecca “Becky” Wiegand, former roommates who concocted the idea for the site when Wiegand came home from a work cocktail party one night, frustrated and confused.
“There were guys around and in my life, but not one of them had asked me on a date,” Wiegand said. “Things weren’t 100 percent platonic, but they also weren’t ‘legit’ relationships, and I thought to myself when I got home that night, ‘What the fuck!?’”
Massa was there to console her friend, but as she saw the new issue in Wiegand’s life, she found that she herself was having the exact same trouble traversing the dating world.
“Dating was just so stressful because it wasn’t happening,” Massa said. “Your job should be stressful, not dating.”
The pair got to talking, and while comparing and swapping battle wounds and war stories, they realized that dating hadn’t existed for a long, long time. Instead, it had morphed into something completely different, something they named the “gaggle.”
A gaggle is a group of guys or girls that a person has around them at all times. Guys’ gaggles are hierarchies — they rank girls in order. Girls’, on the other hand, are webs with a certain amount of emotion involved. Guys call up their gaggle in a vertical fashion to see who is free on a certain night, while girls choose whichever guy will fill that day’s emotional needs.
But Massa and Wiegand needed to discover if others were having the same issues; after all, they were living in New York City — was it just a New York thing?
“We wanted real stories outside the media circle,” Massa said. “We wanted to talk, to hear real stories.”
And so the website was born.
“It was immediately eye-opening,” Wiegand said. “The very first day the site was live, we got an email from a girl in a small town in Maine who couldn’t believe that two big-city girls were having the same dating issues she was.”
And the phenomenon spread. The site constantly gets emails from all over the country and from various ethnic and cultural groups. People, girls and guys alike, were eager to talk about this new form of dating, and the word “gaggle” soon became as common as “dinner and a movie.”
“We found that our generation are keeping their options open until they are absolutely sure they found the one,” Massa said. “We use the gaggle to figure out what we like and don’t like without the hassles of breakups and drama.”
Massa attributes this circumspect version of courtship to the rising divorce rate, which is estimated at about 50 percent. But even so, she says that Millennials aren’t afraid of love — they just want to get it right.
Massa and Wiegand agree that the point of the gaggle is to one day transcend it — to find that guy who wants to take you on an actual date, and to want to let him. The gaggle is how we’ve become proactive in our love lives. It’s no longer a little black dress and desperate flirtation at a bar — we can focus on what we want by having a group of people there to help us figure it out.
For instance, I’ve realized that I’ve always had a gaggle. There’s the boy I text and hang out with when I’m horny, the guy I go to concerts with, the emotional guy, the hugger, the hand-holder, the museum enthusiast. All these things I like, and all these things I can have when I crave them until I find someone who encapsulates most of them.
The WTF girls, however, warn that your “perfect match” is not a combination of all of the people in your gaggle — it’s just some, and you’ll know it when you feel it, so just let yourself feel.
One day your “perfect match” will march into your gaggle and completely blow your mind. Until then, take some time and do what Millennials do best — focus on your career and figure out what you want. It’s not waiting. It’s learning.
No more hot mess, just one big gaggle of options. Goodbye, dating. Hello, WTF.
Photo by moonstarsandpaper.blogspot.com
I wouldn’t say dating is dead, we’re just currently killing it. Forgive me for generalizing, but I think that the problem is that when Gen Y looks for their ‘perfect match’ more often than not we’ll meet someone at a party, or a bar – drunkenly hookup and maybe even go home with them. In the morning light after the Walk of Shame, we want to rewind to a special and meaningful dinner date. That’s just not going to happen.
That being said, plenty of my friends in college also claimed that dating was dead, while they also lovingly dubbed me the Serial Dater. If you want to get to know me, the least you can do is take me out to coffee or dinner (It’s not about the money and I don’t expect you to pay) but I refuse to yell my life story over the speakers while getting elbowed by sloppy drunks. Everyone deserves at least that much, and if our ‘perfect match’ isn’t interested, perhaps they’re not our perfect match?
Yes, but I think the point here is that even though we want dinner or a coffee outside of a beer-drenched watering hole, we inevitably take what comes at us, and more than likely, its a one-night hookup.
Being a serial dater myself, I demand at least coffee or a cocktail, but even on these supposed “dates,” it’s what comes after that matters – hookup? more dates? is it a date? am I interested in dating? what is dating? does sitting around watching hulu on saturday night count as dating? what about that other guy I’m dating whom I kinda like? Is that guy dating other people?
You see the problem here… it’s the Millennial confusion that killed “dating”
I understand that a lot of this was written for the shock value, but I feel like your point could’ve been made without being so crass…
…That being said, my husband and I certainly didn’t start our relationship by “dating” in any sort of traditional sense. In fact, I’m inclined to think our relationship wasn’t even “official” (nevermind “Facebook official”) until he moved in my apartment with me. I suppose I never gave it much thought, though, because sometimes it’s best to just let things happen naturally. The days of courting and parents’ setting up their children are gone and I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m fine with that!
I really wasn’t trying to be crass or shocking…I don’t think booty calls and random hookups are that shocking anymore…at all. I feel like most Millennials are in the same boat as I am…hooking up and living the gaggle life.
I think that everyone’s journey toward finding “the one” is different, but I strongly agree with this Gaggle theory. When I was single, there were a variety of potential opportunities… the hot work guy, the hot sex guy, the asshole who wouldn’t answer my messages, the guy who was easy to talk to, the ex-boyfriend, the guy who I went out to bars with. It totally true.
I agree with Alex too in that dating isn’t necessarily dead. But it’s hard and annoying, especially if it’s with a guy who wasn’t already in your gaggle for a while. Both of the guys who I’ve had long-term relationships with were in my gaggle for a long time before I dated them. My current bf was in my gaggle for like 2 years before we finally became officially bf/gf. True. Story.
[...] HERE is my newest story for The Next Great Generation about the website WTF Is Up With My Love Life. [...]
[...] Today on TNGG, writer Caitlin Tremblay dissects the death of dating and ruminates on the gaggle. And boy, does she get it! Check it out HERE: [...]
I think the gaggle theory is really interesting — but what about keeping the gaggle around after you find “the one,” or at least a steady boyfriend? I guess, since my boyfriend and I have been dating for a while, I see it from a different perspective — the gaggle is just another group of friends. You hang out with certain friends at certain times, just like you did with the people in your gaggle. Sometimes the people in the gaggle keep their purpose, so to speak (say, to be your concert buddy because your BF doesn’t really like concerts), and sometimes they just become good friends that you can hang out with in any situation.
[...] the next (great) generation, we are bound by our shared experiences. So the fact is, we are ALL always taking one for the team [...]