So I was on Instagram some days ago, saw that someone followed me and went to check out the person’s page so as to know whether to follow back or not. I decided to follow and other suggested pages popped up, among them was a hookup page for people looking for friends or potential partners for relationships. I also saw other such pages and the lowest number of followers that they had was one with six thousand plus followers. I was actually amazed at the number of followers that were on the page and how much interaction was going on so I ran it by a friend of mine. Immediately he saw what it was about, he just said “abeg, these people are just desperate”. I just laughed and that was that.
Then I was on IG again and saw on my timeline a post of a lady looking for a man with specific age and physical requirements and other things and the thought of what my friend said earlier came back to me and I began to ponder about it. Apart from Instagram hookup pages, online dating sites are now trending and lots of people are participating in meeting people online and going on dates, some even just request for friends to hang out platonically with, and others use it for purely sexual trysts.
So this begs the question: is this a sign of desperation or social intelligence? An April 2017 survey showed that 84 percent of people used online dating services to look for a romantic relationship, 43 percent for friendly contact and only 24 percent explicitly for sexual encounters. The same survey also found that more males used these dating sites or apps than female users. So does this say that people are being more socially intelligent and trying new ways to meet new people or just being desperate about having relationships and finding ‘the one’ that they have given up and forgone normal everyday meetings with people? That people would rather go online and seek acquaintances out of the millions of people in the country rather than form actual friendships with people they meet everyday and can get to know better?
I posed this question to ten people and six went with the social intelligence motion and the other four went with the desperation school of thought. I’m on the fence on this one as both points make complete sense. What y’all think?
Article by Soomto Ajanma
