I caught her deep brown eyes in the dimly flickering pool of light, perched in the back room of the smoke filled bar; a dark angel infused with that sensual urban beauty that only exists in dreams and depictions.
Those fantastical narratives of love and romance that burst at the seams of heartfelt prose are seldom discoverable in the average daily experience of the 21st-century adult. Were those instances of attraction and sensuality always restricted to an idealistically nostalgic and fictitious conception, or were they once the standard paradigm of a relationship of star-crossed hearts? Those rare, fleeting moments of serendipitously meeting a stranger you fall deeply for seem few and far between in a highly cynical society dominated by insurmountable waves of social media, skepticism, an economy of effort, the yoke of dating apps and the addictive, inebriating intoxicant of Facebook.
To what are we to compare the modern reality of romance? Surely not the rose-tinted predilections of Hollywood cinema packed full with scenes of uncontrollable lust and heartache? Those clichéd portraits of two people in heavenly unison, perched on a wooden bench cocooned by a starry night and a full moon? Perhaps these scenes stray too far from the day-to-day reality of the human heart and its escapades. But surely there is something to be said for that gleaming romantic traditionalism that breathes through wine-stained postcards of the Moulin Rouge and lovers locked in longing gazes with reflections of Brooklyn bridge in the calm, silken water?
It's almost superfluous nowadays to say that the social pulse of technology has changed the way we behave immeasurably. The tender writings of a love letter between lovers has been replaced by auto-corrected WhatsApp messages, the art of endearing and original compliments by the simplistic swipe to the right on Tinder, and the intimate night caps by those one night stands catalyzed efficiently by £2 Sambuca shots.
The modern medium of love is clearly one dominated by app stores, wireless, 4G and software updates; is this just another step towards singularity ? Track back 20 years and the mere idea of your children meeting their potential partner on a mobile application would seem not only unsettling, but incomprehensibly perplexing. But is the preponderance of social media and online dating really as fatalistic and dystopian as some may have us believe ? There is perhaps a uniquely modern advantage to the custom. Love and intimacy have become readily accessible to users through a mere few buttons; gone are the days when one had to struggle and strain in the pursuit of romance bounded by geographical incertitude.
Everyone's preferences are able to be found in a handy thumbnail image on an iPhone screen. The whims and passions of our hearts have become satisfied much more economically (so long as our phones are charged and we have data, that is). The truth is, though, platforms like Tinder and Bumble have clearly responded to a gap in the 'love market', filling it with the opportunity of matching a potential soulmate with your finger tips. In some respects, these innovations have made love a more 'level playing field', one upon which all of us have a potential chance, from the cripplingly shy to the indefatigably over-confident.
The ability - as saddening a prospect as it may seem - to skip out the real, physical and unscripted efforts of romantic dalliances and replace them with a touch of a screen has obviously spoken volumes to many of us. In a world inundated with unread emails and deadlines, the simplicity of a match app can come as a welcomed addition to our hectic lives; the quick perusal of men and women's profiles as we stand on the packed tube during a frantic rush hour has become the 21st-century symbol of the desire to find someone to love which doesn't delay our day too significantly, whilst circumventing the problems of those old-fashioned methods of unrehearsed, potentially awkward seduction.
Indeed, far from alienating us and replacing 'real' romance with solely a screen, technology may have increased the fulfillment of a desire to find love by expanding our options immeasurably. Finding someone 'right' is no longer such a cryptic mystery when we get a good idea of what the world is offering from an app. Whether we hold the social media revolution in disdain or welcome it as a refreshing cultural wave, one must concede that technology has irreversibly changed our relationships with one another. Dystopia or intelligent evolution? Only time will tell...