With modern dating as hellish as it is, it’s tempting to look at the mid-20th century as some golden age where ‘courting’ was simple and easy. From our 2025 perspective, it can seem as though 1950s dating was an entirely linear and straightforward process: share a milkshake, steal a kiss at the back of a cinema, get engaged. But this isn’t quite true: the conservative, pre-pill logic at the time actually argued that the longer you spent fostering an exclusive emotional connection with one person, the more likely you were to have pre-marital sex. One 1940 article in the Woman’s Home Companion advised: “The modern girl cultivates not one single suitor, but dates, lots of them.”

Evidently, casual dating isn’t novel. But it’s fair to say these kinds of relationships are harder to navigate now – because what is new is our ability to see what our situationships are doing all the time via social media. Whereas in the past you might have gone on a date with someone and known, implicitly, that they were dating other people too, you wouldn’t have had to literally see this play out. You wouldn’t see them reshuffle the pictures on their Hinge profile; you wouldn’t see videos of them surrounded by anonymous beautiful women on their Instagram Stories. It’s one thing to understand that the person you’re dating is probably seeing other people – but it’s quite another to have the fact shoved in your face when you’re off guard.

On the one hand, having a greater insight into our lovers’ lives has the potential to save us a lot of heartbreak. Social media, and the ability it gives us to see what everyone is doing at all times, has arguably made it harder to get away with cheating or, more generally, doing something you shouldn’t (if your commitment-phobic Hinge match updated his profile after your third date, it’s safe to say he’s probably not your soulmate). But as a result, we’ve arguably forgotten how to embrace the mystery and ambiguity that often accompanies the early stages of a relationship. This isn’t just an issue which affects fledgling couples either: broadly speaking, social media has eroded our ability to trust one another – or at least be comfortable with not knowing what other people are doing all the time.

This crisis of trust in one another has been brewing since the early days of Facebook and Instagram, when people began sharing photos and videos of themselves at social events and subsequently permitting other users to get a glimpse into all the fun they were missing out on. But as time has gone on, it’s become normal to share even more information about ourselves online.

Take the rise of Apple’s Find My Friends. Location-sharing began to take off in 2017, when Google Maps rolled out a location-sharing function and Snapchat launched Snap Maps which allowed users to see where their contacts were at any moment. By the time Apple launched Find My Friends in its current form in 2019, location-sharing apps had become a form of social media in their own right. Today, swathes of young people use Find My Friends to keep track of where their friends and acquaintances are, with nearly 70 per cent of Gen Z using the app, and 49 per cent checking it (or other location-sharing services) as much as they do other social media apps. Some users (particularly young women) use the app for safety reasons – to make sure their friends can see if they’ve got home safe from a night out or a date, for example. But many use the app simply to snoop on what their friends are up to.

On the surface, using these kinds of apps seems pretty innocuous. I tell my friends pretty much everything anyway – so why not cut out the middleman and let them see where I am all the time? It’s just another way of signalling that there are no secrets between us. But it’s worth pausing to ask whether tracking each other via social media or location-sharing apps is fostering connection – or anxiety and paranoia.

It’s likely the latter: one recent study found that ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) was a leading cause of smartphone addiction, with people increasingly anxious to compulsively check what others are doing online. While you might get a quick hit of reassurance from seeing your friends all safe and sound at home (and not out socialising without you), it’s a short-lived high; the urge to check up on them again will doubtless rear its ugly head again in no time. In the long term, arguably the only thing which would truly make us less paranoid and concerned about what other people are doing would be disengaging from this sort of tech entirely.

Plus, using location-tracking services further erodes the remaining privacy we have – and they can be a slippery slope into a dystopian nightmare. We’ve gone from offering the world a snatched glimpse into our private lives via Instagram, to offering our friends the ability to track us 24/7, and now today we find ourselves in a world where a dating app called RAW is flogging a chillingly dystopian piece of wearable tech called the ‘The Ring’. You’re meant to buy a pair – one for you, one for your partner – with the rings using AI and bio-sensors to track both your heart rates, body temperatures, and emotional shifts. “So when something’s up, you’ll know,” a press release about The Ring reads. A separate statement on their website claims their mission is “Making true love trackable.” This is, obviously, crazy – but an unsurprising development given how normalised surveilling our friends and partners has become.

While it’s normal (and good!) for friends and partners not to keep ‘secrets’ from each other, it should also be normal for people to also maintain some degree of privacy. After all, a close bond isn’t signified by having access to every last bit of information about someone – it’s about trust. It’s about accepting that you shouldn’t (and can’t) know everything about another person and choosing to trust them anyway. It’s easier said than done when tech seems to monopolise every aspect of our lives, but with all this in mind, we’d all do well to evaluate whether sharing so much via our phones is really bringing us closer to one another – or actually driving us apart.