There’s this one scene in Sense and Sensibility where the two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, sit in a room analyzing the emotional bandwidth of Elinor’s romantic interest, Edward.
Obviously, this sort of thing still happens. Single guys and girls will, till the end of time, sit around with friends of the same sex, microanalyzing each other’s love interests. Oftentimes this process gets dragged out over a longer time than it would two hundred years ago (Sense and Sensibility was written in 1811). The slow burn that we’ve lost—that is likely never coming back—is the time between interactions.
Elinor and Edward’s romance evolves over several stretches of zero communication—often going months at a time. Throughout those months of silence, Edward remains Elinor’s sole romantic occupation. That sort of slow burn—a romantic prospect kept alive only in the thoughts of both parties—is unknown today. Gone in world of video chat, texting, and social media.
Now, if a romantic interest is on your mind, you simply text them. Or, if you haven’t reached that level of familiarity, you stalk them on social media. You have instantaneous ways of connecting with that person in their physical absence.
This is not a luddite, technology-is-evil diatribe. We should celebrate technology that bridges relational distance. I don’t think there’s many people who would prefer to communicate only through handwritten letters delivered by horse and carriage. But this change in the way we communicate has also shifted how we form romances and come to identity conclusions. We now analyze other people’s identities, particularly romantic partners, through how they present themselves through digital mediums of communication. This leads to a troubling phenomenon I call “identity depth mirage.”
What is Identity Depth Mirage?
People have never been great at withholding judgment, but this virtue has become even more rare as we tend to do our identity analysis much faster. You can find lots of information about someone by clicking around. There’s no need to wait a week or month before you see them again. You can digest what seems like a lifetime of data points through a deep dive into their social media. Or just start texting them every day. If you don’t engage in at least some small level of digital banter, you risk appearing disinterested and the other person will move on.
The abundance of information about another person available instantaneously leads to an overconfidence in your conclusions about the person. This happens with celebrities as well as friends. Through simply mining the internet you can quickly fool yourself into believing you know the person pretty well. In a sense, you do.
Everything that we say or show, whether online or in-person, is revealing some truth: “Even when the fool walks on the road, he lacks sense, and he says to everyone that he is a fool” (Ecclesiastes 10:3) This verse teaches that, for better or worse, people’s true colors come out. Discerning people can make fairly quick assessments about others because no one can hide who they really are for very long. Human nature, wisdom, and folly come through in subtle things like body language, how a person walks or sits, or the posts that he likes.
The trouble is that some of the identity depth we think we see is a mirage. First impressions can be faulty. That is particularly true online, where people can put a lot more time into crafting an identity. You have no idea how many minutes that person stared at their phone, agonizing over the exact right emoji, or how many hours they spent playing with different lighting or photo filters, or even if the photo is really that person at all!
It’s easier for people to con others online because some of our “stranger-danger” flags get bypassed through the sheer volume of curated content someone can put out. People can still lie and deceive in-person, but you’ll never be “catfished” by someone you met in real life.
One of the results of identity depth mirage is that romantic relationships are sped up. People dive in faster because their time interacting online gives a distorted sense of relational depth. On the other hand, people exit more abruptly because part of our brain discounts online interactions as less real. You might have spent several hours messaging, but if you have a change of heart down the road, that part of your brain is quick to jump in and say, “None of that really counts.”
How Can We Recover a Slow Burn?
The advantages of the slow burn illustrated in Sense and Sensibility are that you are slower to come to conclusions and that, through regularly exercising in-person social analysis, you develop social acuity. Social acuity ends up being a whole lot more useful in your actual relationship than social media showmanship that can produce a cool post of your time together. The ability to hold each other’s attention over dinner serves as a much better indicator of future health than holding each other’s intrigue with texting banter.
The Bible warns us against hasty judgments (Prov 18:17). It also focuses the goal of our faith on a personal relationship. God knows us personally and he wants us to know him personally (John 17:20-24). Studying and learning about God from a distance, even if you build a lot of knowledge about him, will only lead to legalism and nominalism. The Bible gives us many angles on the person of God—stories, letters, commands, poetry, advice, and the life and words of Jesus. And he expects us to share back personally through prayer.
God knows you and loves you personally, deeply, and truly. He wants us to pursue a three-dimensional, personal knowledge of him—the kind of knowledge we should prioritize when trying to find a spouse.
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