By J1 Reporter Clara Stalnaker
Is romance dead? Teenagers no longer meet new people in person. They find them on their devices through apps like Snapchat and Instagram.

Instead of saying “let’s go to a party and find someone,” they sit in their dark rooms and say “I’m going to add someone on Snapchat because it’s the easier way.”

A teenage boy would rather stay up ‘til 2 a.m playing video games with a stranger than going out with friends and meeting real people.

However, it’s never that simple. Sophomore Melaney Franklin said, “Even if you go out, it is never guaranteed to have a person your age there.”

Another challenge of dating is that if you don’t go to school with them, then you have to go out and find them. This can happen in co-ed school, but it is especially apparent in single sex school.

When you go to school with the person you are interested in dating, you are with them all the time, so you know the “real” them. But if you go to a single sex school, you aren’t spending your days with the people you want to have a relationship with.

Franklin said, “I’m at an all girls school, so it is hard to meet people.”

Franklin said she believes that online dating is beneficial for some people, but in her case she has had a few extremely bad experiences with it. She shared one of them:

One day she added someone on Snapchat, and they started talking. She said that it lasted for a month, and during that time she realized that it was not a good situation. She said that about a week in, the guy started acting weird. He started being extremely mean towards her and kept making rude comments about her mom. So, she broke it off with him, but he decided to turn to social media and post bad stories about her on it.

Franklin said that adding someone on Snapchat, that you have never met, may not always be a good way to meet people. She wishes that schools, specifically single sex schools, did more activities with others so they could meet people in person. She said that when you leave it up to social media to find “love” it might not always work. “You can’t always tell what is true if you haven’t met them in person yet,” she said.

Even though Franklin had a bad experience doesn’t mean that there are no pros to online dating.

Sophomore Madi Pick shared why she believes that it can be beneficial. “You get to know people that you don’t normally talk to and you get to find new friends and people to hang out with,” she said.

Pick said that when she was in middle school it was easier to meet guys because when you are with them for seven hours, seven days a week, you get to see the real personality of the guy. She says that it is harder now because you don’t go to school with them, so you can’t always know if the person you are talking to, either in person or online, is the real them.

Although students like Franklin and Pick think that there are not many opportunities to talk to boys when going to single sex schools, Marian administration will tell you that there are many opportunities to get introduced to them. For example, there are many opportunities in Operation Others, school dances, and joining sports teams, to find people with similar interests.

Even though there are a few ways for people to go out and meet them, it is still difficult to be confident enough to go out and find people with the same interests as you.

So, is romance really dead? While society has opinions going both ways, they have to remember that they are only teenagers and have their whole lives ahead of them to find out.