Monday, August 18, 2014
Gen-Y's tech twist on engagement, weddings and parenthood
While Gen-Y is still getting married at much lower rates than previous generations, some millennials are finally beginning to grow up, entering the world of marital engagements, wedding planning, and parenthood. True to form, their choices reflect advancements that set them apart from Gen-Xers, who were the first to utilize technology to chronicle their love stories on websites like theknot.com, build wedding registries online, gift personalized CDs with digitally remastered music as wedding favors, show spliced video montages of the bride and groom's childhood at wedding receptions, and research honeymoons on websites like tripadvisor.com. As a card carrying member of generation X, I can proudly say we thought we were so cutting edge! Our kids were the first to be born with smartphones and tablets in their hands, and we posted their baby pictures on our social media pages and texted them to their grandparents. But time nor technology stands still, and Gen-Y has begun to put their own tech twist on engagements, weddings and baby plans. As a mental health treatment provider and consultant who works almost entirely with millennials in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have taken note of the following trends:
Their romantic relationships have an online life of their own. As the saying goes, no one really knows what happens behind closed doors, but in the personal lives of millennials, we can certainly take a look at their online activity to see what they'd like us to believe about their relationship status and history. The internet has become their forum of choice for chronicling romantic highs and lows, functioning as a means to gain public support, air grievances, compete for attention, and display markers of success (not to mention deleting away failures.) From public playlists on Spotify, hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, Pinterest boards and Facebook's 'Relationship Status' updates, Gen-Y leaves little to the imagination when it comes to sharing their stories of romance.
They crowd source their decisions when it comes to navigating relationships. Millennials are used to solving problems fast, arriving at optimal solutions with the least resistance possible. Millennials have been groomed to work in competency-based teams, and this concept is frequently used for managing their personal lives too. They prefer to avoid conflict, and are more comfortable than previous generations relying on others to help them make decisions. Jeff Snipes, CEO of Ninth House, a provider of online education, including optimizing team effectiveness, says a hierarchical, leader-oriented team was more appropriate for earlier generations: “Traditionally if you worked up the ranks for twenty years and all the employees were local then you could know all the functions of the workplace. Then you could lead by barking orders. But today everything moves too fast and the breadth of competency necessary to do something is too vast.” When faced with life-changing decisions about relationship commitment or endings, Gen-Y seeks the opinions of their team of friends, family and experts to help them navigate and solve problems. When problems are deemed too private to share, websites like popular sites like Whisper and Secret are put to use by millennials as a way to air their private thoughts, share their hidden behaviors and ask for advice completely anonymously, so there is no threat to their carefully constructed online image.
Their engagement stories, weddings and honeymoons reflect their brilliance and investment in personal branding. While previous generations aimed to establish their worth and reputation through self-improvement, author Dan Schawbel of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success points out that Gen-Y has discovered that in the dawn of the internet, admiration and success comes from self-packaging through a carefully concocted personal brand. From the days of Myspace to Tumblr, millennials have grown up managing their self image like celebrity publicists. Gen-Y has turned self-portraits into a way of life- 'selfies' have become one of the internet's top forms of self-expression. Their overall online presence has been a way to uniquely distinguish themselves from everyone else, and they are highly invested in making their relationship milestones ideally memorable as part of their personal brand. Whether they capture and share these milestones via Snapchat's Our Story, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or personal blogs, millennials are sure to control how the world sees their love stories unfold through brand management. One San Francisco Bay area millennial shared with me she got engaged via FaceTime, since her long-distance boyfriend was living in abroad and couldn't wait to pop the question. To his credit, her (now fiance) also created an iMovie that he shared with her, depicting him staged in funny scenarios accompanied by a personalized musical score that specially captured their romantic history.
They're comfortable resisting tradition, understanding that 'following the rules' doesn't necessarily bring 'happily ever after.' Author Paul Hudson of Elite Daily, The Voice of Generation Y observes that millennials are far less likely than past generations to buy into the notion that marriage is the gateway to a future of stability and happiness. Harry Benson, research director at the Marriage Foundation, describes the strong link between parental divorce and a reluctance to get married. “If your parents split up then most people are more likely to be quite skeptical about the value of marriage,” he explains. “So as there’s rising divorce rates, you can imagine how when the next generation appears, people will be more dubious about marriage.” Bobby Duffy, leading market researcher on generational analysis, says there are also far more financial pressures on millennials than previous generations. They have more educational debt in a less stable economic climate, and face an incredibly buoyant housing market. According to CNNMoney, twenty-somethings are transitioning into adult life at a more gradual pace, opting to cohabitate and co-parent without traditional marriage at a much higher rate than previous generations.
They anticipate their babies' future in a world where technological identity matters. One website says it all: awesomebabyname.com, a new online tool that allows parents to choose a name for their child based on website domain availability. Yes people, this is happening. I heard it first a few months ago when a pregnant patient of mine found out she was having a girl, the first thing she and her cohabiting boyfriend/expecting father-to-be did was buy website domains and establish email accounts in her name. Of course, now there's an app for that! "It's important to give your children a fighting chance of having good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in the 21st century," says Finnbar Taylor, who created this website together with Karen X. Cheng. "We use search engines all day long to answer our questions and find things, including people. Imagine being called John Smith and trying to get a ranking on Google search. It's important to give your child a unique name so that people, like potential employers, will be able to find them easily in the future."
Granted, millennials are still in their 20's, a time when it's still developmentally common to be preoccupied with self-image, and an idealized future that looks different than previous generations. The question is, as Gen-Y ages, which of these trends, if any, will change?
Dr. Christina Villarreal is a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. She produces web articles, televised and print/web interviews on current issues in mental health and tech culture. She offers consultation and strategy to start up founders and employees.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Tech in dating: decoding the social rules of text, online dating & social media, by Dr. Christina Villarreal, Clinical Psychologist
Let’s face it: flirting, finding love and managing relationships have always been complicated, but with the involvement of countless forms of technology now impacting every little step of the way, the social rules of love and sex have only gotten more confusing. The role of tech in dating is a primary topic in psychotherapy sessions I conduct with young singles in the Bay Area of California- the world’s hub and backbone of tech culture. Part of my role as their clinical psychologist is to help them decode and navigate the emerging social rules of text, online dating and social media to help them achieve fulfilling relationships. I recently spoke with Tech Crunch journalist Sara Buhr, who was investigating dating trends among people immersed in the tech industry. Some of the questioned she asked of me were: How are the norms and expectations different? Are young men in tech less likely to follow traditional social rules of dating? How has the proclivity toward using dating websites changed the dating game? This article was born from that conversation, and aims to illuminate the challenges of social connection in the 21st century.
So what do we already know? If you want to communicate personally with anyone these days, you’ve got to text them. Casual, easy and non-threatening, text messaging is upending today’s dating culture. The cellphone is the gateway: swiftly and radically changing the way people interact, meet and move forward (or not) in a relationship. According to a report released in 2013 by Nielsen based on actual phone bills of mobile contract subscribers, about 764 text messages per person were sent/received each month in the USA in 2012, compared with about 165 mobile calls per month. A new survey of 1,500 daters provided to USA TODAY reveals how deeply mobile technology has rocked the dating world. The daters, ages 21 to 50, give even greater insight into mobile behaviors and a new range of dating questions: Do you check your phone during a date? How soon must you reply to a text? Should a friend call or text you to see how the date is going?
Among the findings:
•Approximately one-third of men (31%) and women (33%) agree it’s less intimidating to ask for a date via text vs. a phone call.
•More men (44%) than women (37%) say mobile devices make it easier to flirt and get acquainted.
“Texting is kind of an ongoing conversation. It does make it easier to flirt. Maybe you’re talking every day,” says Alex Pulda, 27, who works in product research in San Francisco. “It’s not like text conveys a ton of emotion, but you are getting a little more comfortable with each other.” Pulda says he texts for everything, including dates. “I don’t love phone calls,” he says. “They have all the downsides and don’t have the benefit of face-to-face communication. It’s kind of this in-between. And part of it is, it’s a lot more work than a text.”
Millennials’ love of texting is rubbing off on other generations, suggests Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University in Washington who has studied electronically mediated communication in five nations, including the USA. She says telephone calls are often thought of as an intrusion, while texting affords a way of “controlling the volume,” a term she uses to describe the sense of control that text gives users that they can’t get with a voice conversation. “We tell ourselves we don’t want to disturb someone. Sometimes it’s true, but more often, it’s because we can’t get them off the phone,” she says. In texting, “we don’t have to talk to people or listen to what another person has to say. We decide how we want to encounter or whether we want to encounter other people. Technology gives us tools for controlling our relationships.” In the modern world of dating, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know how our electronic messages are being perceived and paced by others.
It’s not uncommon (and quite the norm) for my patients to save texts, tweets, status updates and Gchats to discuss and analyze during our psychotherapy sessions. These digital exchanges are often at the root of their increased anxiety and worry, social tension, and depressive symptoms such as decreased concentration and irritability at work and other important areas of functioning. Life coach Debra Smouse explains “when a response [from others] doesn’t come, we begin to worry. When we don’t hear back, our minds start to spiral, creating crazy scenarios and we begin to believe that something is wrong. We know logically that a friend may have left his or her desk or a colleague may be on a call, but when we’re on the other end and stress hits, an unanswered chat box is discomforting, and logic goes out the window.” [Technologies like Gchat] “make us think that because the technology is ‘instant’ and free, people should respond instantly — and there’s something wrong when they don’t,” adds Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of “The Distraction Addiction.”
It’s not just the frequency and pace of our electronic messages that are difficult to decipher. The content of these exchanges can also be equally confusing in the context of modern dating (a.k.a ‘hanging out‘), getting to know each other, (a.k.a ‘internet stalking‘) and sex (a.k.a ‘hooking up‘.) Ambiguous, common messages like “what’re you up tonight, anything fun going on?”, “I’m out drinking with some friends if you’re around”, and “hey” are all commonplace in the current dating marketplace, can make it difficult for people to gain traction towards building a committed relationship. The normalization and proclivity toward using dating websites in recent years contributes to a pattern of non-comittal social ties. Mobile apps like Tinder, okcupid and plenty of fish supply people with a never-ending source of new social opportunities. The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture” Donna Freitas explains, author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.” “Dodging vulnerability cheats us of the chance to not just create intimacy but also to make relationships work”states BrenĂ© Brown, a University of Houston researcher whose work focuses on the need for vulnerability and what happens when we desensitize ourselves to it.
In this light, people can utilize psychotherapy as a way to build social skills to help them find, evolve and navigate romantic relationships. Dean, a Millennial who writes about her generation (generally born 1982 to 2000) says, “We really see this generation as having a huge handicap in communication. We have our heads down in our smartphones a lot. We don’t know how to express our emotions, and we tend to hide behind technology, computers and social media.” she says. With diminished opportunity for healthy social relationships, this generation is at increased risk for anxiety, depression and isolation.
As a mental health professional, I help people identify the relationship between their thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are leading them to feel ‘stuck’ in unfulfilling social patterns. It’s a slow process- teaching pacing and managing expectations are key to lasting progress. Participating in psychotherapy can help people increase their ability to establish and maintain fulfilling relationships. With these relationships come the superior health benefits of physical contact and emotional intimacy, love, trust and not-so-cyber sex.
Dr. Christina Villarreal is a licensed clinical psychologist in the Bay Area, CA with offices in Oakland and San Francisco. For professional inquiries, she may be contacted at christina.villarreal@gmail.com or visit her website at www.drchristinavillarreal.com
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Cohabitation: a generational trend that’s here to stay, but does it work?
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