Meet The Gaggle authors Becky and Jess. I did makeup for them a while back for their book launch, which started with an actual funeral for traditional “dating.” Kind of necessary as lord knows it’s been pretty dead for a while now. 

Photos by Diane Bondareff

Now to pronounce dating is dead is somewhat of a bold declaration. And one I totally dig.

I asked the ladies to expound and here’s what they had to say…

When we say that dating is dead, we mean that traditional dating, as we’ve always been taught to expect it, is no longer the primary path to romance, relationships and love. If you are looking for love these days, you mostly likely will NOT find it by exchanging phone numbers with a new guy, going on candlelit dinner dates, and having a “DTR” talk after three dates! That’s just not what the modern dating landscape looks like anymore.

Instead, we found through our research that people are now falling in love via more ambiguous paths. They are soccer teammates who spent months flirting and becoming Facebook friends before ever hanging out one-on-one, or professional contacts who sat down for a networking coffee and found out that they had a lot more in common than just work, or old friends who spent years texting and emailing and suddenly felt a new spark one night and decided to explore it. 

This means that in this post-dating world, singles need to be open to discovering romantic connections anytime, anywhere. Even if you don’t have a date on the calendar, you likely have an endless schedule of “non-dates” happening – parties, work events, classes, casual hangouts, e-conversations simultaneously going with many people…and these non-dates are all opportunities for love. So singles need to stop simply asking themselves who they are dating, and start looking around at everyone they know and are meeting, in any setting, and exploring the possibilities for connection there.

Makes sense to me. (Particularly given that I met my boyfriend via the internet for business networking.) But if dating is now non-dating, then we are all on non-dates much of the time. And it’s not like we are getting daily blowouts or manicures and rocking our best soft smoky eye. (When I met my boyfriend, I was in jeans, an oversized sweater, lipgloss and a single coat of mascara… I probably fooled him into thinking I was super low maintenance. Which I am when I don’t care. Which is hardly ever. Oops.)

Of course this is where my mind goes… So I invited Jess and Becky over to create some makeup looks (on them!!) appropriate for the different non-date genres. As you can imagine, we had a blast. Stay tuned for their big reveal next week!