Netflix and chill is one of the many pop culture trends that our generation is enthralled with. It’s basically both the most proper and improper way to ask someone to hook up. Yeah, there will be some Netflix watched, but let’s be honest, there’s only so much of a bad Netflix movie a person can watch in one sitting. It is a funny term, but it’s also pretty sad when you put it in perspective.

Our generation has become insanely accustomed to having what we want right at our fingertips when we want it. We want the fastest 4G networks for our phones and we’ll pay a crazy amount of money to get it. We want to lose 10 pounds in one week and we’ll damage half of our organs, but as long as we look good, right? We want a “bae” and we’ll swipe left and right on Tinder until we find someone that is down for a Netflix and chill date.

Somewhere along the line, our generation has ditched the whole idea of dating and getting to know someone slowly. Where we actually have to make eye contact and hold a steady conversation with each other in a public place, where we get to see what kind of food the person likes, or if they chew with their mouth open or if they succeeded or failed in finding the right outfit. This is all too old-fashioned, out of our comfort zone and much too long of a process for our generation.

Getting to know someone involves manymore feelings and our generation would much rather enjoy the temporary and instant satisfaction of hooking up. Our generation deems that acceptable, because it’s fun. We protect our minds instead of our bodies. Because if we want something, we can have it, just like everything else society advertises to us. And when we don’t want it anymore? No big deal. Just upgrade to a new phone or, even simpler, chat someone else online. Traditional romance is gone.

Now, the equivalent of someone holding the door for another person is sending texts and inviting someone over for a Netflix and chill date. How could you pass that up? Someone is letting you drive to his or her house and watch their $8 monthly subscription to Netflix. That means something. It took a lot of effort for that person to send that text. Almost just as much effort to find a bad enough movie that you won’t miss out on while hooking up. But that’s what we want, right? And after we continuously make Netflix and chill apart of our “love” lives, we get confused when someone is genuinely polite. We meet someone who does not rely on their phone or Netflix for kind gestures and think the person who holds the door for us wants to get married and have eight kids.

But there is hope. Of course, it’s inevitable for us to fall into our generation’s trends because we are our generation. We’re missing out on slowly creating that raw friendship that turns into a relationship. We’re human and we’re going to look for something more than Netflix and chilling one day. When you actually make the effort of appreciating the mind before appreciating the body, you might find that you don’t even mind sitting through a Netflix film that has a one star rating with that person. And that? That is love.