It has been thirty years since the movie Back to the Future hit the cinemas. That entertaining movie made us laugh as we looked at how things were different twenty-five years in the past and how, from the viewpoint of the past, the future we lived in was almost inconceivable. We would like to consider forward to the future of dating and how dating and relationships might be different twenty-five years from now. We get a little help on this subject from Tech Insider and their article about the future of dating and relationships.

Dates in the future may not happen in coffee shops – instead, you might just sit in your living room with a virtual reality headset, according to a report from Imperial College London and eHarmony.

The report predicts how relationships will change over the next 25 years (and discusses how they’ve already changed in recent years) using eHarmony’s user data; historical accounts; and interviews with anthropology, technology, and biomedicine experts.

“People want to be matched – and ultimately form relationships with – like-minded people in the most efficient way possible,” eHarmony’s UK director Romain Betrand tells Tech Insider. “What’s different is how people will go about it, redefined by advances in science and everyday consumer technology.”

The article considers virtual reality dating, the ability to see the other person’s emotions, relationships with robots, matching people by behavior patterns, matching people by DNA, dating in remote reaches of the world by rapid travel and computers that feed instant conversation into our heads in order to avoid awkward silences on first dates. From the viewpoint of 2015 much of this may feel scary but as society moves along over the next decade and a half all of these forward to the future of dating issues may be commonplace.

But, What Is the Point?

Tech for tech’s sake is not necessarily a good thing if what you want is a happy relationship or simply a hot first date. Today people date in order to socialize, for romance, purely for sex and in pursuit of a lifetime relationship with that right person. To the extent that new technology helps us meet the right person, makes it easier to get to know them and increases our chances of ending up with a happy result, the new technology will be useful and get used. To the extent that new technology is useless or leads to a dating disaster, as can happen with some of the dating apps, that new technology will hopefully follow the dinosaur into extinction.

A Voyage into the Future

Looking into the future can be exciting. But, by the time you have physically arrived you are already there and it is no longer the future. And in this case you are twenty-five years older and looking at an entirely different set of issues in your life. Nevertheless, virtual reality dating sounds like a useful way to meet new people keep the keepers and exit from bad dates. Our concern, however, is that the person you are dating in virtual reality may not be the person whom you meet later at the coffee shop. As tech advances watch out for how it affects your love life.