Remember the days of telephone calls and pre-planned dates and letterman jackets? When the “Dear Abby” column made sense and men asked a father’s permission to initiate courtship? Nope, neither do Jessica Massa and Rebecca Wiegand, the girls behind what could be the world’s first crowd-sourced relationship advice blog, WTF Is Up With My Love Life?! “We don’t think the ‘conventional’ dating literature/self-help literature out there in bookstores and the blogosphere is actually speaking effectively to women now, because for the most part it assumes we’re living in a ‘dating’ world that no longer exists,” says Wiegand, referring to how the digital sphere – among other things – has completely turned the romantic realm on its proverbial head. When folks are breaking up with each other on Facebook, and a text message equates a love letter, it seems that we actually are quite primed for a romantic reboot.
Jessica Massa and Rebecca Wiegand realized the fact and they were about to do something about it, by means of a movie, a book and a website.
How WTF?! Came To Be
It was summer 2009, and the two girls befriended at twelve. Massa had quitted her job in the music field and planned to get a visa in Brazil and worked as a bartender. Wiegand came home from a party of her movie company and started complaining her miserable love life. Massa was not convinced, as she knew Wiegand were instant messaging with a guy that week, spending time with her ex and flirting with a stranger at the party the week before. She thought her friend was doing it all wrong.
This revelation lead to an idea: That all women have a “gaggle” of men, satellites who may or may not be their one and only, but were romantic prospects all the same. The two got to work writing a description of the 10 types of men in one’s gaggle – The Ex-Boyfriend Who’s Still Around, The Ego Booster, The Boyfriend Prospect, The Hot Sex Prospect, The Prospect You’re Not Sure Is a Prospect, The Accessory, The Career Booster, The Super Horny Guy Who Happens to Be Around a Lot, The Unavailable Guy, The Guy Who Just Blew You Off – and took the idea to New Line Cinema. The execs loved it, and optioned the concept as a movie idea. “They got it right away,” Massa says. “What we’re railing against is that He’s Just Not That Into You mentality, which is a movie that New Line made, also, actually.”
Collecting Ideas Through Blogging
Although they had a movie in the works and were prepping a book proposal, the pair was not content to just wait around for the film and book to come to fruition. Books and movies take a long time, and they wanted to formulate the concept in the meantime. Also, they didn’t feel exactly qualified to dispense with the advice based on the Gaggle concept alone. After Wiegand left her job at New Line in April 2010, the two started J&R Creative Media, LLC, a company through which they could develop the Gaggle idea further across media platforms and start developing other, unrelated multimedia projects. The film deal was signed, sealed and delivered in January 2009, and the WTF?! blog went live in beta in Feb 2010. “We had these ideas and wanted to get them out there now,” Massa says. “And we’d been talking to a ton of women, but we weren’t in a place yet where we could be traveling all over the country, talking to women, because we were building this idea. We wanted to start getting stories from other women, broadening the scope a bit. The more I talked to women, the bigger the idea got. It started as a gaggle and then it became WTF is Up With My Love Life?!, which is much bigger sense of: For our generation of women, how do we deal with this frustration, this exasperation? It’s not just the guys in your gaggle; it’s non-dates, technology, what are you doing with these guys in your gaggle if you’re not dating them?”
Digital Romance
And there’s the rub. According to Massa and Wiegand, we live in a post-dating world. “There’s such a thing as techno-romance,” Massa says. “Your grandmother’s never gonna get it, but that text message is meaningful.” Back in the day, all one had to do to show one’s interest was pick up the phone, now, there’s a bevy of venues by which a person can flirt: Twitter ( ), Facebook ( ), text, e-mail, MySpace ( ) (if you’re still living in 2005). Which means there’s also a bevy of ways to get utterly confused. Massa and Wiegand even include app reviews and stories about technology as a way of helping their readers break through the haze of pixels and pings.
Neither men nor women can really figure out this new form of dating and romancing. Nobody is sure when to do what to do on those digital portals. Massa and Wiegand are against those guidebooks written by some well-educated elites who had graduated thirty years ago. They wanted to build a forum which would allow exchange of ideas, and not some top-down nurturing of, like transforming yourself to get the guy you want.
People come to the website to learn from one another, and the creators also benefit by getting value-added stories to be incorporated by their movie and book. Massa is hoping to eradicate the over generalization of dating and everybody will soon abandon those outdated tips.
Learn more about relationships. Stop by Queenie Ang’s site where you can find out all about dating and what it can do for you.
