When Facebook messaging and texting have become new forms of courtship, all those dating guidebooks and self-help blogs no longer work for men and women. In the age we are living, a revolution is needed in the love advice domain.
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 a rather typical night in the summer of 2009 for Massa and Wiegand, two 27-year-old Brooklynites who had been friends since age 12. Massa, who had worked for years in the music industry, had just quit her job and was glued to her laptop, surfing celebrity blogs in her PJs whilst also tele-networking with a bunch of banking people in Brazil, discussing job opportunities and getting her visa application materials in order. She was planning on moving to the exotic locale, sleeping on couches and working as a bartender for cash, and was, understandably, a bit on the frazzled side. Wiegand had just come home from a work cocktail party (she was working for New Line Cinema at the time) and, in a similarly frantic/foul mood, she threw herself on the couch and started lamenting her romantic situation and the lack of men in her stable. “We’ve all had that moment,” Massa says, “but as Becky’s best friend, I know her day to day, so I was like, ‘OK, I get it, but actually I know that you were IMing with that publishing guy this week, and your ex-boyfriend was hanging around the apartment last week, and you made out with that random guy at that party we went to last week. You’re not dating anyone, but I objectively know that you’re talking to guys. I think you’re looking at it the wrong way.’”
They reached a conclusion that night: every woman had her ten types of men to deal with. From previous lovers, potential lovers to sex partners, disposable used ones and so on. The idea was totally welcomed by the executives of New Line Cinema and was going to be made into a film after the company’s blockbuster He’s Just Not The Into You — with a new perspective.
Blog For More
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.
Not just women, but men also have little idea on the dos and don’ts in the new dating world. The website Massa and Wiegand set up is a great place for exchange of ideas. They prefer such kind of interaction because they don’t trust those old-fashion dating guidebooks and experts.
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.
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