Alex Casey talks to Joe Canham, co-creator of new interview series d8talk, about capturing the realities of dating for Gen Z singles in Aotearoa.
Celia has a habit of getting stuck into situationships with guys that look like rats, specifically the rats from 2006 animated film Flushed Away. Keven is frustrated with being exoticised by “creepy crawlers” on dating apps, and being bombarded with “bootyholes” in his DMs. Liv follows fanny flutters at the expense of emotional connection, and Thomas once had to help his date pop her dislocated knee back into place after 3-4 overpriced gin and tonics.
These are just a handful of yarns collected by d8talk, a new online interview series exploring how Gen Z feel about dating and relationships in Aotearoa. Co-creator Joe Canham (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Te Hikutu) first came up with the idea while reflecting on his own experience in the gay dating scene in Queenstown. “It’s a transient town where, especially being in a minority, it’s a small scene to begin with… it doesn’t feel like anyone’s here for the long term.”
Thinking about the role that location and identity can play in people’s romantic endeavors, he began conceiving of an ambitious 100-part social media project that would speak to Gen Z about the realities of dating in Aotearoa. Putting a call out on social media and Student Job Search, he and producer Georgia-May Russ (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Uekaha) whittled down a shortlist of 36 participants to fly to Tāmaki Makaurau from all around the country.
Having previously worked in advertising, Canham harnessed the simplicity and authenticity of a casting tape for the d8talk interviews. “Very early in my career I edited a lot of casting tapes for commercials and, even though it looked so basic, people’s stories were always so cool,” he says. “We wanted to make something that was very authentic, like you are sitting down with your flatmates and just having a bit of a chat about something that happened to you.”
Shooting five or six hour-long interviews every day for an entire week, participants arrived separately with a buffer window between each of them. Production also had a media chaplain onset to ensure that the interviewees felt totally comfortable before and after their shoot. “Having that support on set was really valuable. And we also had a psychologist on call who could provide psychology services, but we didn’t actually end up taking that up at all.”
After sitting through nearly 30 hours of interviews in the edit, Canham says he has learned a lot about what Gen Z values when it comes to love. “From our subset at least, they seem to have a very romantic view of love and relationships, which feels in contrast to the way millennials think.” For example, almost every d8talk interviewee said they would like to get married, which tracks with recent articles about Gen Z being more pro-marriage than their own parents.
Canham also found that people were well and truly over using dating apps. “Even the people who were most prolific on the apps said they felt like they just had to be in those spaces to be able to find a connection, but they really didn’t actually enjoy that process,” he says. “Almost everyone said they would prefer to meet someone organically – I think people do seem to be yearning for something different, and something more authentic.”
The d8talk project has launched across Instagram and Tiktok, with the next “diaries” phase to commence shortly. Eight participants from the original interviews will be selected to record their own weekly vlog updates as they navigate the dating world. “They will be a mix of people who are either prolific in the dating scene or are on a personal journey in some way,” Canham says. “It’ll have a similar aesthetic, but it’ll essentially be a completely new series.”
Still working through hours of interviews, Canham’s hope is that d8talk inspires reflection and empathy in others. “We definitely observed that this younger subset of Gen Z are really self-aware and quite empathetic to other people’s perspectives,” he says. “I really hope that people will connect with someone in the series that’s different to who they are, and open their mind in that way. That’s always been the motivation for this project: to inspire acceptance.”
