Our generation is a unique specimen crafted by the era of digital dating. By the time I entered the dating scene, dating apps were the way of life. When people describe meet-cutes and blind dates I am reminded of my parents talking about doing parkour across mountains to get to school. That is, I’m convinced that the collective memory is largely untrue. Sure, I’ve seen friends attract dates in college (an environment crafted for intense socialization), but I cannot fathom finding my spouse simultaneously reaching for spinach at the same time in a Whole Foods. Anytime I hear my friend announce that they were courted in a bookstore, I listen with amazement, as if hearing an alchemist talking about creating gold from thin air.
Yet meet-cutes never sound like the fairy tale romcoms make them out to be. In my time researching the phenomenon, I watched two episodes of Sex and the City (a show from which I believe the Bechdel test was borne out of necessity), and living in Samantha’s brain would be my purgatory. The show follows characters continually caught up in mental gymnastics, all to attract men who look like any average dude you’d find in Jason’s Deli on a Tuesday. There are so many randos and unwanted gaps in their romantic/sexual history that seem to drive them crazy. Why would they not want to set themselves up anytime they want? Wouldn’t they rather just make a Bumble?
(Buzzfeed said I was Miranda, a character who is slowly making me understand misogyny.)
However, my understanding of the show is incredibly biased by my own neuroses, which are in turn crafted from the digital dating system we’ve set up. Dating apps are a fun little game, so far distanced from reality that the prospect of spontaneously running into romance is daunting. If the universe conspired for my soulmate to meet me on a plane, the fabric of spacetime would be annihilated when they observed me mid-flight. (I make myself so evolutionarily unappealing it should be an anthropological study.) Apps allow me to craft an image of my greatest hits and generate a highly controlled conception of “me,” delaying the act of becoming a real-life human. But this also introduces a delay in appropriate communication (aka spooky honesty time), creating a liminal Wild West of etiquette: if I want to stop talking to someone, I ghost them and then proceed to religiously watch their Instagram stories until one of us passes away. But ghosting in real life is far hairier: as someone frightened of confrontation, I might just marry them. It’s easy to swipe unabashedly, but indicating interest in someone you find attractive? That’s the setup to how I die in Final Destination, slipping in a pool of my own sweat.
Dating apps remove the escalatory stage of noticing someone to a flirtationship, which has personally helped me out (a ton) (a TON a ton), but has also changed the name of the game entirely. It’s a sport. “Tinder is for hookups, Hinge is for relationships,” I tell people, talking out of my ass, because no app is really “for relationships.” The people who use Tinder to find a significant other are also using the same app that others use for meaningless hookups. Because of this ambiguity, it’s much easier to just use it as a slot machine of validation, collecting the Pokémon cards of people who would possibly chat you up at a bar (especially in the Sex and the City cinematic universe).
The medium is the message (an original quote from me), and our romantic/sexual needs and wants get messily tangled with what’s in vogue at the time. Should we even be striving for pre-Tinder romance? I’m not sure that even exists anymore. Attempting to cohesively define this era of dating is impossible, and I wouldn’t dream of wrapping it up nicely. However, one thing I do believe is that love is universal (boo, boo, I know). Although I’m the prime neurotic and flighty specimen of post-Tinder dating, if there’s hope for me, there’s hope for all of us. God bless.
Our generation is a unique specimen crafted by the era of digital dating. By the time I entered the dating scene, dating apps were the way of life. When people describe meet-cutes and blind dates I am reminded of my parents talking about doing parkour across mountains to get to school. That is, I’m convinced that the collective memory is largely untrue. Sure, I’ve seen friends attract dates in college (an environment crafted for intense socialization), but I cannot fathom finding my spouse simultaneously reaching for spinach at the same time in a Whole Foods. Anytime I hear my friend announce that they were courted in a bookstore, I listen with amazement, as if hearing an alchemist talking about creating gold from thin air.
Yet meet-cutes never sound like the fairy tale romcoms make them out to be. In my time researching the phenomenon, I watched two episodes of Sex and the City (a show from which I believe the Bechdel test was borne out of necessity), and living in Samantha’s brain would be my purgatory. The show follows characters continually caught up in mental gymnastics, all to attract men who look like any average dude you’d find in Jason’s Deli on a Tuesday. There are so many randos and unwanted gaps in their romantic/sexual history that seem to drive them crazy. Why would they not want to set themselves up anytime they want? Wouldn’t they rather just make a Bumble?
(Buzzfeed said I was Miranda, a character who is slowly making me understand misogyny.)
However, my understanding of the show is incredibly biased by my own neuroses, which are in turn crafted from the digital dating system we’ve set up. Dating apps are a fun little game, so far distanced from reality that the prospect of spontaneously running into romance is daunting. If the universe conspired for my soulmate to meet me on a plane, the fabric of spacetime would be annihilated when they observed me mid-flight. (I make myself so evolutionarily unappealing it should be an anthropological study.) Apps allow me to craft an image of my greatest hits and generate a highly controlled conception of “me,” delaying the act of becoming a real-life human. But this also introduces a delay in appropriate communication (aka spooky honesty time), creating a liminal Wild West of etiquette: if I want to stop talking to someone, I ghost them and then proceed to religiously watch their Instagram stories until one of us passes away. But ghosting in real life is far hairier: as someone frightened of confrontation, I might just marry them. It’s easy to swipe unabashedly, but indicating interest in someone you find attractive? That’s the setup to how I die in Final Destination, slipping in a pool of my own sweat.
Dating apps remove the escalatory stage of noticing someone to a flirtationship, which has personally helped me out (a ton) (a TON a ton), but has also changed the name of the game entirely. It’s a sport. “Tinder is for hookups, Hinge is for relationships,” I tell people, talking out of my ass, because no app is really “for relationships.” The people who use Tinder to find a significant other are also using the same app that others use for meaningless hookups. Because of this ambiguity, it’s much easier to just use it as a slot machine of validation, collecting the Pokémon cards of people who would possibly chat you up at a bar (especially in the Sex and the City cinematic universe).
The medium is the message (an original quote from me), and our romantic/sexual needs and wants get messily tangled with what’s in vogue at the time. Should we even be striving for pre-Tinder romance? I’m not sure that even exists anymore. Attempting to cohesively define this era of dating is impossible, and I wouldn’t dream of wrapping it up nicely. However, one thing I do believe is that love is universal (boo, boo, I know). Although I’m the prime neurotic and flighty specimen of post-Tinder dating, if there’s hope for me, there’s hope for all of us. God bless.
