What is, and what cannot be
A millennial woman complains to you about online dating
A few days ago I was walking to the bookstore when, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a man on the other side of the street wave and say something to me. I was wearing headphones and I had a feeling that whatever he had to say wasn’t anything I needed to hear, so I pretended not to notice. I walked into the store and eventually stopped at a shelf. And then I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the man from the street. He had followed me all the way to this little corner in the fiction section. His face slipped into a lazy, satisfied smile. Finally. He said it like this was all very normal and he was greeting a friend who was late. Sorry, what? Every time I apologize like this I get angry with myself (so then I internally apologize to myself). You’re cute, he said, and I guess he expected me to thank him for scaring the living shit out of me to deliver the used paper straw equivalent of a compliment. I didn’t want to say thank you and I didn’t want to laugh and tell him that he startled me. But I also knew how precarious my situation was, alone in the corner of a bookstore with a strange man in a city where most people pretend not to see you even when you’re in front of them, so I also didn’t tell him to get the hell away from me. Instead I put my headphones back on and pretended to read something on the shelf. Fat bitch. (The usual). I stood there for a while, willing my fingers to stop trembling and my face to cool down.
I have an album I titled and these are the men where I collect screenshots of some of my more absurd encounters on dating apps. Sometimes I send these screenshots to friends and we exchange funny quips and gifs about the absurdity of it all. I drone on and on about wanting to meet someone in person, preferably while doing something I already like doing. And guess what? I really like books. Reading, and going to places that enable reading, is a huge part of my personality. In fact, I met my last lover while I was reading at a cafe and he stopped by my table to ask what I was reading. Even though we were strangers, that interruption led to a natural, easy conversation that lasted over many coffess, glasses of wine, walks along the Seine, and a slow dinner that outlasted the restaurant’s hours. I knew very deeply how looking into his eyes made me feel before I even knew his name. I fell in love with his surprisingly soft laugh against his strong dark mediterranean features before I knew what he does for a living. I felt the soft strenght of his hands on my back before I knew whether or not he was looking for a relationship. By the time I went to his place a few days later and I saw the wall-to-wall shelf of books in his tiny studio that technically had no room for even a single shelf, I knew he was my person. We learned the other stuff slowly, sometimes across from a table, other times in the tangle of sheets, and everywhere in between.
This is all to say that I am fundamentally more comfortable with meeting and falling in love with a random stranger than I am with the digital marketplace of online dating. But - and I hate how whiny this makes me sound - it seems to me that the days of meeting normal (read: not rapey) people out in the wild are behind us. I know many people who have found through online dating exactly the person they were seeking, so I don’t mean to disparage the entire industry. But, speaking for myself, I hate the nature and premise of it all. Every time I open my profile to do my homework of selecting potential dates, I feel like I’m auditioning to play a role in someone’s life. Rather than engaging with the initial experience of meeting someone new, sizing them up and getting to know them bit by bit, I’m supposed to wade through endless profiles and decide that the way this guy is holding the dead fish is less psychotic than the other 18 so maybe I should just respond to the “hey” and see what happens?
But it’s all so dry. In Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Sociologist Eva Illouz puts it perfectly:
Whereas romantic love has been characterized by an ideology of spontaneity, the Internet demands a rationalized mode of partner selection, which contradicts the idea of love as an unexpected epiphany, erupting in one’s life against one’s will and reason. Whereas traditional romantic love is intimately connected to sexual attraction - usually provoked by the presence of two physical, material bodies - the Internet is based on disembodied textual interaction. The result is that on the Internet, a rational search takes precedence, both in time and in approach, over traditional physical attraction.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that my anxieties about internet dating are more closely related to my anxieties about myself and how I may be perceived and rationalized by someone else, than they are about the task of perceiving and rationalizing another person (although I hate that too). In this digital marketplace where we are to choose only the most promising mate, I know and you know that the preference is not for someone who looks like me. But, in the real world, I am not standing in a room with a sign above my head with my best pictures and most interesting statements about myself, waiting to be selected by not just anybody but by a person I would also select for myself. Whereas in real life I rarely think about the fact that I am not an athletic (read: not fat), adventurous, open-minded supermodel with a great personality, it’s all I think about every time I open the dating app du jour. Leaving little room for me to be myself, which is ironically my best feature.
Once again, Illouz puts into words the confusion I’ve been stumbling through for months (if you are a person alive, you should probably read this book).
In order to meet another person, one is made to focus intensely on oneself, on one’s perception of one’s own self, and on one’s self-ideal as well as one’s ideal of another.
The technology of the Internet thus positions the self in a contradictory way: it makes one take a deep turn inward, that is, it requires that one focus on one’s self in order to capture and communicate its unique essence, in the form of tastes, opinions, fantasies, and emotional compatibility.
On the other hand, the internet also makes the self a commodity on public display.
Because it is a marketplace, I can’t help but select based on what I ideally want, both physically and in personality, lifestyle, values, everything. And, because it’s a marketplace, it’s inevitable that I would come across the ideal specimen (at least online) which inevitably leads to evaluating myself against that ideal. I used to have a very pragmatic understanding of who I am as a person, a neutral and respectful approach to my appearance, and a readiness to see and embrace my own unique beauty. But I think I have lost most of this respectful and kind look upon myself because of this daily evaluation through the prism of online dating. It forces me to place myself into categories that are highly coded by physical and other superficial attributes. I find that I scan extremely carefully every profile for indication that this person would actually not like me if they met me. I don’t know about you but the last thing I ever want to happen during an in-person meeting with an online match is that they’re surprised by how I actually look. I don’t think I could survive the humiliation of something like that. So, as dramatic as I sound, I want the very first meeting, before we’ve even said hello, to come after they have seen me. Is this shallow? Yes, most definitely. But we are in a very shallow society and I have been socialized to take personal responsibility for how attractive someone else does or does not find me, even though it’s actually not up to me at all.
So, what’s the point of all this? Not much, really, because this is real life and I’m just navigating it like you. Although it’s worth noting that a few days ago I deactivated my accounts and removed every dating app from my phone. After several months of earnestly putting “the time and effort” into making it work for me, I decided to listen to the screaming voice inside me that felt betrayed every time I opened the sites or scrolled through my own account to identify exactly how I might appear to someone else. So far, it’s been wonderful to reclaim that time, to spend it reading a nice story or talking to someone I already know and like, who already knows and likes me, just as I am.
Thank you for being here.