i'm declaring online dating dead

just hit on them!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lois Dodd (2018)

meditation on: the apps

I don’t really write about dating, sort of on principle—love, heartbreak, etc. obviously, exhaustively, but Dating proper I avoid just because it feels like the centripetal part of every female comedy routine, and self-diminishing at that. I’ve paid $10 to sit on a metal folding chair and drink a PBR and here comes act four of six beginning the same way: “So, I’m on Hinge—”

And then it’s always: bad sex, dry sex, I’m ugly, he was ugly, I hate myself, cellulite joke, Lexapro joke, ending the set with ex-sex and something left-field about 9/11. I don’t know, I also just kind of hate seeing stand-up. And I also just kind of hate online dating! Wouldn’t you think that rare for a woman who has put, I don’t know, a short novella together already that could not be farther from passing the Bechdel test—whose life so clearly revolves around loving and being loved, seeking and then dodging sexual partners, doomed to wish for the chimeric Capable Artist that will transport me to my falling-apart beach cottage three kids one ugly dog book never finished and unkempt garden kind of salvation.

I’ve talked about this before—said something about the plight of New York Hinge which is sardined with artists who don’t make art, Larry David humor, gauche New Jersey wealth, people at Columbia for no reason.

It’s not even that these people aren’t hot, that they don’t have jobs, or hobbies, it’s just that the nature of this thing will never become organic—we aren’t meant to have so many options, so many imagined futures (again, fig tree, always with the fig tree), such grotesque accessibility to the parasocial. It’s so harmful to learn applied identity, and to become comfortable with it.

This is not a hot or new take, obviously. This is also not to say it’s not a completely effective and sound way to find a perfectly suited partner. Or anyway, it was.

It’s hard to say what it was in the air that changed—but its end feels imminent. The signs are in the resurgence of cutesy classified-type ads, “stable seeking unstable” like on Angel Food mag, Instagrams falling in the footsteps of Hot Singles NYC (now defunct, but something tells me not really), the emergence of things like @unhingeddatingny, self-proclaimed “not-your-average” speed dating series. Center for Fiction holds speed-dating events for nerds, Lucky Dinner Club hosts singles evenings for hot, scene-y people. People seem to feel tired of swiping, tired of trying blindly, of strained text conversations and the complete unreliability of their evenings. He’s nothing like I imagined. Yeah!!!! You imagined him!!!

We all know the best way to meet anyone is a house party thick with adjacent strangers, but when there’s a lull of those, there’s a romantic vacancy that pushes us back into the horny, desperate ethers of the internet. Only to find: we still don’t really want to do this. We want someone to see us at the bar and come over. We want to chat and cheek-kiss as our friends pull us from the bar and scratch our number on a receipt and hear from them two days later.

I’ve been on zero online dates in my life—I can’t push myself to do it despite the encouragement of everyone saying something like: grow the fuck up. A few months ago, I saw someone gorgeous at a concert, and while he was having a cigarette outside I had my friend write my number on my hand and pressed it against the window. He called me from outside, we chatted for about 15 seconds and I texted him when I got home, where we set a date for the following week. Date was awesome blah blah we kissed blah blah it fizzled as it should have because he was another fucking musician/bartender and I’m 26 and I need to Get A Grip.

But it felt amazing, to, how you say: strive to seek to find and not to yield¹. Felt like real life, like being in New York, and being grown up and going after what you want in the moment you want it. Last week, I met a woman at the bar for 5 minutes and she slipped me her number on a napkin before she left. Was awesome. I don’t know, it feels like we’re moving into some sphere of being forthright about our attraction. Which is sort of the hottest thing a person can be, really: certain of wanting you.

A piece on bringing back the dance floor makeout went semi-viral on Substack recently that brought even further to my mind the actual fun of our young(ish) adulthood romances, which is the sexiness and brazenness and spontaneity of it. I have my whole life to be Montessori mommy, to fight with my husband(s), to grill tofu and rosé my mid-life crisis into submission but I have—god, what—three insolent years left in me to wear a bejeweled crop top that says “Twat Rock”?

There’s something tepid and insecure about the online thing, impatient about it, like you need upfront validation to be seen and be kissed, and then it has to happen on your timeline—and god I do need that but I don’t think I’m actually supposed to have it. Is that so Orthodox? So personally disciplinary for no reason?

Online dating resonates that same fear of mine that plagues all my behavior, which I’ve also talked about before on here—being wrongfully perceived, performing yourself. Obviously, online you’re known for how you’ve presented yourself, and not how you are. But don’t we all want to be seen in our quiet and unaware element, looking for nothing and no one, and just perplexedly skimming the dry book before us and thinking about something else? (Like, for example: how uncomfortable it is that everyone is memeing someone asking “how the Advil knows where it hurts” when that’s exactly what you’re wondering all the time?) Dancing atrociously to “astro-atlantic hypnotica” with someone else’s Modelo all over the front of your shirt?

The sick crux of the thing, the crucial failing of the apps, is that you’re being drawn to this person’s mood board of their own character. In real life, there can’t be such a performance, or curation. In real life, you saw exactly how tall they were, what they looked and moved like, what they wore not knowing they would be meeting you, what they ordered at the bar, who they came with. And you liked them! Without logistics or preliminary chat, or an Instagram stalk, or any idea of their opinion of Larry David. No stamp of pedigree conveyed by alma mater and hometown. You saw them and wanted to see more of them.

And I feel that maybe we’re starting to tap back into that—like we’ve grown weary of taking our algorithmic approach to sex and romance and want the song and movie kind back. We want to be noticed as much as we want to be the sort of person who notices, and acts on it.

^ this applies bc the twisted thing about receiving a number irl is that you can also lose that number extremely easily

It’s a good thing, I think, not because we need to disparage or invalidate online dating (as I’ve just done without really setting out to do that, sorry), but because it’s inviting the honesty of attraction, the sincerity of interest. I remember being stunned once, waking up at someone’s place, and him saying “I really like you.” I thought—I would never say that. And that’s because of my avoidant attachment and petrifying fear of vulnerability (why is this newsletter Free, why do I give this to you), but it’s also because it’s not a language I learned: to be sincere about my interest, or my feelings. I learned to be indirect about it, to strategize an exit before I’d ever anticipate a connection. How indelibly Fucked, but how suited I am, then, to the apps which feed my sick little desire for validation, eliminate the risk of initial vulnerability.

I guess my aversion is really that I want to be too honest for the apps, too forward for them, a person in the moment, and certain that life brings you the right people at the right time. I think any alternative is too depressing to believe. If I can just remind you of wu wei for two seconds (sorry), you can’t force what wasn’t mean to come! All you can do is attune yourself to the opportunities and able moments of your life which, even if you don’t believe in that, is the kind of attitude that makes you pleasant to be around.

Anyway, all I care about is voice and hands and energy, and I can’t properly assess a single one of those over the internet. And lastly—Paul Mescal is not on Hinge <3 (he is on Raya, though, so my crush actually died with knowing that)

recommendations:

• Y Tu Mama También has been on my list for, oh, I don’t know, a decade, and I thought it was going to be something completely other than it was, which ended up being: a Mexican coming-of-age shyly homoerotic threesome road trip movie. If you don’t want to watch it after those adjectives then you won’t like it, but it was a 4.5-star for me, it was so unlike anything else

• This album has been soooo nice to listen to on all occasions—cooking, writing, reading, cleaning, working, there is nothing it doesn’t work for

• I am veryyyy obsessed with Joy Laville right now, good selection of her paintings here. Mexican pastel painter whose work got really weird and cool after her husband died in a plane crash

• I went to the park and listened to this whole thing from Apt 9 Recordings and it was Blissful As Hell

• Very excited about this little find which is a recording studio with a listening room and a ton of monthly events

• I just want to wear everything from this place all the time, one of those “conceptual design” places but I’m giving this one a break. This one in France, all pleats and the best colors you’ve ever seen

• There’s a talk at Unnameable Books on 4/24 about independent publishing and curatorial practices that looks Cool to me and probably to -1 other people reading this newsletter; also this Faccio Brutto happy hour on 4/17 at Lise & Vito (Greenpoint) looks v fun

1. “Ulysses,” Lord Tennyson