I broke up with my 2nd therapist several months ago because she “wasn’t a good fit.” All I wanted to do was talk to her about love, sex, and dating; all she wanted to do was give me worksheets where I identify my strengths. Sure, whatever: Humor, honesty, curiosity. Love of learning. When do we get to talk about me?
Her primary solution to many of my problems (loneliness, celibacy, insecurity) seemed to be related in some way to me downloading a dating app. She kept bringing it up, even when we were talking about unsexy problems. I once told her I felt like I was generally risk averse and afraid of failure, which kept me from living a more fulfilling, meaningful life. She suggested that downloading a dating app is a kind of small-scale risk I could take on.
She was right. (She was usually right, though hardly ever convincing. I wanted the reasons for my feelings to be intellectual, complicated, and severe, like in a novel. She wanted me to accept that some things really were so simple. How could I?!) Putting pictures of yourself online and announcing you’re ready to be fucked and/or loved is risky. It is also so stupid, the spectacle of presenting yourself, trying to present enough pieces of your life in a beautiful or purposefully homely way to make anonymous strangers like you. All that presentation and self-branding to what end? To be literally shooed away and replaced by the next body on the stack. Or, to maybe, finally, incredibly…be fucked and/or loved?
I broke up with her but took her advice. Now I save $40 every month1 and just took a break from writing this to swipe some more left and right on one of the apps (the yellow one).
I feel sad about it some days, excited on others. Some days everyone I see on there is so dopey that I sense I must be the most interesting and mysterious person in the entire DC metropolitan area. The critiques are all cliché now. The apps are prone to abuse and harassment. Black and brown women and Asian men are rated less desirably compared to other users, especially white ones. For many daters, the apps are exhausting, consuming hours of your time (and some of your money) and leading to yet another kind of burnout. Also white people keep messaging me about Zoroastrianism (I AM A MUSLIM) and telling me they tried tahdig.
Something about it feels profoundly sad. Our society is so atomized and depersonalized that even falling in love is mediated by a platform.2 We’re goods! We’re goods, and being a good means selling which means branding which means strategy. This has been the history of the world, or at least of America, for the past several hundreds of years. But the history of American capitalism has also always been a history of making do (or “making out” in the wacko pervert speak of Burawoy).3 So what do we do to win? A few years back, when I was curious about why all of a sudden I was getting less matches than before, I turned to Reddit (the Library of Alexandria), and found thousands of daters (mostly men) asking why people (mostly women) weren’t sending them likes, weren’t matching with them, weren’t responding to their messages. The replies were of course Redditesque: brutally honest without crossing into cruel, though of course based on some stereotypes and norms about how men and women are, what they like, etc. But this is par for the course. What struck me was first that the replies were full of insights about the logisitics of the algorithm, with rules of thumb about what works and doesn’t work. What surprised me second was how earnest everyone was, and how willing they were to receive feedback on what, to me, feels like such a vulnerable kind of self-exhibition.
Should I be so surprised? The people using these apps have to learn how to play the system, just like with any other algorithmically-mediated interaction with winners and losers: Algorithmic hiring causes people to strategically place buzzwords on a CV (or, anecdotally, place buzzwords in tiny text in white ink on a pdf — readable to a machine but not a hiring manager). Algorithmic recommendation makes content creators tend towards clickbait and algo-bait, keeping up with changes so they can keep their income. The mere existence of search engines leads companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on optimizing their brand name for a customer’s search query. The algorithms try to predict us and we try to predict them.4
God, I want to believe that love and attraction are not so predictable. My parents met because my mom’s brother had a friend who was single and moving to America. My mom said she liked his smile and two weeks later they were married. Thirty years later they’re still the closest model of a happy life-long partnership that I know. But the same story is told so many times around the world with a different ending. Has anyone told the algorithms about my parents? Have they used that data?
Maybe my problem is that I am optimizing for narrative. I have been watching so much of The Mindy Project lately that it’s decomposing my brain. Unfortunately I love Danny Castellano (before season 4 when he becomes a weird trad misogynist). And I know the Mindy Kaling critiques — I know them!! The dark-haired white guy fantasy is potent and it is sick and it is even worse than I remember: Like, Mindy does not have a single non-white love interest. In 2015!? Even after they left network TV for HULU!? I thought I remembered there being at least one. Ridiculous. But nevertheless I am eating it like cotton candy, accumulating a sticky mound of sugar to ferment at the bottom of my stomach.
I melt when I see Danny and Mindy interact on the screen. I am kicking my feet and twirling my hair and blushing and slobbering, all part of the feverish mania of a crush we know so well. Is it so wrong to want to live through a story, with all its tumults and soft heat and clumsy ornaments? There’s something so humiliating about admitting that I desire a romantic life, as if I just admitted to dreaming of being a wizard.
But I don’t think what I’m interested in is so fantastical. Perhaps it isn’t the plot line I’m interested in, but gut. It is the embodiment of romance that feels lost. Apps miss the little things, which sometimes feel so important. Virtual representations can cut us off from the ways we come to care for each other, like seeing the minute and weird behaviors that make someone you weren’t into before suddenly irreversibly hot. Watching them pick up litter off the street, pack a lunch, muss their hair in the mirror. How does a profile communicate that?
idk man. what do u guys think
related reading:
I feel like dating apps are in some ways related to a lot of concepts from The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, especially her essay on how porn shapes our desires (and what we might do about it), “Talking to My Students About Porn,” and the titular essay which is available here. But maybe this is just because I read the book recently and everything reminds me of it, LOL
'Date Me' Google Docs and the Hyper-Optimized Quest for Love
asjhdflakjhsdf there were two essays I read years ago that I can’t find for the life of me. One was about The Big Sick/internalized racism and how related criticisms of Mindy Kaling are a bit different from those of The Big Sick, and another was about how South Asian social norms around marriage are reconciled with (?) the opposite fantasy in Bollywood films. I can’t find them but trust they exist and if you’d read them you’d CREAM ur PANTS. If you find anything that sounds like this please let me know. It’s midnight and my eyes are burning
some things:
I went to Ashley Darby’s now-defunct restaurant today and we took some photos. Gone but never forgotten
i spent so long writing this this evening that now im so tired and i can’t remember anything
Oh actually i had the most insane plane ride of my life but that’s a story for another time i guess
I’m now reading A Tale for the Time Being and The Lying Life of Adults. I’m looking to read some old but still fun/easy/interesting books lol because I feel like my brain is deteriorating and all I know is Cell Phone Dot Com Wi Fi etc etc
I’m seeing a PLAY with my mom tomorrow 😀
Ok that’s all for now
cheers
PM
My copay is sooo low you guys. I hate Aetna Student Health but I can’t deny they’re real as fuck for this
I am not trying to moralize — Many of the people I love and admire most in this world have found incredible and loving partners online! And I’m jealous of them!
Idk why he had to call it ‘making out’ like did nobody tell him
Another paper for you freaks: Malte Ziewitz’s Rethinking gaming: The ethical work of optimization in web search engines, in Social Studies of Science, 2019.