This past July, I got to be one of my high school best friend’s maid of honor for her wedding. I lined up with the other bridesmaid and we walked out one by one while Taylor Swift’s voice blared over the speakers, singing “You can hear it in the silence / You can feel it on the way home / You can see it with the lights out / You are in love.” Under the gazebo, which sheltered us from the sweltering Texas heat, I watched my friend walk down the aisle, her veil trailing behind while tears welled in the eyes of her soon-to-be-husband. I got a glimpse of a love I had only heard about in passing, gaining newfound respect for the bond they shared, and thinking about how absurd it was that this random man that she had found on Tinder and brought into her home was now going to be a constant in her (and our) lives forever.
After my own stint in the world of dating apps, I’ve discovered that it’s quite rare for an online interaction to turn into wedding bells. I was not just witnessing the romantic union of two souls coming together – I was witnessing a lightning in a bottle.
As I was lamenting to friends on how terrible the dating scene is, one of my them referred to the whole interaction as a “mating interview,” which was the most blunt and hilariously (but also, depressingly) accurate reading of the situation. It does feel like an interview in that cold, formal and nerve wracking way. Anytime I go out to meet someone off the apps, there’s no nervous excitement, just dread and the desire to get it over with. But worst of all, that small tiny hope in the back of my head telling me that maybe this time, just this once, there will be a spark that leads to something good.
But does it happen?
(As Chappell Roan once said, NO!)
I can think of plenty of dates where I’ve zoned out while he started rattling off historical facts I did not ask for, or where the whole interaction felt like a one-way interrogation from him that left no space for a conversation to breathe, or where he inevitably says the Thing that reveals that hint of sexism or alpha male dominance that makes me want to stick my head into a toilet and puke. Let’s not even get started on the guys whose love language is “physical touch.”
You’d think that with these apps you could cast a wide net that caters to your most compatible, but the illusion of choice is a double edged sword. Why match with one person, when you can have the same old shallow conversation with hundreds, just to ghost them three sentences in? Why take the time to study a profile and get to know a singular individual on a deeper level when there is always a more attractive option waiting in your phone?
There is an unfortunate lack of true connection, where instead of thoughtful responses you get the age old “wyd?” or the nonchalantly bored “dinner on Tues?” before you’ve even proven that you can hold a singular interesting conversation. (And don’t even mention the number of failed matches that ask to follow you on instagram – there is something so unnatural in giving strangers access to your personal life, when you know the interaction will end up being fleeting.)
One of my friends wondered aloud, once, about what happened to the magic of being set up by your friends. It seems that we’ve lost the art of a good set up; old school matchmaking fueled not by the capitalist greed and paywalls of dating apps, but an individual’s love for two friends who might have some common ground.
It’s not like matchmaking is fully out of the question. For years, my mother has been pushing to match me with the sons of family friends that she knows. I can tell she fears I will end up alone, tending to cats and dogs rather than human children. There is something terrifying about the prospect of trying to form a romantic connection with someone when you know your family is involved. There’s pressure in knowing that you’re not dating to learn what you want from a partner, you’re dating for marriage. I know that families have been arranging and matching lovers for generations, and oftentimes it can work out very well, but something about it feels so uneasy and unorthodox to me when I’ve always thought I would stumble into something organically. If not organically, at least by my own choice, with power over the when and where and if and how long of the whole situation.
I can’t help but wonder what happened to the age old meet cute? To talking to people in the wild, to taking the time to get to know one another? For that natural evolution of friendship to romance without that constant pressure of a hook up? To fun activities, instead of dull dinner conversations? To holding open someone’s door? To polite niceties and banter that doesn’t end in misogynistic comments? To shared interests, melding your life with someone else not because you have to, but because you truly complement one another? Perhaps it exists out there, somewhere – just not in my corner of the universe.
I sometimes wonder if romance was just a concept created by western capitalism as an excuse to sell flowers and chocolates and diamond rings, something for the benefit of the economy, something to keep us pining and spending, because surely these half-baked dates cannot be the Love that all these books and movies and songs and poems have been marketing to me all these years. Or maybe some of us are just unlucky.
Anyway, enough whining.
There are Hinge messages to respond to.
