Assembly line romance

I went to socialist speed dating because as all of you know by now, I am a staunch defender of romance and also flirting and also socialism. I’ve never speed dated before. The way I pictured it was something like a conference where you go from table to table talking to different people. An assembly line of prospects if you will.

This event rejected the assembly line, maybe for socialist reasons, but I suspect for (dis)organizational reasons. Instead, it was more like a summer camp mingle. They made us break into random groups and do icebreakers about things like your astrological sign or your favorite thing about yourself. They had volunteers holding up signs with number groups (50-100 say) and you had to mill around and find your match based on the numbered name tags you were given. Each rotation, they would dictate new conversation prompts which were the kinds of questions you get on hinge dot com, except with a leftist spin sometimes. Because of this, men kept coming up to me the whole night and asking me things like, what’s your love language?

Acts of service, but that’s one of those questions I’m saving for marriage. No one I spoke to seemed to be having a very good time. Everyone was angsty, defensive, anticipating rejection. A lot of people seemed to find the process agonizing. One girl near me had a full breakdown when she couldn’t find one of her matches. It’s not like I’m having any success with dating elsewhere, she said to no one in particular. Whenever I asked anyone what had brought them to socialist speed dating, they answered in basically a similar way, often with an acute sense of shame. At the end of the night, someone came up to me to tell he followed me online and that we had talked on a dating app at some point. So why didn’t we go out? I asked him, expecting him to ask me out now. You probably ghosted me, he told me, trying to play it off as a joke and not quite succeeding.

I was going on to a beautiful editor’s birthday party in Bushwick, so I was wearing this corset top and my name tag kept falling off of it. I got kind of drunk right away because I came straight from work and didn’t have time to eat beforehand. On the door, one of the organizers made this joke about how there was libertarian speed dating right down the block, and I kept hearing people repeating it, laughing at themselves. Inside, they led some chants, socialism style, which got people briefly enthusiastic. We need more red diaper babies if that ends up happening tonight, said one of the people emceeing, before trying to lead a chant that went “more red diaper babies.” The crowd mumbled along. It was too early.

The point of a socialist organization, critics kept saying online when this event was announced, isn’t to get people laid. Inarguably, though, the point of a socialist organization is organizing. And dating, at its core, is just like any other kind of mingling. In her book, A Collective Bargain, which I fact-checked back when I was working for her agent, Jane McAlevey describes how natural leaders emerge during unionization processes and how you learn to identify them. It’s always a people’s person, someone who talks to everyone at work, who knows their children’s names, who knows their little quirks, who can intuitively understand what people will respond to, what will get them to push past their fears and conflicts and exhaustion and prioritize solidarity.

Obviously not everyone wants to do this kind of affective labor or is equipped to do it. And it takes all kinds on this earth. But being good at talking to people or at least having the desire to talk to people is on a basic level an important component of socialism. That Marx quote that people are always pulling out and which I have embraced in ruinous, consumerist ways, is indisputably true: “The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

I recently launched personals ads for my magazine, called Earthly Connections. I kept trying to solicit them from friends and acquaintances and everyone expressed enthusiasm about the idea but told me they were too shy. It seems more vulnerable than a dating app, one of the other editors at the magazine told me. In purely numeric terms it really is less vulnerable. You put less information about yourself, you don’t have to include your physical biometrics, your pictures are not juxtaposed crudely besides those of thousands of other people’s, placing you within a vicious hierarchy of desirability or at least of photogenecity. You are not at the whim of an algorithm created to mine data and to try and force you to shell out money for visibility.

But it is more vulnerable in the sense that it is declarative. The apps are so ubiquitous as to be generic. They encourage passivity, laziness, dishonesty, inattention, the anticipation of rejection, the kind of mindless, repetitive swiping that promotes object impermanence. The thing that has made me feel brittle about trying to date in New York and in this time is above all the sense that it is hard to retain someone’s undivided attention long enough to really be vulnerable with each other. It’s tempting to try to rush it. You meet someone and if you’re demonstrative enough, if you throw yourself at them, you can work around the system. This premise has spawned a whole genre of reality TV aimed at the idea of hacking love: Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, 90 Day Fiancé, Are You the One?, Love Island, the entire extended Bachelor franchise.

I’ve watched parts of all of these shows, mainly when I was sick or otherwise incapacitated. When I had covid, I watched so much Married at First Sight that I started dreaming in the vernacular of it. I wondered if I could also have a blind arranged marriage, chosen by an allegedly infallible matchmaking system. The notion of scientific compatibility is an overarching theme in these shows, although a lot of the happiest couples I know in real life are not particularly compatible on paper. On Are You the One? this idea of compatibility is gamified into a kind of treasure hunt. Stuck on an island together, the participants must search for their perfect match. When they choose someone, they are taken to the “truth booth,” a room that looks like a dystopian spaceship, and their error is revealed to them. They believed they were compatible. They were wrong. This is not their soulmate.

This kind of ritualistic humiliation is obviously the backbone of reality TV. But it also feels baked into the dismantled courtship practices that have trickled down to us. I saw a man on Hinge a while ago who, in the section where they ask you what your dating intentions are, had written something like, “I’d love to be in a relationship but unfortunately I have a chronic wandering eye, but who knows maybe you can make me settle down.”

You couldn’t waterboard that one out of me, but I hope he finds what he’s looking for or at least figures out what that is. A challenge, ladies, if any of you choose to accept it.