I went on a date with someone who, midway through, told me that on the Larry David show, Larry David always stops midway through a date to ask: how do you think this date is going? So, he said, pausing for dramatic effect, how do you think this date is going? We were at a sports bar in the East Village. That was not where we had started the date, but we had ended up there because he disliked the cocktail bar in my neighborhood that I had chosen. It was the kind of sports bar where they were playing tennis on the screen and sad rock music over the loud speaker. I was too embarrassed to say I thought the date was going incredibly poorly so I told him I thought sometimes it took more than a couple drinks to get to know someone. When I asked him, he demurred. It seems to me that if you ask that kind of question, you have to be prepared to answer it, but I have not watched the Larry David show.
I went on a date with someone else who asked me what I thought about dating apps. My feelings are sort of complex overall, although they skew negative, so I told him that. He asked me immediately if I thought people were less likely to pursue each other in real life because dating apps seemed to offer infinite variety. I don’t really know if that’s true. It seems to me that it’s less about variety than risk aversion, but it’s hard for me to put myself in that mindset. I told him that truthfully I have a tendency to be extremely passive, a negative trait that makes you liable to end up dating people who are mostly interested in the chase, so I was never pursuing anyone to begin with. He seemed unhappy with my response, he became defensive.
The most interesting thing about going on dating app dates is often talking to people about dating. The people who profess rage or shame or disgust towards apps on the platform fascinate me. The people who treat it, earnestly, like a homework project kind of scare me, but I suspect they are the ones who have figured it out. They have cracked the secret, which is like any algorithm, mainly about appealing to a wide enough mass that you are sort of generic. It’s like Instagram face for your personality. The men who get in the news for behaving badly on apps, the “Tinder Swindler” or “West Elm Caleb” are running startlingly generic game. On Catfish, that incredibly insane golden era of reality TV, the eeriest thing about the catfishers is how bland and interchangeable they all are. The more vague and popular your identifying features, the easier it is to cast a wide net.
If this seems antithetical to relationship building, which is generally based on extreme specificity, helping people fall in love is clearly not a very sustainable business model. No one with a happy and fulfilled love life would pay $32.99 a month for Hinge+, which apparently allows you to like an unlimited number of users and to see everyone who has liked you at once rather than having to filter through them one by one. The second one would probably be useful for me. I was recently banned from Hinge because faced with any large stack of likes, I experience extreme levels of anxiety and usually delete and reset the app. This is apparently bot behavior. I briefly felt incredibly liberated and then they rescinded my ban. I remade my profile and tapped through it on the subway. “Watcha reading?” someone messaged me immediately.
What disturbs me about Hinge is how much, for all its dystopian manipulations, it mostly mimics the dullness of traditional courtship. It encourages people to list their vices (drinking, smoking, drug use), their education levels and job titles. It offers prompts about what you’ve learned in therapy or what you’ll order for the table or how you spend your average Sunday or what you’re looking for in a partner. Because of the limited likes and clunky format, ostensibly designed to encourage seriousness, it also encourages the kind of intense vetting that makes you ask: is this person relationship material? The kind of person who you might say right off the bat presents as relationship material is often middle class with a classic managerial office job, enjoys average levels of fitness and normal hobbies, seems domesticated, probably has a dog. In that sense, the app punishes strangeness or wildness, it enforces the kind of weird prudishness that makes you wonder: if I put up this picture, will people think I’m loose? The mother of their children is probably at brunch right now. Although Hinge is not by any means exclusively, or maybe even primarily, a platform for people seeking serious commitment, it is nonetheless incredibly sexless. It would drain the joy out of flirting, if anyone even knew how to do that anymore.
It is not of course the only app. The Match Group, which owns Hinge, also owns Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, The League, Plenty of Fish, and a wide assortment of other dating apps. There is Bumble, the “feminist” app where women make the first move. There is Raya, the “celebrity” app. There is Feeld, the “weird” app for adventurous people. I downloaded Feeld briefly after a friend who went through a devastating breakup recommended it to me. A few swipes in, I saw a profile called “John Galt” with pictures of a faceless torso and some anime porn. I deleted the app. Rinse and repeat.
What depresses me about dating apps is mainly how little they deviate from the norm, how they encourage our worst tendencies, how easy and acceptable they make it to lash out at people, to objectify them, to do things like casually ghosting, blocking, or otherwise erasing the existence of people you have dated or had sex with—clearly an insane, dehumanizing, and bad thing to do. But the people I know who haven’t spent any significant amount of time on dating apps, but have spent any significant amount of time being single, have largely had similar experiences. A friend of mine dated her coworker who would respond selectively, stringing her along, and then eventually ghosted her rather than break up with her. How do you ghost someone you work with, I remember wondering. She was too afraid of being deemed crazy or clingy or obsessive to call him out. She let it go. There are several men in my social circle I have turned down after a drink or two who still will not speak to me or make eye contact with me at parties. Sometimes the apps seem preferable to this kind of discomfort, often sustained by social groups that tacitly encourage shame, disparage rejection, treat success like a conquest.
The people I know who have had the most success on dating apps are the ones who really go into it wholeheartedly, who really believe in themselves. Often, I think they are the ones looking to slot someone into a place in their lives. Serial monogamists, you might call them, although they are not all monogamists, and I know several people who consider that term a slur. They are the sober minded version of the people who are in love with the idea of love. I am maybe in love with the idea of love. I want a person who is completely individual and who I can adore, the rest seems extraneous. It is hard to select for that on an app, but it is also hard to select for that in real life. It may be a fantasy version of what your life can look like, sure, but what do we have if not fantasy? If there are no utopias in our minds, where could they ever flourish?
In Crossing Delancey (1988), a quintessential New York romantic comedy, Isabelle Grossman is a single woman in her 30s working at a bookstore, looking, kind of ambivalently for love. She has a studio apartment, an amazing wardrobe, very healthy, defined curls. Probably all a woman really needs. She develops a crazy crush on an emotionally unavailable famous writer, who narcissistically encourages her. She is at pains to distance herself from her scrappy Lower East Side Jewish roots, but her grandmother, who lives in a high rise building downtown and who is prone to dramatic forms of manipulation, forces her to see a matchmaker. The matchmaker finds her a pickle seller named Sam, who instantly falls in love with her. He tries to court her by sending her an Annie Hall like felted bowler hat with the equivalent of a word of mouth gift receipt in case she doesn’t like it. She does like it but she doesn’t like Sam. Or she can’t figure out if she likes him. He’s not the man she dreamed of. She’s cool, bohemian, bookish, sought after, a literary it girl of her day. Can she really show up to a glamorous party with a pickle seller on her arm?
If this sounds like a cruel way to assess a potential partner, I would venture that many of us have at times thought in similar ways. I often have the sense when I meet new people, who are prospective lovers or friends, that they are sizing me up mentally against an imagined hierarchy of success, attractiveness, coolness, wealth, connectedness, intelligence, talent. This may sound crude but it’s not as simple as chasing whoever ends up coming out on top. You might imagine on meeting someone what it would be like to walk into a room with someone, to tell your friends about them, whether they will be seen as the shinier person in the relationship, the more desirable one, whether you will be overshadowed. This can create a kind of disorganized object attachment which ricochets between trying to seize onto the thing you desire and trying to avoid getting caught in its orbit. It’s a love-hate relationship, a swirl of jealousy and desperation.
Ultimately, Isabelle realizes that Sam can be incorporated into her world and also that she still belongs in some ways to his world. They soften towards each other. It takes time and is a painful process. There is surprising personal growth for a romantic comedy. In a cringe-inducing scene towards the end, Isabelle nearly blows it all, looking as beautiful as anyone ever has in a movie. The writer makes her feel seen, he really gets her, and he’s so self-obsessed it’s easy to be obsessed with him too. He tries to seduce her and then offers her a job midway through to be his personal assistant/muse. To her credit, Isabelle says no. She understands then, briefly, instinctively, that she is the rockstar and not the rockstar’s girlfriend.
What I think is really beautiful about Crossing Delancey, aside from the tenderness with which Isabelle and Sam care for Isabelle’s grandmother, is how they really try to accept each other’s differences and to see past the fantasy partners they have built up in their heads. It’s not that Isabelle has to humble herself to be with a man who doesn’t care about the things that matter to her, as so often happens in romance narratives. It’s more that she comes to understand that people are complex and multi-faceted, that there are other kinds of human experience and feeling and sympathies that may come to trump more superficial kinds of social similarity.
I cross Delancey most days now, more often than not. I lug my laundry across, stop at the light, close my eyes, say a prayer to the spirit of serendipity or whatever cosmic fate is biding its time. You can’t hurry love, whatever the apps say.
There are these two references that come to mind:
In a 2019 episode of Ologies with Allie Ward, she hosted Dr. Benjamin Karney to discuss the study of Matrimoniology (Marriage). When asked about if similarities (i.e. dating app compatibility) are what determines how people fall in love, he noted it's "the interaction between two people" that really does it. Specifically, that when people interact, are responsive, and make each other feel heard and understood, you'll feel interested and excited about what's going on between each other. Plus, these interactions are conditional to the context you are in: you cannot replicate that kind of interaction, and no dating profile can promise or replicate it either. It's sort of exciting to meet people, and when you enter with that goal, I imagine it is at least more fun! Even if you met people with identical profiles in identical locations, an infinite amount of variability will result in you feeling different each time. In Dr. Karney's words: "We don’t choose partners the way we choose furniture, because furniture doesn’t have to choose us back. But partners do, so it has to be an interaction; a give and take".
CJ Hauser wrote about their experience on dating apps, noting how conversations on Tinder were akin to being "in-book" in chess game: chess moves that are optimized for success, which only when diverged allow for more authentic play. Similarly, when Hauser spoke to one of the people on the app, he gestured to being "in-book" in Tinder (Small Talk Purgatory), allowing them to step out of the the same common algorithmic responses, giving them the floor to be more human and exploratory with each other. That attempt to get a review of the date like Larry David seemed like a faulty attempt to disrupt the "meta" of the dating process, and I think the thing missing is that he was afraid to actually respond in a vulnerable or sincere manner, which would actually open things up to be more organic. The give and take HAS to be risky on both sides. Otherwise, it's just polite conversation, and that isn't particularly intimate or connective.
This is a really thoughtful and well-written essay -- kudos.