I think we should all be falling in love with our friends. Or our friends' friends.
Technology has fractured every aspect of human existence over which it creeps. Culture has become profoundly anti-social, fragmented across apps and spheres of technological experience. Like everything else, we want love to be predictable, easily organizable, a project that we can manage via a certain amount of time spent on three apps, and two dates a week. There is a myth that there are endless options in a big city. So you swipe, and swipe, and swipe. If there are endless options, you need to get specific: You can tell a dating app that you want to date someone who's tall, who has a certain set of politics or a certain set of hobbies, and it might show you those people (then again, it might not). It will show you the set of people who you think you might be attracted to. A set of potential objects of desire, based on prior assumptions. You silo yourself off, or you accept so many fringe cases, so many maybe-i'll-like-them-in-persons that the actual options become lost in the flood. Addiction, distraction, endless swiping across the virtual planes filled with people that we don't want to know. It's hard to get excited about people you don't know anything about, too, and there's no real stakes--it's much less scary to ask someone out on an app, knowing nothing about them, than to ask out someone who you actually know.
Dating apps have atomized human connection, and with it removed the few (and somewhat ineffective) guardrails that protect us from treating each other badly. There is no incentive to continue texting or seeing someone that you do not actually know. If you're shitty to a friend of a friend, there are consequences. If you're sexually harassing random girls who you don't know on Hinge, there are none. When I talk about treating each other badly, generally, I don't mean specifically sexual harassment or off-color comments or whatever, though those are certainly an issue-- I mean the endless question of whether this person is actually ever going to respond, whether it will actually lead to a date, whether the date will be good or just an hour of gritting your teeth until you can leave the coffee shop. And there are always more options. As any of my female friends know, spending any time swiping through your likes on Hinge and Bumble will make you a more judgemental and also much more depressed person.My point is that the structure of dating apps conditions users to treat other people as disposable or unimportant, which is a fast track to social psychic death, I think. You end up playing a numbers game, and nothing should be a numbers game less than love.
Of course, some people have found love on the internet. I think they're the outliers--if everyone found love on Hinge, it would cease to exist. My roommate thinks that you have one shot--you go on one or two dates from the apps, then you delete them (to be fair, it's how she met her ex as well as her current boyfriend; it's also how I met my most emotionally destructive situationship. Both the ex and the current boyfriend were the first people she met on different apps). Nothing interesting happens after that first shot, she thinks. I salute all of the people who have found their partners on dating apps, don't get me wrong, but I think we should reject Hinge and Tinder and Bumble and whatever new cesspit people are using as a technofascist imposition on the one thing that makes life worth living. The people who own Tinder and Hinge are on the board of Palantir, for godssake!
I think that the real rot lies in treating love and attraction as a game or a betting pool, something that can be organized and determined and optimized. If they were the kind of things that were easily quantified or sorted, I'm not sure that human life would be worth living anymore. The actual joy of love and intimacy is that it arrives unexpected, the quick glance across a room changing your life in an instant. Sometimes not the person you would expect, not "your type" in the parlance of the reality dating shows (see footnote); someone that you never would have looked twice at if you saw them on a screen becomes interesting, alluring, the person you can't live without. Partially this is because it's a fool's errand to try to determine who a person really is based on six photos and three quippy answers to boring prompts and a set of basic demographic information; partially this is because attraction is ephemeral, unquantifiable, unpredictable.
Love and attraction are far messier than we would like to admit; romcoms wouldn’t exist otherwise, no one would ever fall in love with someone they’re not supposed to. The sweet ache of knowing that you're doing something crazy is what makes life enjoyable. You bake a cake or throw a party for fifty hoping that one person will walk through the door; you take long walks in the rain and poke around in the wound to feel it twitch. You map the set of freckles across your beloved's nose. You give yourself over to the sublime, to something beyond yourself, to the flesh of human connection. As Lucia Berlin put it -- “Love makes you miserable,” our mama said. “You soak your pillow crying yourself to sleep, you steam up phone booths with your tears, your sobs make the dog holler, you smoke two cigarettes at once."
EVERYONE GET MORE HUMAN NOW!
Really, what I think I'm responding to is an overall decline in the texture of social interactions. Put your phone down while we're having coffee together, stop booking yourself for three events in one night, stop bailing on your friends when they invite you out, RSVP when they ask you to. Think less about boundaries and policing behavior and embrace the messy complexity of what it is to be human. Tell your friends that you love them. Forgive them when they fuck up, let them forgive you when you inevitably fuck up, stop trying to impose rules. What I'm really trying to say is that I think we should all throw ourselves into the project of love -- platonic, romantic, messy and beautiful and awful. But love is really all we have.
Anyways-what I'm saying is I think you should throw a party and invite all your friends. Tell them to bring all their friends too.