Love and Circumstance

I've always thought that our perception of love is incredibly circumstantial. There's a certain scenario I like to envision in my mind—imagine yourself as the main protagonist of your top ten favorite romance novels, movies, or television series. Now copy-paste any potential romantic partner, particularly ones you might deem incompatible or presume to be way out of your league, into the role of the primary love interest in any of those stories. Now, in each of those iterations, I want you to honestly ask yourself: do you really think, in each of those scenarios—with all the ridiculous coincidences and contrived plot events characteristic of romance stories—you and your partner would never see anything in each other? Or imagine you and your partner together tomorrow, where suddenly everyone on earth except you two just spontaneously vanished, and you had absolutely no choice but to coexist together for the rest of your lives, where you both have the opportunity to learn about each other through trial and tribulation, to be privy to all your attributes, both good and bad. Would nothing ever happen between you two?

I went on a Hinge date earlier this year in February. Long story short, neither of us really felt anything for each other, and we didn't really seem to have any natural chemistry. But what left the biggest impression on me from that date was this persistent notion that had we been in different circumstances that would've enabled us to better get to know each other and start with a baseline level of comfort, we might've made something happen from it. I mean, after all, we did end up matching and she did end up agreeing to a date, so we did come to the date at least somewhat optimistically. At least from my perspective, she was much like me in the sense that we felt that the premise of a Hinge date was stilted, unnatural, and was surrounded by too many expectations, whether we'd like to admit it or not. We were neither the type to get along with strangers super well, and if I imagined ourselves in a romance drama, or even something not as absurd and more commonplace like being classmates that got stuck together for a group project, it would've been far easier for us to ease ourselves into a more natural emotional bond.

Nobody writes a plot for a romance novel or movie where the two main characters meet in a dating app, and if they do, they always meet, and then something else unexpected happens; there's nothing remotely interesting or unique about using the app itself. Nobody's going to write a story about swiping left or right on your phone at midnight, having the most stale and generic text conversation before agreeing to a date, and then slogging it through the ritual of small talk.

Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Beauty and the Beast, The Titanic, The Notebook—the vast majority of the great romance stories we all know primarily center around surmounting the odds and the circumstances, overcoming the strife and struggle leading up to a relationship, not the relationship itself (or sometimes there is no relationship at all). By using dating apps, there is no strife. There is no struggle. There is no story. You simply meet, and that's it. Despite our cultural fascination with romance, we seem fine with foregoing the opportunity to write our own stories without a second thought. Dating apps optimize their way out of the story—the "hard" part—leading up to a relationship, But stories were never meant to be optimized; we don't suggest that Tolstoy should've used more concise language when writing Anna Karenina, and we don't recommend anyone to go to SparkNotes to skim over a one-page summary of it instead of actually reading it.

Dating apps are gamifying something that was never meant to be a game. Despite the predominant cultural perception surrounding the notion of love and relationships, these matters are quite serious, as sexual desire, emotional connection, and marriage are all deeply rooted in the survival of our species. And when we're forced into this dehumanizing, inane game of cycling through human beings as if they're NPCs in a role-playing game, many of us unsurprisingly feel disingenuous. We perceive that something just isn't right when we constantly meet one person after the other and trick ourselves into forgetting they ever existed, over and over again. These feelings are disconcerting, a poignant reminder that what we're doing is inherently unnatural and cruel, desensitizing and detaching ourselves from the innate, humanistic desire to pursue connection and to thus create stories. This isn't a problem for everyone, obviously, but for people like myself who cherish and embrace human connection in a profoundly emotional way, it makes life on dating apps grueling and exhausting.

With online dating, finding love is no longer achieved with the means by which you can write your own story—the nuances and intricacies, the magic that happens when we clash two personalities amidst perfectly imperfect circumstances—is no longer relevant. Instead, it has been consigned to the principles of modern-day mass marketing. Before online dating really even took off, Seth Godin wrote in 2003,

"It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. With 100,000 singles out there, and 10 million resumes, the only people getting what they want are the ones exceptional enough to stand out."

The ability to market yourself to an audience is highly determinant of your success, starting from the creation of your profile, your approach to texting, and how you choose to present and sell yourself on your first date. Unfortunately, a lot of us, including myself, are terrible at marketing, especially when the thing we're trying to sell is ourselves, which makes it only feel more disingenuous. And considering most people's attention span nowadays, you're going to have to present yourself hastily and convincingly; barely anybody wants to go through the trouble of actually getting to know you, especially when the next candidate is a couple swipes and a few texts away.

I'm convinced that online dating will remain a niche—a shortcut for those who want a shortcut. The proof is in our culture, in our obsession with the idea of romance for millennia. But more fundamentally, the proof is in humanity itself; I'm not inclined to believe we will ever be able to extricate ourselves from our fascination with stories and our predisposition to write them. Especially with something that is so integral to humanity as love and relationships, stories of utmost struggle and of triumphant redemption—the nuances and intricacies of human interaction, the fateful magic that takes place when we clash two personalities amidst perfectly imperfect circumstances—are far too compelling for us to let go of.