Dare 2 Date?
Dating app whirlpools and a prophecy of lovelessness
Hi! I cranked open my laptop after over a year today (seeing that the only use I have for it is to run this once-bustling newsletter) to pen down wandering, disjointed thoughts about the 2024 General Election. But I quickly realised nothing I have to say hasn’t already been said. I’m far from an expert on electoral processes, and like many others, I’ve learnt so much this election cycle beyond what is held in common knowledge (ah, the resounding “people have denied Modi government iqbal”). So for my unglorious return back to your inboxes, I’ll stick to something I’m a self-declared expert, almost a veteran, in. Dating.
Late 20s is a harrowing age to be single. Our friends start to squarely fall in one of four categories, arranged in descending order of ridiculousness:
Married. Full blown fucking married to either someone we vaguely remember from college, or a stranger so left of field for them it must be a bit.
Confused. In a relationship with one foot out the door—in love enough to pee in front of them, but not enough to be undeterred by Daniel Sloss’ Jigsaw.
Free. They’ve danced this dance enough to now declare independence; soooo radically in love with themselves, never missing the chance to tell a crowd they PREFER BEING ALONE!!! (hey man, you okay?)
Hopeful. The bottom feeders. Just trying to find love, hold hands, share warm hugs while watching trash reality TV in bed. And so far, overwhelmingly unsuccessful.
After concluding a long, sweet, somewhat exhausting tryst with love and manic romantic dependence (weird way to say I broke up), I’ve spent the last year jumping between #3 and #4. Makes for good cardio, but terrible heartaches. I switch fairly often between ‘BEING ALONE IS GREAT. IMAGINE SHARING A BED WITH SOMEONE. IMAGINE THE CREASES’ and ‘hey man. I’d love a cuddle… and someone to beat at NYT Connections.’ The switch can be monthly, daily, minutely—and I know I share this fickleness with many others. Let’s not lie here, all of ya’ll are crazy.
So why is it that I, and perhaps you, gentle reader, have not yet found ourselves a worthy partner? What is a ‘worthy partner’ anyway? This edition of Charcha has zero news, but a handful of honest critical analysis of my coupling methodologies—which can hopefully double up as a list of ‘Do Not’s for you.
If groceries can arrive in 7 minutes, why can’t love? A few courteous minutes after my big breakup, I carried this foolproof logic to Google Playstore to resuscitate my long-paused Hinge account. Setting up a profile is always fun—puts you in touch with just how big of a fucking snoozefest you are. Beyond this point? Pure hell. Sooner or later you will fall into a reckless cycle of this vague description:
You install a dating app, condense your myriad likes, quirks, hobbies, jokes, stories into six pictures and three prompts, and do a quick wellness check before sliding the ‘distance’ bar to 25km and ‘age’ to a cosy 26-40 (no questions, no comment). The landing page will start laying out meticulously-assembled profiles, summarising with great care, thought, and caution 26-40 years of strangers’ well-lived lives. Their myriad likes, quirks, hobbies, jokes, stories, in six pictures and three prompts…
And you will swipe left.
He would order beer and fries for the table. You would too, usually. But who writes such a thing? Swipe left.
He would fall for you if you… pull his chair. Well, okay, you are looking for humour and goof in a partner. But this is *so* unoriginal. Swipe left.
He likes long walks and cafe hopping. Two things that invariably brighten your weekends and would be so much more heartening to do with a partner. But boy does this read basic. Swipe left.
Traits he values in a partner are honesty and communication. Reasonable, humble, clear asks. You remember your last relationship missing both, you remember identifying these as minimum romantic expectations in therapy. But this, here, just seems lazy. Swipe left.
Two truths in a lie: he’s had a close brush with death in his travels; he eaten animals you didn’t think were edible; he’s gotten a bone fractured. You suspect its the fracture—which makes for two incredible stories you want to stick around to hear. But hey, what a show off. Swipe left.
Alright then, what the fuck.
We get so caught up in mechanically swiping left based on arbitrary criteria we couldn’t list if asked, that this now has nothing to do with finding love. Its Gamified Dopamine. Its Thrill of Inconsequential Rejections. See, for us women, saying no to romantic advances from men IRL is a most nerve wracking and dreadfully consequential affair, so this can feel great. But it feels so great sometimes, we can forget to say yes. For me, so powerful is this swipe left whirlpool that I open the app hoping for another chance at love, and close it convinced I will never find it. Truth is, I seldom even try.
Late one night, the rare ~*match*~ comes by. Then the app prompts us to talk. Pray tell, was swimming against the whirlpool to swipe right not enough, that I now have to make small talk? Sure, I beat all odds to make decent conversation, and even defy gender roles to offer to shift the conversation off the app. A move that can only end two ways. Either my WhatsApp Graveyard of Matches takes another unsuspecting victim. Or we meet. Our tryst with the dating app ends here regardless, and will never come up in conversations with our friends and families should we make it that far.
And even if we talk, and talk, and talk—the newness, intrigue, and excitement tends to wear off as quickly as a conversation with ChatGPT in its early days. This is, for all you know and to the extent you know, not a real person yet. There is no flesh and bones behind the half-arsed conversation you both drag your feet to because you *must* get along off the app as much as you did on (Hinge, after all, thinks you’re most compatible). But it wears: a hundred things get in the way. A hundred things more tangible, short-term, and directly related to paying your bills than finding love.
Look, I’m almost 27. A fully realised person who likely knows themselves well enough to have built their world to their liking. All the furniture, so to say, arranged the way I like it—work, hobbies, leisure, thoughts, all in their designated time and places. How, then, do I let a stranger into my life and trust they will make themselves at home without moving a thing?
And I imagine this home gets smaller and furniture more rigid as one grows old and more comfortable with their own company. That scares me. If its this bad now, will my luck in love only get worse year on year? Will my insincerity today lead to chronic loneliness tomorrow? Am I getting too comfortable being alone? And most pressing question of all—why does that terrify me?
Trying to write this down has helped me reason with some of these fears. Being alone is not terrifying to me—missing out on being loved is. Love is wonderful, and love is for all. I just want to make sure I get a part of it. Sure, the dating app whirlpool can be concrete evidence that I’m not reeeeeally putting in the effort (true, it’s true). In fact I’ve annoyingly run into everything but love on there—by some magic I’ve found joyous friendships in past matches, while in some I’ve found what will forever remain a nondescript Instagram follower. This one match landed up on Shark Tank and pulled mad funding. Another became an academic peer I cite sometimes. My last date was the only other person who had read this self-published clusterfuck of a book I was hung up on, and an older date just self-published a book I would never in a million years read.
I also must declare: I’ve been trying. I have! It’s been a couple months of patience and not dismissing horribly written bios or shirtless selfies in milliseconds (on second thought…). I now fight out of the dating app whirlpool more times than usual. I’ve even pulled myself ashore to some truly astoundingly wonderful people, and I plan to pave way with them with plain sincerity. So I, you, my mom, my besties, we all can rest assured if I end up alone it will not be for lack of trying.
Because it’s human to keep trying.
