online dating is a diabolic machine
I woke up thinking about the Gizmodo piece by that woman who went out on two dates with the Magic the Gathering champ then wrote about how she, like, couldn’t believe that he was such a dork and that he didn’t even mention that on his OKCupid profile. I guess one point in her favor is that she’s a bit less passive-aggressive than most dating columnists by naming the dude instead of giving him a cutesy moniker like, I don’t know, Foul Unfamiliar. But to be turned off by Googling and then go out with him again just to data-mine for making-fun points? C’mon, Alyssa, that’s just cruel, and writing about it in a flip “oh well, THAT”S MY LIFE” way is just a setup to froth battle-of-the-sexes bullshit on both sides. (Not to mention that maybe dude didn’t mention this fact on his OKCupid profile because he was worried about attracting women who just wanted his money? Apparently being the world champion of Magic The Gathering can net you serious cash.) One thing that I’ve always disliked about online dating is how it turns romance into a dim sum menu—one from column A, one from column B, two from column C and voila, you’ve got a “perfect” match. That is rarely how life works out! It is possible to learn things from people and deeply care about people who aren’t exactly like you—sometimes those are the best lessons. (I mean, it’s not like I’m exactly like my parents, just to give a pretty obvious example, but I still love them and learn a lot about life from them.) I’m going to put this down as the most recent example that the ever-increasing technological-deterministic streak of culture is really detrimental to our lives as a whole. I mean, it’s ruined music consumption on multiple levels, from the unwillingness to pay on the part of people who believe that music should just be free for them to the idea that algorithms will guide them through their tastes. And now it’s going to ruin romance too. “Tell me everything up front, so I can decide whether or not to be grossed out by you before I have to bother.” God forbid they get to the point of things where they take their clothes off and he reveals a mole or something to her. (OK, maybe that’s a little extreme. But you see the logical through line here, yes? Why would you want to reveal everything about yourself to somebody right away?) Culturally I see little value in stories like this, ones that have zero self-examination and that pose as Real Talk while painting the writer as an innocent lamb who just has standards, what’s wrong with having standards when you’re trying to (Also, why have so many of the posts on Gawker Media by people who humiliate themselves in these experiential-yet-not-self-reflective ways lately been by women? Jezebel included there, obviously.) be a woman getting a paycheck from a site for dudes find love? Even though true love requires things like self-examination and a willingness to deal with one’s faults and also maybe the suspension of indulging one’s worst impulses. I mean of course there’s economic value—521,000 pageviews and climbing as of this writing, way to go everyone!—but that virality just further corrodes the discourse on all sides. This is the sort of writing I am talking about when I say that most “relationship” writing should go die in a fire, or at least marinate in self-reflection for more than five seconds.
