Dating. Am I good at it? What qualifies as good at it? For me, dating was always about the effort. I put effort into my dates under the (gargantuanly misguided) notion that effort nets result. I do my hair and makeup, pull a lewk, and put on my optimism and positivity panties before walking out the door. I ask thoughtful questions and come prepared with morsels of information gleaned from their profiles so as to ensure my dates never feels void of conversation topic or connection. I put my best effort forward, because I believe — sorry, believed — dating is an activity worth the effort.
And in 2013, when the oldest Millennials were in their early 30s, Tinder became available to smartphone users everywhere. Suddenly dates too (or sex, or phone sex) could be set up without so much as a single spoken word between two people who had never met. In the years since, app dating has reached such a level of ubiquity that a couples therapist in New York told me last year that he no longer even bothers asking couples below a certain age threshold how they met. (It’s almost always the apps, he said.)
“I live in a small city,” she says. “Big enough to always be meeting new people, but small enough to see at least three people you know on an outing. I think where I live all the lesbians know each other, all the gays know each other, and so forth. I think it can become a bit of a cesspool where dating is concerned. Everyone you know has dated everyone you know.”
Even in the late 19th century, marriage was more practicality than rom-com, whereas today’s daters are looking for nothing less than a human Swiss Army knife of self-actualization. We seek “spiritual, intellectual, social, as well as sexual soul mates,” the sociologist Jessica Carbino told The Atlantic’s Crazy/Genius podcast. She said she regarded this self-imposed ambition as “absolutely unreasonable.”
What should I think when someone I’ve been flirting with all night tells me they’ve only dated cis women, but lately have considered “opening that up to trans women”? At the end of the night when they don’t kiss me, how do I know if that’s because of me or because they decided tonight wasn’t the night to get adventurous? This is not a rare occurrence.
Unlike a friendship, where not responding to a text for two hours (or two days?) is acceptable, in dating, both the act of texting and not texting communicate something. How fast or how slow you respond says something to the other person.