The Death of Dating
I recently caught myself knee deep in a conversation with a male acquaintance who is equally as exasperated with the current state of dating women as I am with dating men. To be honest, I don’t even know if “dating” is the right word to describe what all of us single people are doing out here anymore.
We’re hanging out, okay? Isn’t that enough?
Your friend – or worse, your mom – asks you to define what you’re doing with said surfer boy – or worse, a dentist from Detroit – and you justify his commitment-phobia with responses like, “He just doesn’t do labels. He said he’s not ready for a relationship. But, ya know, we’re like hanging out. So, when he is ready…”
That’s not a typo. I didn’t forget words. That’s the end of the sentence. Correction: that’s the end of the incomplete sentence. Feel free to insert an infinite number of ellipses to it. At no point in time is a single period going to be appropriate.
Because if you didn’t know, that is the current state of dating. Modern-day memes say things like, “What do you mean, what are we? We’ve been hanging out for three months and you’ve met my parents. Clearly, we’re friends.” And they’re funny because they’re so ridiculously true.
In my conversation with aforementioned male, he expressed his frustration of finding women in dating apps who are essentially Bumbling around out of boredom.
Guy: “If they don’t want to be in the race, they should get off the horse.”
Me: “Agreed. But in my humble opinion, the issue is that there are multiple races. And only one app – essentially – to serve all of them. So, it comes down to you being okay with asking the tough questions. And the recipient of those questions being invested in honest answers.”
Guy: “Touché. There’s definitely more than one race. But, sad truth, honesty barely exists.”
I’m not here to argue that point otherwise. Unfortunately, our collective we is pretty damn awful when it comes to upholding integrity. But, if finding a partner means something to the generic you, then you simply have to keep playing the game of numbers. Yes, honesty is not everyone’s top priority, but you don’t typically buy the first car you test drive; you take all the ones that interest you out for a spin until you find the one that you simply cannot live without.
Case in point. One of my girlfriends recently got ghosted (and blocked) by a guy when she explicitly stated that she was uninterested in showing up to their first date in a thong bikini. They’d been talking for two days – yes, two – and she didn’t think the immediate ass exposure would be appropriate. His response: he can’t handle uptight women. Wow, I never knew that modesty was synonymous with being ignorantly conservative. This guy clearly has a faulty engine. And, in the all too famous words of Ariana Grande, thank you, next.
Per normal, I could go on and on about the obnoxious stories that epitomize online dating, but in all of my ramblings for the last year or so, I realized that my sexual orientation creates for a rather biased opinion on the subject matter. So, I recently took to the streets – or my DMs – to ask some single men for their unfiltered stories, answers, and frustrations about our current “hang out” state.
If you’re eager to hear their answers (and aren’t we all), then I’m actually here to tell you that you’re in the wrong place. Because their responses are not this blog. Their responses were going to be this blog, but the more email replies I received, the more I realized that I needed to really break all of this information down into two equal parts.
Part one. A precursor to their answers. Essentially, my interpretation of the current madhouse that is dating.
And, part two. Their actual answers (which is a three-part series that you can start reading here). That I attempted to convey as eloquently as possible without allowing for my double X chromosome to get in the way.
Because what I’ve learned through all of this data analysis – yes, I admit, I’ve said once or twice under bated breath, “Just do this for the blog, Stephanie” – is that men are equally as annoyed with women as women are annoyed with men.
I know, I know, the mutually agreed upon confusion that exists between the two sexes is most certainly not a new revelation. I oddly remember Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus hitting bookshelves circa the early 90’s and I can’t even tell you why – other than that I must have found it on my mom’s nightstand and thought the name to be intriguing – because I was definitely still under the age of ten. Honestly, I probably thought men were really from Mars and women were really from Venus (life was so much easier then). Fast forward to present day, open up iTunes and allow yourself to be blown away by the number of podcasts that are attempting to decipher the dead zone that is dating.
Men confuse women. Women confuse men. From Adam and Eve to Kim Kardashian and Kanye. Same old. Same old.
My point in all of this excess verbiage is that our courting conundrums are not a man versus woman thing. At all. It’s more like a “I’m here for the real deal” versus “I’m not” kind of thing (which I started to analyze here). All sexes are welcome to enter either race. In the former, you’re interested in monogamy, and in the latter, you’re more liberally exploring the field. The only expectation we should put on ourselves is to honestly show up with the proper bib number.
And a major problem is that too many of us lose our bib numbers or try to sweet talk our way into an undeserving heat. Shit, some of us don’t even know where the hell to park the car.
Ladies, I will be getting to the bottom of dick pics in next week’s man blog – this is not to be taken literally – but I’ll tell you right now, the guys who parade around under the guise of boyfriend material only to immediately send their privates via the social systems in less than a 24-hour timeframe, they are not running the monogamy race.
Nice try, Shooter. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go.
My professional opinion – if a toxic marriage followed by three years of diverse dating experiences makes one an expert – is that we’ve turned dating into a Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors (welcome metaphor number two). The ice cream parlor is a paradigm for the paradox of choice, a phenomenon that suggests that we actually become less satisfied with the more options that become available to us.
Our infinite access to people via dating apps and social media and the off-hand face-to-face interaction have perpetually paralyzed us. We interact. We date. And, every single one of these people is a ten in at least one category. And, armed with these handfuls of different tens, we patiently await the moment when we will find the one person who is the proud owner of all of them (think chocolate chip cookie dough).
But newsflash. No one is a perfect ten in every single category.
Regardless, we try. We incessantly try to piece together our model mate. We keep ourselves exposed across the airwaves because maybe. The Internet has subconsciously ingrained into our psyches that there is certainly someone who is better-looking or funnier or smarter or more “my type” just one more simple swipe away.
YOU MUST KEEP GOING, it screams.
And underneath it all, we’re really just paralyzed by our own inability to find the person that matches this unattainable level of perfection that we’ve manifested in our minds. Then, we’re ironically disappointed with our own paralysis.
So, we’re trapped. In a self-inflicted prison. We’re forever torn between honoring our millennial mantra that whispers for us to never settle and succumbing to the realistic notion that monogamy is a choice that flourishes in our chosen partner’s flaws.
Because when we choose someone, really choose, we’re not attaching ourselves to an ideal. We’re not thanking our lucky stars that we’ve finally found the person with whom we will never disagree. Choosing someone is not about hand-selecting that person’s habits with the presumption that those habits will magically appease us at any – and every – given moment.
Really choosing a person has nothing to do with perfection.
Because to choose a person is to extend our hands as a token of our conscious humility: You take all of my blemishes, and I will take you in your brokenness. Choosing someone is choosing the journey, not the expectation that he or she has already arrived. Because to choose someone is to be aware that an arrival does not exist.
The choice is an understanding that you will both awaken in the morning – your interdependent bodies holding each other while squeezed just tightly enough into one sliver of the queen-sized bed – and you will both be faced with the decision to choose each other again. And again. And again. Because choosing a person is not a one-time decision. The words do not roll off our tongues to be swallowed by our partner’s ears for one minute of one night when we were fumbling through the apartment door, locking lips, clothes half-removed and soon-to-be strewn across the floor.
I don’t choose you today because you know that I chose you yesterday.
I choose you today because I am committed to the work. And I am committed to the work because I refuse to settle for a less-than-best authentic version of myself. Our millennial mantra should live first inside our own souls and then challenge us to choose a partner who is equally obsessed with a respective propensity for personal growth.
We should choose people because of not only who they are, but also who they are becoming. And I don’t mean the empty beliefs we notoriously feed to the self-deprecating individuals who are brimming with infamous potential (hello, ex-boyfriend). I mean the future of people who have thrown in all their chips because they’re betting on the betterment of themselves over everything.
And, dear gawd, this may sound like way more than your Bumble bio is interested in entertaining. Fine. Good. Bow out there. Abort. If you want sex – and I mean only sex – say that. Just do that. Openly announce your affinity for a stranger’s attention. Let’s not turn my snowboarder status into some crude color commentary about me “riding hardwood daily” so that you can dream it will come to fruition under the covers of my Airstream sheets (no, absolutely not).
I have a theory. Dating isn’t hard. Breaking up is hard.
And, the more we date – no matter which race we choose to run – the more we have to break up. Because, by definition, dating is the exposure to people with whom we have initial romantic or sexual interests. When those interests are squelched, we are responsible for articulating this plateau to the other person involved in the relationship (please read this word loosely here as it is used to define much more than long-term, monogamous courting).
As a whole, we do not like to articulate our feelings much less our lack of feelings. I’d like to believe it’s because we are so scared of hurting the other person (which, at the very least, supports the fact that we still do possess empathy). From this fear, we come up with bullshit answers like, “It’s not you, it’s me,” or we engage in the modern-day phenomenon of ghosting to avoid discomfort. I say that answer is bullshit because dating is about both you and me, so the break up – if one is going to occur – should sound something like, “It’s not you. It’s not me. It’s both of us.” Because, yes, sometimes – most times – the answer is that we simply do not fit together (even if one person disagrees).
So, we date irresponsibly because we don’t possess the adequate tools to maturely end it when we believe it should end. Or, as described, we never call it dating in the first place (even though it is clearly dating) so that we are safe from having to make any significant choices in the matter. Then, our immaturity is magnified by mechanisms that allow for us to put far too much of our romantic fate into the power of our phone screens.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we all suck. I’d like to believe that dating is simply about finding someone who inspires each one of us to suck a little less. And then you both try. That is all we can do for each other. Try.
Agree or disagree? Leave a comment below. I reveal the inner-workings of the male mind on all things dating in The Man Blog.
