Love In The Panopticon
It’s clear to me now that Tinder is the future of dating. You can’t sleep with your coworkers, you’ll get kicked out of social clubs if you start hitting on fellow members. Anybody else you will ever see in between those two realms will be either working, or wearing headphones. If you weren’t able to keep your college relationship alive after graduating, your chances of finding a partner are laughably small. You’ll be lucky to make two friends a year after starting your first job and your friend attrition rate will sky rocket as your existing friends grow apart from you, marry, or die. Human’s weren’t meant to live alone, and if you can’t find someone to love you you’ll be subject to the same soul killing pain that drives homosexuals to risk execution in places where their love is illegal. Social media companies offer solutions to the problems I’ve mentioned, but most of their benefits are negated by other social media companies.
A beautiful and intelligent woman recently told me that she’d rejected a Tinder suitor (with decent abs no less!) because he’d posted the following on Facebook in the early 2000's:
The woman who related this story, strongly implied that if you thought this post was anything less than offensive, you had a deep seated hatred of women. She seemed to interpret Lil Woody, and by extension he suitor, as advocating using starvation as a technique to control women. Much like a cult leader, Lil Woody would systematically foster a negative body image in his victim, and then encourage anorexic eating patterns until his subjugated possession lacked the strength to run away from him and explore her sexuality. From my perspective the comment is just a bit of observational humor from a man who is having trouble weening the woman he cares about off a diet of creme cheese bagels, so that the two of them can experience the world together. The ambiguity of humor necessarily enables multiple interpretations, so I can’t say who’s right. I can say that, as far as I’m concerned part of being a good partner is forcing your loved one to take care of them self. The creme cheese industry has a lot to answer for.
It get’s worse! For all I know, the article I’ve just referenced could be completely ironic. Prospective friends, lovers, and employers may disqualify me for inter alia: 1) Not noticing the irony. 2) Defending the joke 3) Not defending the joke hard enough 4) Being too lazy to write this list as an elaborate sentence. Or even out of a mistaken belief that “inter alia” is a dirty word. A portion of this article could go viral on social media, and my current friends might have to denounce me for reasons that aren’t even predictable based on the original text. Maybe Lil Woody has said some other things I’m not aware of and I’ll be held responsible for those too! It’s a total nightmare.
The curse of social media is this: We love one another as whole human beings, but we can hate each other based on a single objectionable quality. The more people know of you, the larger the percentage of the those who know you will hate you. Every piece of information you reveal increases the number of ways other people can conclude that your are a bad person, or simply not worth knowing. Given the elaborate social media profile we need to generate in order to live, we’re all screwed. (Somebody just lost respect for me because I said screwed, and somebody is mad at me because I copped out and didn’t say “fucked”. I love them both for bothering to read this far.)
The closest thing to a solution currently on offer is the following: If anybody gets close enough to you that they will give you the benefit of the doubt, or accept an apology for hurting their feelings, hold onto them for dear life. If you need new friends or a partner, increase the number of people who can see you while keeping your personal information to a minimum. Statistically, a large enough population is bound to include potential mates, but only a massive population will contain enough potential mates to ensure that at least one person navigates the minefield of reasons to casually dislike you. With it’s minimalist format and massive user base, your best option is clearly Tinder.
Tinder allows you to construct a minimalist profile with just your name and age. You can add up to 500 characters if you want to, but nobody is going to read them if they don’t like your picture. If you’re a woman you have the challenging task of figuring out which of the handsome men won’t try to kill you. If you’re a man, your task is to scroll through hundreds of pictures of women selecting the ones you’d like to talk to. The women you selected will reject you one by one except for the few that don’t. If the women “like you back” you now have permission to talk to them. Essentially, you’ve convinced them to take their headphones off and engage in casual conversation at the cafe. If you can get more than a few responses out of them you might get placed in something called “the friend zone”.
Some stupid romantic comedy in the 90’s coined the term “friend zone” to describe a situation where women feel kindly disposed towards men but don’t want to sleep with them. Unfortunately, the movie portrayed this so negatively that placing someone in the friend-zone is talked about as if it were an act of violence. What it really means is that a women has trusted you with the power to ruin her day. That’s a serious responsibility, so don’t abuse it. When women let you talk to them on Tinder, they are opening themselves up to the possibility that something like this will happen:
Woman: “Hi”
Man: “Hi you’re very pretty”
5 minutes elapse and the man starts imagining the woman talking to some other man and laughing at him for being stupid enough to think she really liked him.
Man: “Fine, I didn’t want to talk to you anyway you fat whore!”
If something like that happened to you before a job interview, it would hurt you performance. At the very least, it’s going to put you in a bad mood until lunchtime. It’s a pretty big compliment to risk something like that just to talk to you. Feel lucky to be in the “friend zone”.
Naturally, if you are deeply in love with a particular woman who sees you “more like a brother”, that’s very painful. It’s also painful to be lonely because the only women you know closely, just want to be friends. That’s where the real magic of Tinder comes in. You can’t be in love, because you barely even know these women. They barely know you, but they’re still your friends! Even though the chances of getting a date with any particular one of these women is small, the stupendous rate at which the internet allows these relationships to develop ensures that success is only a matter of time. Unless you told a serious lie on your profile. All you have to do is be friendly and patient.
Now comes the greatest challenge of all, bridging the Facebook gap. Facebook, is the fortress that separates the internet from “real life”. Your Facebook is full of information about you, your friends, and your family. Something on it is almost certainly going to kill your budding romance. Sadly, this is especially true if the object of your affections is an intellectual. No sensible woman, FBI agent, or prospective employer, will neglect to look at what you’ve been posting lately. A brilliant woman will examine strategic selections of posts. What were you like at 18? How did your character develop as you entered your mid 20’s? What did you post the day after Donald Trump was elected? Do you really like dogs as much as you claim!?! Your only hope is that by sheer chance, one of the women that agrees to talk with you will have temporarily deleted her Facebook after reading a New Yorker article. If the cosmic pachinko ball bounces in your favor, you might get to meet her in person.
Once she agrees to meet you, you’re first order of business is to realize how lucky you are to get this tiny window of objective personal contact before the internet intrudes into your relationship once again. After the meeting, everything you said will be meticulously fact checked against wikipedia, and any TV shows or celebrities you mention will be vetted. Something related to your birth date, choice of clothing, profession, or media preferences, is highly likely to screw things up. Just keep perspective and realize that you’re fundamentally unlikely to succeed, but perfectly capable of trying again. The word “fair” shouldn’t even enter your mind. A man’s heart is not an enormous tank with giant spinning chains on it. You can’t beat a minefield, you can only fail to explode.
Now here’s the sensitive part. If you do end up sleeping together, there’s a considerable chance that neither of you will enjoy it. You may be so tired and on edge from the constant scrutiny and pressure to entertain that all you can do is grit your teeth mime the image of what you think is a sexually potent person. That’s okay, it’s worth it. Romance may hurt, and it may require countless days of effort assisted by sophisticated algorithms, but concentrate on the prize at the end. Someday, somebody may love you so much that they’ll accept your apology if you post something they don’t like on the internet. That’s a level intimacy that’s worth the fight, and worth the search.
