short term relationship, open to long
my personal hingepocalypse + july vibe inventory
post might cut off in email and yeah, I know it’s midway through august so the “july” part feels stale. just read this as the sweet little cherub you were on august 1, 2024, who hadn’t yet considered the possibility of an elon/trump interview and hadn’t yet read the machine in the garden. ily.
A few weeks ago, I made a bad decision — hiking on a 95 degree day — which led, maybe, to a good one — nuking my Hinge account.
The scene: an uneasy Saturday morning. Feet itching while I poured my coffee. Fingers shot through with that aggravating air-conditioned clamminess. A melodramatic sense of constraint with absolutely no explanation. You know the vibe. Had to get out of it. I drove to Griffith, basted myself in sunscreen, and tied a wet bandana around my neck. When this dries out, I told myself, I’ll turn around.
Turns out, bandannas take a long time to dry. I trudged up Mt. Hollywood, watching my shadow grow progressively more hi-def. The pinched feeling went away within 15 minutes – hiking’s sick in that way. My head was delightfully empty for half an hour. I listened to Mariah Carey and swatted flies away. I took an overexposed photo of the Korean Air building from the barren summit. All was good in the world. Then my thoughts turned, inevitably, to my love life. Fuuuuuuck. I won’t get into the details, and I promise they’re uninteresting.
All you need to know is that by the time I got back to the car, the bandanna was still damp, a dozen numbers were deleted from my phone, and a digital, flirtier version of Kylie was dead in a ditch.
The decision came quickly, the action even more so. One moment, I was gumming my Camelbak and trying to figure out if a man I’d passed on a switchback was sunning his testes or just taking a luxurious pee break. The next, I was in a patch of shade, tapping through three separate “are you sure” pages. There was no epiphany that led here, no great heartbreak or shock of inspiration. It was pure impulse — and maybe heat exhaustion. I mentally saluted the 300 profile pictures in my “matches” folder, accrued over the last nineish months.1 Good luck out there, soldiers. I exited the app, tapped again, and stuck the phone in my day pack. The whole thing took about 40 seconds. Designed to be deleted, indeed
.I expected to feel triumphant, or at least clear-headed, on the way home. Instead, my thoughts got cloudy again. I knew I’d just given up on something. What was it, really? The 300 faces? The what if scenarios they carried? The zero-risk, zero-reward nature of app-based dating? The easy validation? The stress? All of the above?
A few ways I’ve described online dating in the past:
A random number generator but for people
A wide, shallow bruise that keeps getting bumped
An oversized jawbreaker
The I Love Lucy conveyor belt scene
Like if a phone book was trying to have sex with you and you were maybe into it??
Watching a photo get Xeroxed over and over again
A fucking HASSLE!
None of these feel quite correct. It’s hard to say anything that feels 100% true about dating apps. They’re a novelty, a utility, a game and a product all at once, freighted with the notably chill themes of partnership, sexuality, social hierarchy and (dare I say) love. As Allison P. Davis wrote in 2022, “they’re the air – or perhaps the pollution – we breathe.” And, as lame as this sounds, they’re an integral part of my personal history.
I’ve always been the target customer: mid-20s, city-dweller, sorta prudish. I downloaded Tinder before it solidified its reputation as a semen-encrusted hellmouth. I got on Hinge before we realized it was just Tinder with a shave and some Carhartts. With few exceptions, my entire adult romantic life has been mediated through taps, swipes and texting. Honesty, I’m not sure I’d have a romantic life without them. My self-confidence was criminally low for most of my college years, especially re: my appearance, and I was genuinely confused when I got any likes at all on my first profile. Then I got addicted. I loved the way they made dating feel concrete and manageable – a set of checkable boxes and subtle thumb swipes. It felt good to have my desirability quantified, and the search for connection felt less daunting when it was turned into a personal branding exercise. I liked flattening myself into six pictures and being told that was enough. I liked projecting onto the six-photo sets in front of me, turning quote-unquote “courtship” into a game of shadow puppets and paper dolls. I was charming enough to keep text conversations engaging and culturally literate enough to seed my profile with references tailored to the vaguely artsy, left-leaning beta male (my core demographic). I owe my most serious relationship to the algorithm; when that ended last year, I ran right back.
I joyfully allowed a machine to control my love life, which sounds fucked up until I admit that the machine-mediated part didn’t have much love in it anyway. The reliable pulse of notifications and potential kept me confident, sleepless and stupid for about nine months. If you’re a fellow veteran, you know what happened next.
After the initial thrill wears off (and honestly, mine lasted longer than I would’ve guessed), online dating takes on the feeling of an extended humiliation ritual. You get tired of asking how many siblings someone has or contemplating how many y’s is appropriate in “hey.” You become painfully aware of the egocentrism of major cities and the creative-class freaks who populate them, yourself included. The men tend to be self-absorbed, unemployed, or both; the women tend to be anxious with underdeveloped conflict resolution skills and pathological independence issues. Yourself included. You start to write down bitchy little iPhone notes like “there are two types of straight men in Los Angeles: those who are obsessed with images of women and those who are obsessed with images of themselves,” and genuinely believe them. You realize that everyone’s still in love with their ex, everyone’s ambitious and no one’s getting paid enough. Your heart sours, and hope turns to aggravation.
Obviously, the apps themselves are partially to blame here. They sold us something that should never have been put on offer — in Davis’ words, “the sense that the dating pool is some unlimited, ever-increasing-in-quality well of people.” This left our perspective permanently skewed, allowed our irl social skills to atrophy, and forced us into weird cycles of pathological avoidance. And that was when the apps’ algorithms were actually working! I fully believe the conspiracy theory that they’ve gotten much worse in the last few years, despite whatever the Hinge CEO says. Some combination of “improved” algorithmic sorting and the need for a paid subscriber base turned wide-open dating fields into fetid little pools. The resulting frustration made their chief commodity (who were already ruined by the illusion of endless choice) less likely to match, respond or go on actual dates. Pandemic-induced awkwardness made this worse, and so did generational malaise. But like, seriously. The apps seem intent on mangling their product into a publicly-traded, AI-enabled hellscape, and dragging the delicate hearts of American heterosexuals with them. Users are figuring this out and quitting (or at least emotionally divesting) en masse. Now, I guess I’m one of them.
Still, in the weeks since The Great Deletion, my life hasn’t changed. My screen time’s gone down by a grand 9 minutes per day. I’m still ambivalent about the idea of a relationship, disgustingly jealous of those in them, and utterly unwilling to figure that out. The pressures of womanhood are still pressing against me, reminding me that my viability on “the market” will only go down from here. I feel like I’m wasting potential by sitting out – even if that potential is just funny stories to share in a group chat. I know that I spend too much time alone, like most of us. I want connection, as we all do. By all accounts, dating should be on the to-do list. But a certain amount of wide-eyed faith in humanity is required to fall in love, I think, or even to spark an enjoyable, short-term connection. The app industrial complex snuffs that out with remarkable efficiency. It leaves its users disillusioned, shallow and a little bit cruel. Again, myself included. They offer a sense of control, and make the romantic landscape utterly loveless in the process. It sucks, because that control is what made them so fun in the first place.
I wish I could end this with some grand statement about meeting people in person or joining a running club. I wish I could tell you with full conviction that I never plan to redownload and that I look forward to finding a slower, messier route to partnership. To be honest, I find it terrifying. I wonder if my age cohort is too addled with our app-related neuroses, too atomized by work-from-home jobs and DoorDash accounts, to reshape our dating norms before the clock hits midnight. I may go back into the proverbial trenches, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Hinge and Tinder are evil, yes, but they’re not the source of my problem. The issue, I think, is that I bought into the dream they were selling – the idea that companionship could be optimized and delivered on my schedule – without ever questioning it.
For now, I’m white-knuckling my singledom. My phone’s a bit quieter, my evenings a bit emptier, and my romantic future is a question mark. I’m trying to be okay with that, and remind myself that the only things I can actually control are:
(1) how authentic I am
(2) how open I am to others, and
(3) how much I am orienting my life toward connection of all kinds.
So that’s what I’m focusing on for now. I’m doing my best to let go of the outcome. Maybe I’ll have a good conversation with a friend of a friend. Maybe I’ll actually join a kickball league. Maybe I’ll go on another ill-advised hike, run into the mysterious testicle tanner again, and fall madly in love. Fingers crossed for option 3!
vibe inventory: july (+ half of august) 2024
reading material
Good reading month in general! Currently midway through Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna, Hot Cold Heavy Light by Peter Schjeldahl. Also started the audio of Good Material by Dolly Alderton, but then ran out of Spotify audiobook listening hours for…2 weeks? The audiobook credit system makes no sense. I’m feeling very scattered in my reading right now, if you can’t tell. Still haven’t started Anna Karenina even though I keep telling myself I should.
Mating, Norman Rush
The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum
Preliminary Materials for the Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun
All Fours, Miranda July
Fan Fiction, Tavi Gevinson
My Pinup: A Paean To Prince, Hilton Als
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus
On Women, Susan Sontag
I also loved the Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker piece on Dead & Company at the Sphere, which I didn’t completely agree with but found delightfully bitchy, and Joe Zadeh’s essay about (of all things) cement in Noēma.
listening material: tunes
To be entirely honest, working on the Charli essay kind of ruined my usual listening habits. I usually make a playlist of albums at the beginning of the month that operates as my go-to when I just want to put something on but didn’t get around to that bc I was busy furrowing my brows to “Drop That Kitty” for the first 3 weeks of July. Without my playlist as anchor, I kind of just floated from hyperfixation to hyperfixation all month and never really settled on a semi-official soundtrack. There was a 3-day period where the only thing I wanted to hear was the first two songs on Infidels. My brain was fried enough that for a sec I considered adding “Jokerman” to the playlist for my company offsite. I thought better of it. Idk. This is absurdly detailed and yet more evidence that I spend far too much time alone. Anyway. A few albums cut through the noise:
Big Ideas, Remi Wolf
HEAT EP, Tove Lo + SG Lewis
Daniel, Real Estate
11:11, Pinegrove
Here Are The Sonics, The Sonics
Channel Orange, Frank Ocean
listening material: non-tunes
I am sooooo skeptical of Rick Rubin’s whole schtick but really enjoyed his 2-part interview with Ezra Koenig; his interview with Tom O’Neill (the author of foundational Kylie text Chaos) was also fun.
The plastic surgery episode of Never Post
Lauren Oyler talking about Mating on Reading the Room
Charli xcx, A.G. Cook and George Daniel on Tape Notes
Tavi Gevinson talking about Fan Fiction on the Longform podcast
Elisa Gabbert on Otherppl
Jason Farago’s theory of cultural stagnation on The Cluster F Theory
screen time
Maxxxine (2024, dir. Ti West)
The Bikeriders (2024, dir. Jeff Nichols)
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015, dir. Osgood Perkins)
Longlegs (2024, dir. Osgood Perkins)
The Wrong Ferrari (2011, dir. Adam Green)
Dìdi (2024, dir. Sean West, and more importantly assistant edited by my friend Chris!!)
Trap (2024, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
Eraserhead (1977, dir. David Lynch)
This BBC documentary on Maria Callas
I think I need to get really into watching mid-range Ken Burns-style documentaries. This was so soothing.
other
I know that very few people will care about this, but I switched up my gym programming, moving from a powerlifting-style program (Stronger by the Day from Meg Gallagher) to one that’s more focused on athletics/conditioning (Limitless from Kelly Matthews, via the Ladder app) and want to shout my recommendation from the rooftops. The workouts are quick and actually fun, with a lot of kettlebell work and heavy compound lifts paired with a manageable amount of cardio. The app is a little finicky but it actually times rest periods to avoid excess dilly-dallying and there’s optional in-ear coaching from Matthews, who I would gladly lay down my life for at this point.
in other news, I’m now a member of saloon, a substack-native creative community that allows writers, editors, and professionals in PR, fashion, beauty, food and adjacent sectors (oop, slipping into my day job voice now) to network in an un-yucky way and share opportunities, events and projects with each other. it’s cool as shit, and I’m very grateful to julia harrison for reaching out + adding me! I highly recommend checking it out if you’re in one of the above listed industries — the membership roll is stacked and the rising-tide vibes are immaculate. consider these boats LIFTED!
and that was July! Bigger essay coming soon, maybe on the idea of creative partnership, getting over the feeling that I could be magically Unlocked by finding/working with the right person. idk, it’s a very loose idea right now that I need to research and flesh out a bit. or a dual review of The Material and Good Material as an examination of The Standup Comedian Novel. or something else. we’ll see.
as always, thank you for being here 💖 wishing you the best for august’s oven-like gauntlet. avoid the back-to-school aisle for as long as you can. eat some nectarines. stretch your hip flexors. listen to fountains of wayne. compliment someone’s t-shirt. that’s all the advice I have.
If you’re not a dating app user — this is a very normal number, I think. If you ARE a dating app user and this is NOT a normal number, don’t tell me.
Might be stealing “extended humiliation ritual” for the title of my memoir
Yes!!! Every part of this was relatable, down to the bitchy notes app musings & gamified self-branding (& deleting hinge this summer, of course)