love in the time of tinder
It doesn't feel like Valentine's Day today, probably because (one) I haven't left (and won't leave) the house and (two) I have no social media. The only real giveaway I've seen is the billboards advertising deals for roses on the side of the highway. But other than that, nothing.
That being said, I did want to write a meandering wordvomit about love and my thoughts on dating. I probably would have put it off per usual if I hadn't read nutgrafs's wonderful example. (Thank you, Marlene!)
I want to preface all this by saying that while these are my candid thoughts, I recognize that they are just one fallible way to view the world among many, and I don't judge anyone for doing or thinking otherwise. Okay - let's go.
The first thing to get out of the way is that I don't date. This isn't to say I haven't ever been romantically involved with others â I certainly have â but what I mean by this is that I've never gone out to meet a stranger (or even an acquaintance) on explicitly romantic pretenses. I can't knock it because I haven't tried it, but putting my inability to ask out a stranger or acquaintance out on a capital-D Date aside, I simply cannot imagine considering someone in a romantic light without befriending them first. I think I'd find the whole situation too stifling.
Even if I were okay with the whole idea of going on a date, I'd face some serious hurdles finding one at all. As a stubbornly stingy, risk averse, and antisocial extravert, I don't go out (to bars, or to much else). Most of my friends get around this by finding dates on apps like Hinge & Bumble, but I'm not a huge fan of the idea of a company using me like that to make money. Not to mention all the awkward scenarios I can think of like coming across exes or coworkers on them. No thanks.
I also don't like the idea of someone passing judgment on me based on a few of my photos and responses to canned prompts. I know I can't change the way I look or speak either, but I at least want to be there in person when someone decides what they think about me, silly as that may sound.
I also know myself well enough to recognize that I'd probably find swiping through other people's profiles a complete waste of time. I'd get through about three minutes of it before retreating to a book. And what would that get me, the illusion of choice without any of the actual choices? What's the point of opening up Pandora's box if you won't even look inside?
Thinking about searching for dates also forces me to admit that I'm a lot more superstitious than I like to let on. The Supremes sum up my whole dating philosophy in their 1966 hit song You Can't Hurry Love:
But Mama said
"You can't hurry love
No, you just have to wait"
She said, "Love don't come easy
It's a game of give and take" (Can't wait)
"You can't hurry love (Ooh, until that day)
No, you just have to wait
You got to trust, give it time (Love don't come easy)
No matter how long it takes"
I take this wu-wei attitude to the extreme: I don't bother looking for love at all. It's sort of worked out for me thus far, even if completely thanks to dumb luck. I've at times had to wait years for a good long-term relationship, but I've been blessed to meet wonderful people who I loved (and who loved me) very much without having to go out and look for them.
Logically though, my approach of complete inaction makes no sense. I read very bright people like Henrik talk about finding these soul mates in Looking for Alice and can only nod in agreement:
And the thing is, there aren't that many people you can have an amazing life with. Maybe 10,000, spread fairly evenly across the globe? A bit more if you're less weird than me, perhaps. Anyway, the number is small enough that you can't afford to be casual about it. You have to never let someone like that pass you by.
I think he's wrong about the number (what are the odds you'll run into an Alice if there's only 10,000 out there spread evenly across the 7 billion people on Earth?), but his point still stands. Ben Kuhn puts the consequences of missing out on someone like that succinctly in Outliers.
Quality of romantic partnerships [is a heavy-tailed distribution.] For example, in the US today, almost 50% of partnerships end in divorce, whereas the 99th percentile probably involves the couple being (on average) extremely happy with each other for 50+ years. In other contexts, this seems likely to be even more true; for example, in some low-income countries with regressive gender norms, over 25% of women who have ever had a partner experience domestic violence each year, which probably makes the average partnership extremely bad.
The logical conclusion? You have to sample. A lot.
The most important thing to remember when sampling from heavy-tailed distributions is that getting lots of samples improves outcomes a ton.
In a light-tailed contextâsay, picking fruit at the grocery storeâit's fine to look at two or three apples and pick the best-looking one. It would be completely unreasonable to, for example, look through the entire bin of apples for that one apple that's just a bit better than anything you've seen so far.
In a heavy-tailed context, the reverse is true. It would be similarly unreasonable to, say, pick your romantic partner by taking your favorite of the first two or three single people you run into. Every additional sample you draw increases the chance that you get an outlier. So one of the best ways to improve your outcome is to draw as many samples as possible.
As the dating example shows, most people have some intuition for this already, but even so, it's easy to underrate this and not meet enough people. That's because the difference between, say, a 90th and 99th-percentile relationship is relatively easy to observe: it only requires considering 100 candidates, many of whom you can immediately rule out. What's harder to observe is the difference between the 99th and 99.9th, or 99.9th and 99.99th percentile, but these are likely to be equally large. Given the stakes involved, it's probably a bad idea to stop at the 99th percentile of compatibility.
This means that sampling from a heavy-tailed distribution can be extremely demotivating, because it requires doing the same thing, and watching it fail, over and over again: going on lots of bad dates, getting pitched by lots of low-quality startups, etc. An important thing to remember in this case is to trust the process and not take individual failures, or even large numbers of failures, as strong evidence that your overall process is bad.
Let's say the number of people in the entire world I could have a great life with numbers in the hundreds of thousands. (I could be wrong by orders of magnitude, but that's besides the point.) If I care about finding the best possible partner (which of course I do and should, as Ben has helpfully pointed out), it follows that I should be searching for these people as quickly as I can, at any cost, and refining my methods in order to find the 99.99th percentile.
Except I haven't, clearly. I've been doing the complete opposite. I'm sitting here in my room and waiting for life to plop the right person in my life. Why? I couldn't tell you exactly, but probably a mix of fear, indolence, and (financial) inability. But I recognize that there's some serious cognitive dissonance going on here. And I don't exactly know how to resolve the squabble between my logical side trying to solve the optimal stopping problem and my intuitive half telling me, "you'll never find love if you're looking for it!"
Ben's take raises more questions than it answers for me. How am I supposed to know whether someone great is at the 99th percentile or the 99.9th? What if I meet the 99th percentile early on and don't realize until it's way too late to go back? (Oof.)
The other issue I have with this is that in my experience, I can't tell the good relationships from the great ones until I've been in them for a while. All relationships are good at the beginning. If I've been trying to sort the 60th percentile from the 80th, how long will it take for the 99th percentile to reveal itself? At that point will I still be able to look for the 99.99th percentile?
(To be clear, I am not one of those people that puts their dates in spreadsheets to analyze them; I am a romantic through and through. I just find it rather instructive (and fascinating, frankly) to run through thought experiments like the ones above.)
I do think I have some traits that work to my advantage. Namely, I'm not afraid of being alone. Most people I see who are miserable in love (or chasing it) are deathly afraid of it. A lot gets made of dying alone but I think many people forget that you can't control whether you die alone. Even if you marry the love of your life, who's to say that they'll stay or live that long? The only way to face the possibility of dying alone is to not let it bother you.
One of the best parts of being older is that now I'm far better at distinguishing between actually liking someone and simply liking the attention. I know what it feels like when someone makes my heart sing.
The flipside of this is that now that I do know that feeling, very few people actually make me feel that way. Maybe one for every thousand I meet? My parents always chide me for being picky and hard to get along with, but the way I see it, it's better to be picky and alone than unsatisfied with someone else. I won't settle for less than I'm happy with, and I'm willing to wait my entire life for the right person to come along, which means accepting that they might not ever show up (or even exist).
What else... oh! I've learned that I don't have any dealbreakers in dating. I used to think I could never date someone who smoked cigarettes (when I was a kid I literally asked my own grandpa not to visit because he smoked cigs and reeked of it), until I met a German-born Chilean at a party who asked me to accompany her out on her smoke break to talk about David Foster Wallace. (A week later I was buying her Marlboro Golds at the corner store.) These days I'm not sure if I have any instant dealbreakers anymore. You do crack? So long as you can finance your habits, who am I to judge?
Sasha Chapin puts it way better than I do in Maybe Your Dating Preferences Are Stupid:
Once, on a day where I felt like I knew something, I declared that I would be okay with dating anyone who wasn't vegan or an actress. It was clear to me that cheeseburgers were crucial to my happiness, and that I'd have a hard time getting close to a professional emotion simulator. Now I have a wife who is both a vegan and an actress, with whom I'm extremely happy.
I can still recall, with shocking clarity, the moment three hours after I met my wife, when I offered her a piece of chicken. "Actually, I'm vegan," she said. "Well," I said to myself, "I suppose I am fucked now." The night air was glimmering, love was all around, and I mentally edited out many chunks of animal protein in the future.
I still have red flags, of course, even if I often ignore them. And nothing has changed about me preferring not to date people with raging substance abuse problems. But like Sasha writes, I think it's silly to rule out entire groups of people with flimsy criteria, for several reasons.
First, it presumes that you know what's going to make you happy, and that your preferences aren't flexible. This is laughable. Humans are adaptable, and, also, we are bad at forecasting our future states. You say that living in New York is absolutely necessaryâyou couldn't live without the culture, the restaurants, the poignant odor. But how do you know? If you were stuck in northern India, presumably you'd find some way to enjoy it. You might enjoy it more. ... The experience that solitude gives you is insufficient to provide this kind of self-knowledge. If you're a Democrat, and the only people you hang out with are Democrats, I promise you that you have no idea whether you could be happy with a Republicanâand that there's a decent possibility that you could be. Or that you could even learn something from this experience.
Second, it assumes that your partner is going to remain static over long periods of time. That doesn't really happen. Choose someone on the basis that they'll be a good mother? Hope you're okay with fertility issues, or maybe them just deciding that they don't feel like being [pregnant]. Choose someone based on their career? They might remember that they only have one life to live and choose to work at a crystal store for the rest of their life.
People change. You've got to be willing to stick around for that, which directly implies that you shouldn't be too particular about their current trappings. Obviously there are limitsâI am very sorry that Elizabeth Chambers discovered the hard way that her ex-husband, Armie Hammer, has a cannibal fetishâbut some amount of flux needs to be tolerated, or your relationship probably won't last.
Third, this choosiness oftenânot always, but oftenâcomes from the mindset that your partner should fulfill all your needs and be into everything you like. Must appreciate political philosophy, mixed martial arts, sushi, and want to hang out for precisely 12.7 hours per week. This is reflective of the insane amount of pressure some of us put on romantic relationships.
Your partner cannot give you everything. In fact, nobody can give you everything. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, they are not enough people. Discussing the latest debacle in the chess world is what your chess friends are for, so give your wife a break and go to the chess club. Just get some flowers from Trader Joe's on the way back.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have any criteria when you choose a partner. It's reasonable to have a few deal-breakers. I just think that many people could occasionally use some looser ones. I'm not an expert on everyone's relationship, but I'd provisionally suggest that this is a reasonable default selection mechanism: if you find someone who feels like your best friend, with whom you have mutual physical attraction, lock it down immediately. You have located an incredibly rare commodity, and you should treat its extraction with the utmost seriousness.
Marlene also mentions casual dating. Perhaps surprisingly, I actually quite enjoy casual dating, though I'm not sure if casual dating means quite the same thing to me as it does for other people.
I treat the people I date casually pretty much the same as the ones I do seriously; I don't date (or even talk to) more than one person at once, casual or not. The only thing that separates casual flings from serious relationships is a gut feeling that tells me whether I can imagine a future with them or not. Theoretically a casual relationship could turn serious with time, but it's never happened for me. Somewhere deep inside there lies this ideal of the kind of partner I want to build a life with, and as far as I can tell it's rather unforgiving: people either fit it or they don't.
While I've generally liked my serious partners more than my casual ones (due to deeper emotional connection, more interest in each other's hobbies, etc), flings come with this carefree happiness that can be hard to find in more serious relationships. When dating seriously I find myself dogged with questions like Is this The One? and struggling to find the balance between "don't settle for less" and "nobody is perfect", especially the longer they last. Casual flings give you a chance to try new things and see how you mesh with different kinds of people without the (often overwhelming) pressure to Get It Right.
That brings me back to Valentine's Day. I'm like Marlene in that I appreciate having an opportunity to celebrate romantic love, even if I could do without overpriced roses and chocolates being shoved down my throat at every opportunity.
That said, I've come to dislike the sense of obligation Valentine's Day brings when I'm in a relationship. I don't want to feel like I have to do something just because the calendar reads February 14th. Yet that's exactly how I have felt in past years, especially when I set the bar high with elaborate gifts years prior. I know the solution is to find someone that doesn't judge me so much on things like that, but for reasons mentioned above, that's hard!
Eep - I've just passed 3,000 words! I know many of them haven't been mine, but you can probably tell that I have a lot of Thoughts on love & dating. Feel free to write me if you want to talk about anything; I'm always happy to chat with kind souls.
