The best of the internet is behind us. There used to be a time when it opened the world up, uncorked whatever your Landlocked American Suburban Upbringing had given to you, and provided something glimmering. Something infinite. It was a supernova. A triumph.
Now every technological novelty promises only to narrow down our existence into predictable, unthinking sameness. So this is where we find ourselves: at the end of the line of the Great Fun of Being Online. At the dissolution of the awkward, risk-filled act of meeting a stranger from the internet. The collapse of the once-empire of Casual Dating. As I call it: The Death of Hinge.
I was sprawled out in the smoke-filled backroom of Amma (68-64 Forest Ave.), not smoking, given my pitiful teeth, and nursing a beer that tasted like a Sunkist. We’d taken SK out for the night. She’d been broken up with, so we drank hard seltzers in her new, beautiful studio in Ridgewood while she twisted her hair in hot tools. A girl who has been broken up with must Be Seen, we understood, so we crawled our ways a few blocks to the only bar I could bear to go to anymore.
SK had met her boyfriend on Hinge. Ah, yes, Hinge! It had completed the promised loop of its very design––they had both deleted the app! (Okay, it was true, some people were still using Hinge. Give it a year, though, and it’ll be none.) They had been dating, somewhat uneventfully, from what I know, for six months, until, in a very classical male sense, he began The Withdrawal.
He had begun to express less and less interest in hanging out, and showed a general lack of effort. When she brought it up to him a few months back––during an important right-of-relationship passage: a trip upstate––he panicked: No, I Love You, he asserted. I’m sorry. Really, I will do what I can to make this work. I will try harder. I will be better. Because, yes, I Love You.
Two months afterwards, he ended things, a few days before we found ourselves crammed onto a pew at Amma, recounting his idiocy (SK was out of his league, but what’s new there?). He just couldn’t see her as a wife. He said he enjoyed everything about their relationship: the time they spent together, the sex, the happiness it brought him. He had no issues with her, or with the relationship itself. But the thing was: he just couldn’t picture her as his forever. He was 29; marriage was on his mind. But in no way did he ever behave as one would imagine an Adult Ready for Marriage would. We were all a bit thrown.
SK’s breakup, I saw, was not singular. It was a symptom of a greater cultural breakup with uncertainty. We have developed an inability to accept the present without the certain outcome of the future.
People have become incapable of in-betweens. We desire the absolute in everything: in the RSVP list of every party we attend, the exact location of a delayed train, the categorized kinks of prospective sexual partners on dating profiles. We want everything, and we want it completely and immediately. It’s visible in every single advertisement I see for some new startup writhing over the concept of the two-week pay period, offering your paycheck in minutes.
There’s little that is left to exist in the nebulous space of Dating. Because Dating is defined by instability. It’s the act that exists between absolutes. Naturally, it’s having a tough time in this cultural moment. You can see this in its shifting vocabulary: we never say we are dating someone; we say we are seeing someone, hooking up, we have a partner, we’re in a situationship, et cetera.
This leaves Hinge in a particularly thorny place. My only successes there have been murky, unclear, and ephemeral, some of them joyous. Hinge triumphs in the grayness of unclear sexual dalliances. (I have grown to loathe the term situationship, as you can see.) People prefer the great monstrosity of Being in Love, which leaves little wiggle room for anything that precedes (or succeeds) it. Or, even worse: they prefer Nothing at All.
Maybe I’m just repellent. Maybe all my attractive, cool, and totally normal friends are also experiencing the same stroke of sexual misfortune. Because there was once a time when you could go on flippant dates. They were plentiful, and as such often meaningless. (I’ll correct myself here: do things that go nowhere truly mean nothing? Really, the casual, so-called meaningless flings that we all rail against can actually become the most interesting.) These days, my single gal friends go on, at best, one date a quarter.
Is it so much the same for straight men? The ones who exist parallel to my life always get what they want when they want it. They always do well (they are creative, performative, sought-after). If anyone knows immediacy, it’s them. They usually don’t show up in my life unless they are between girls, so it’s hard to know, really. Anyway, it isn’t so hard for them to stumble across a beautiful woman in these parts. Throw a rock off any J train platform, and you’re sure to hit one.
Welcome to Late Stage Hinge: the final stage in the life cycle of what Used to Be Cool. It happens to all apps; they become tired and worn and pitiful, eventually. They become symbols of obsolescence and Getting Left Behind. And then all you can associate it with are all the Straight Flatland Millennials who met their sad, generic husband from their First Hinge Date Ever. Because there were really only ever two people who were on Hinge: those who went on one date, or those who went on a hundred. There was never an in between. And for us sore-losers who had wasted our first date on someone unremarkable, well, we were left with the technological ruins of what used to be Fun.
So we find ourselves in sexless, prudent, loops of ego-stroking self-preservation. Not exactly the fault of dating apps, but something greater. Something like living in a crumbling democracy. One that is distinctly characterized by threat, instability, and isolation (the unfortunate realities of living under a president who is both fascist and demented). The instinct is to protect the self. Not great conditions for Putting Yourself Out There.
Maybe that’s the real issue here: a shift toward emotional remove and hyperindividualism. Everyone is turning inward: optimizing health, productivity, and self-aestheticization rather than turning outward: toward a terrifying and beautiful unknown. And really, what’s the point of self-aestheticization when we are also quickly approaching Late Stage Instagram, where none of your friends, let alone a general public, is going to see your June Dump anyway?
For the most part, we fail to realize that A Life Worth Living actually exists outside of the perimeters of stability, not within it. That all those stepping stones toward something solid are where the best possibilities exist. Turning inward, shutting down, choosing the easiest path is a submission to the greater powers that be. It is Giving Up.
If we didn’t see everything so black-and-white, we’d find a bit more happiness, a bit more comfort––a sense of security in the not-knowing. We wouldn’t end things before they even started over fear of commitment, or not being able to visualize someone in a wedding dress.
So, yes, the State of Dating is a sorry one. But I’m not bitter about it. The death of at least one of The Apps, I believe, provides a wonderful opportunity for thrill-seekers: for asking each other out In Real Life, handing out your number on napkins with wild abandon, flirting without meaning, and collecting a trove of great stories from bad dates.
There are still many girls out there who want to swim around in some risk and embarrass themselves in search of a Good Time––in fact, drag their embarrassment all over the internet. There should just be more of us.
The internet is no longer as brilliant as it once was, and maybe that’s the hope right there. Maybe that will make the Real World––the heaving, wheezing mass of the city––a bit more full of the secret joy of the uncertain. Because that is where possibility — great, wonderful, sexy, terrible possibility — lies.
EL is a writer based in Bed-Stuy. You can reach her on Instagram.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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