Zero-sum game

Earlier this month, one of my favorite publications, Dirt, ran an essay I wrote last summer in defense of feeling things. When I wrote the piece, I had experienced a series of romantic disappointments and felt lost and unsettled. Love felt illusive but I also wasn’t sure if I knew what I wanted. Every affair I had had (and many of the ones people around me were having) seemed to go the same way. They all fell into the same grooves, deep, well-worn gendered patterns. Everyone seemed to want me to wait around for them until they were able to decide if this was something to singularly pursue. I found this process incredibly painful, partly because it felt like a constant audition, but also because it did not really seem to take into account my feelings at all.

“We are conditioned to be obsessed with people falling in love with us,” writes Marlowe Granados in Happy Hour. “Reaching that point is seen as a success. […] By the time you win them over, you don’t know how to really love them in return because we never ask ourselves enough about what we want.” Existing models for forming relationships do not encourage much reflection. A series of reality TV shows offer a kind of escapist fantasy: what if someone else could just make the choice for you? On Married at First Sight, couples meet at the altar and embark straight on a honeymoon where the cameras awkwardly follow them into their hotel suites. On Love is Blind, participants must propose, after several rounds of speed dating like conversation, without having seen the other person. The unveiling moment is always treated like high drama even though all the participants are reality TV attractive and fairly bland looking. The couples very rarely stay together.

The problem with these setups is perhaps not so much that they are gimmicks (which they are, but in a way every courting ritual is a gimmick), but that the purpose of going on reality TV is first and foremost stardom. Finding love is secondary and often incidental. On Love Island, which is perhaps both the simplest and most intricate of these dating shows, couples are often accused by the public of pairing up strategically to win the competition by garnering popularity and a reputation for consistency. This is a form of cheating, gaming the system to win. But then again the whole point of the competition is to win. It has the basic form of a gameshow, riddled with pitfalls and obstacles. At times couples pair up and one is then randomly bumped off the island in a routine culling process. In each season, the men and women (they call each other “girls” and “boys” or, Britishly, “lads") are separated late in the process and sent to separate villas where “bombshell” contestants are brought on with the sole purpose of wreaking havoc on existing pairs and testing their fidelity.

The setup of reality dating shows is generally so artificial as to feel removed from our own lived reality. But emotional politics also intrude upon them in visceral and unexpected ways. The participants are judged, rejected, led on, deceived by each other and often crumble and cry in front of the camera. Their working conditions are brutal. They are isolated from the world, lied to by producers, discouraged from sleeping, encouraged to consume substances and to pick arguments. Their emotional entanglements may at times be real or feel real, in the way that very intense sensory experiences can feel real in the moment, but above all they are offering themselves up to the camera and to the public for assessment. They really want to be found attractive, desirable, glamorous, and worthy of attention by a broad audience that, if they play their cards right, will become their audience for life.

These are obviously opposing and conflicting goals. They are not easy to reconcile. In a recent modestly viral TikTok video, a young woman named Anya (@anyahaas) described the endless disappointment and humiliation she has experienced trying to find a boyfriend. She is 33, pretty, heavily manicured. She tells her story, which is less a reflection on dating and more a kind of loose dark comedy routine, with tears welling up in her eyes. It would be easy to imagine her playing the story for laughs were she not so self-serious and brittle. It goes something like this: she is tired of dating apps and feels isolated. She decides to go to a comedy show to try and meet people, ideally men but also potential friends who could introduce her to men. She shows up early and is directed to sit in the front row. The comedians single her out, a woman alone in her 30s, the only person sitting right at the front. They praise her bravery, in what she maybe fairly experiences as a backhanded dig. They give her raffle prize to reward her. Upset and ashamed, she gets an Uber home and the driver is an elderly woman with several dogs. Anya stares down the barrel of her future. This, worst case scenario, will be her: old, alone, unattractive, a dog lady.

She was widely mocked for the video. A large contingent of right wing men who insist that it is easy for straight women to get a boyfriend at any time ridiculed her tears. A lot of other female content creators took umbrage at her cruelty towards the Uber driver. This is the way of the internet. If you make a video of yourself talking about your intimate life and crying on camera and it is seen by a wide cross section of the public, you will likely be insulted. Influencers are aware of this. They regularly produce viral videos that I cannot make it through without overwhelming secondhand embarrassment. It is a cynical but also thoroughly reasonable marketing tactic. As vulnerability, in the strictest sense, it fails. But as self-mythologizing, it clearly succeeds.

Anya is not an influencer in any real way. She only has 2,000 followers. Her previous videos are small inside jokes about her mother hiring a psychic to see if she would ever meet a man and manifesting being “taken off the market” (implying a certain kind of intense gendered and familial pressure that she does not bring up in the video). She is clearly trying to go viral. In multiple follow ups, she hits back at her critics, describing in cruel terms being hit on by an older man the same night, who “waddled” over to her, and whose belt, she shows with hand gestures, was down at his abdomen, because of his protruding stomach. She speaks in the flippant shorthand of TikTok influencers, most of whom treat dating as a zero sum game, if not an out and out war. They churn out advice about how to manipulate men by using “divine feminine” traits and withholding affection. The ones who regularly post dating stories, from the field as it were, treat their dates as content factories, Carrie Bradshaw like, but without any of her charm. If there isn’t much to say about any given date, as there isn’t about most dates in my experience, they will simply manufacture controversy like any good storyteller.

What I found strange about the video is how offended Anya was by having attention called to her. It seems like an easy route to meeting people, her ostensible goal. It’s easy to imagine people coming up to her after the show, asking what’s in her big raffle giveaway bag, asking what brought her there, offering to set her up, her riffing on her status as the last single woman alive or whatever. Online, she calls attention to herself, to her singleness, her feeling of being ridiculous and undesirable. She cries on camera. She is willing in other words to humiliate herself for the appetite of a public that will humor her. She is less willing to humiliate herself for the sake of human connection.

I think this is less an allergy to vulnerability than it is a fundamental disinterest in self-examination. Romance also becomes a narrative device in this front-facing rehearsal. It is a thing you get for being pretty and desirable to men. You will finally be picked in the end. You do not question the structures that make this ritual your singular purpose and desire. Although viewers were upset by her misogynist horror and disgust for the Uber driver, more disturbing to me was the prospect of a 75 year old woman forced to ferry people around late at night for pennies on the dollar. Growing old without a social safety net, perhaps a caretaker for a sick partner or dependent, or perhaps scorned by society as a woman aged out of fertility and a non-participant in motherhood, is a frightening prospect. It should be a frightening prospect.

There is another genre of viral video, many of them shot or promoted by right wing platforms, which show people sleeping rough, using drugs on the street, having psychotic episodes in public, brutalizing or harming themselves or other people in various ways. In a recent, particularly horrific video, released by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s office, an 82 year old man and his wife, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, were served with an eviction notice. In the video, the man pours gasoline all over the carpet and throws the canister at a cop before trying to light them both on fire. His wife, who cannot walk, had to be dragged out of the house. The man passed away.

My own grandmother suffered from a related illness, Lewy body disease. At the end of her life, she could barely remember how to feed herself. She confused the names and faces of her children and grandchildren. By some inexplicable grace, she was lucky enough to die in her home in peace. She was married for more than 50 years. I wonder if there is any story about romance that is not really at its core a story about welfare, about a safety net, about the conditions that enable us to fall in love and get old and live in dignity. It is easy to ascribe dating woes to phones, to political polarization, to changing social norms, to agoraphobia and laziness. There is an implied existential threat in a lot of these analyses, as if we were a species on the verge of extinction, one that could not remember how to do our natural mating rites.

But the reality is that we live in a world which is not set up for young people to thrive. They are burdened with debt before they even enter the workforce, set back by punitive systems such as credit scores and the maze of medical insurance. Endless legislation aimed at propping up corporations, dismantling welfare programs, criminalizing abortions and miscarriages, destroying labor and environmental protections, and conscripting us into perpetual wars, hamper and debilitate the futures of my generation and the ones after. It is not so much that it is difficult to remember how to fuck or how to feel something and more that it is increasingly difficult to imagine a future at all.