Post-breakup, following a decade-long relationship, I awoke to find myself thrust violently back into the dating pool. It was a new, unfamiliar landscape where nothing was left to the imagination. Sex was assumed to be on the cards, and a new performative intimacy inevitable. Having relied in the past on chance encounters, an air of wondering, a feeling that fate (as opposed to an algorithm) had maybe put you and whomever else in one another’s paths, this new world where no one “chats you up” or flirts with you felt alienating.
I was forced towards dating apps: a vast pool of geographically convenient false advertisers who mostly don’t want relationships, let alone any connection. It’s been roughly three years since my breakup and I am already fatigued. I am 43, a single mother of two, with a very demanding career and limited time without the kids. In fact, my sacred free time is so limited that the thought of dating strangers who may ruin it fills me with resentment and rage. Imagine devoting your one night off to someone dull, vacuous and – worse – flippant about that luxury?
There is a general, unspoken understanding that most people who are on dating apps are there for an ego boost, free, noncommittal sex, and potentially to offload their madness on to others, while giving the impression to prospective partners with genuine intent that they are emotionally available. I wonder if the constant carousel of suitors in an age in which people don’t draw out courtship is going to gradually chip away at me if I partake in it. Will I become more desensitised, more cynical, more paranoid and potentially lose my spark, my hope, my wild abandon? Will I become, God forbid, one of them?
It seems people want to enjoy and lavish themselves in all the perks of committed, loving relationships while avoiding all the hard work they take to maintain. I have had someone masturbating over me non-consensually on a video chat; met people who claim to want “ethical non-monogamous” relationships who have become enraged when I found their requirements not very ethical for me (they throw this idea around without full intellectual understanding of what it means and how to behave kindly). I have met people who claim to be in love with me yet never want to meet unless it’s to “have fun”. The moment I wanted to speak and connect in a truly intimate way, this was deemed “not fun” and the person would disappear (again) for days on end. This, I suspect they told themselves, was part of having “boundaries”, a much confused and misused buzzword of the time. I have experienced those who have become so obsessed – love bombing, available anytime, anywhere – that I suspected the obsession to be unhealthy and on ending it, felt mine and my children’s safety were under threat. I have found myself at times craving what I left behind in my relationship with my children’s father. Was the grass greener after all?
It feels like the modern model of how to connect with people is the very thing preventing us from creating real connection. It’s an illusion, a sham. What is meant to be driving us together is in fact driving us apart. There are so many “available” unavailable people that no one feels compelled to break the fourth wall and actually, truly learn about each other, warts and all.
There are few things more rewarding, more enriching and more wonderful than a connection built on emotional and physical intimacy. There should be a sense of calm that accompanies it. A sense that you are – by some stroke of luck – finally sitting at the right table, at the right time after years of fighting with“spidey senses” and gut feelings that whomever you are trying to connect with is bad news. If you can experience this feeling of profound connection once or twice in a lifetime you are lucky – more than that, you’ve hit the jackpot. But sustaining these connections requires effort. They take complex and committed levels of self-awareness, lack of ego, and a willingness to grow and change from both parties. In other words, you can’t just jump on an app, meet someone, have OK sex, and immediately launch into pretending you have been married for 15 years without being open to standing in front of your own reflection and facing the beauty and the horror of who you actually are: revealing your failings and insecurities without turning to defensiveness or manipulative bravado.
People seem to be confusing true intimacy with “hanging out”: watching television together and skipping the brilliant stage where you truly get to know one another. When you are a woman with two children who has to watch TV or read alone every night because you are in baby jail when the kids are asleep, you don’t want to spend your evening off doing the same thing. It makes you feel the person you’re with lacks empathy for your daily struggles.
It’s a modern-day tragedy that we may feel a connection with a person we are messaging daily, only to discover they are messaging four other people at the same time. As a result, none of us are revealing ourselves fully – we are driving with the handbrake on. And it’s my belief that it’s not because we don’t want love. It’s that we are so governed by fear, and so falsely supported by the illusion that there are “plenty more fish in the sea” that we have become lazy and flippant when special people come our way. I know for me, every time someone comes close and leaves, they take a piece of me away. I worry I will become too afraid to bare my soul and eventually lose feeling completely. That would be sad.
So instead, I will try not to give up hope. I will write letters, whisper words of adoration in the ears of my lovers, ask them questions about their vision of life or their wants and fears. I will offer myself with my whole heart and hope that one day, I meet someone who wants to connect in a way that goes beyond splitting a bill on a date, or talking about seeing other people; someone who doesn’t show a complete disregard for me as a working single mother of two, and who matches their words with their actions. I am not sure that I will meet them on a dating app. But if not there, then how?