#12: Do I want to be saved or do I want to get into even more trouble?
Dating apps, reality TV, and other foolproof ways to find love.
pov: is it true love or just the ocean? listen while reading for best experience.
Happy Monday, girls. 🌙 🤏 This week, we’re discussing love in the digital age. Traumatizing at worst and vaguely underwhelming at best? Yes. Weird as hell? Yes. But still fun? We think so!
E: June is the season of love.
Last weekend, my older sister called me at 3 AM. It struck midnight in California, she had just gotten engaged, and I was up finishing that Sunday’s 888 life updates. The next day at work, someone from marketing flashed her new ring. It was all we talked about during lunch. One girl gushed over her successful Hinge match and pending double date. Another recalled a friend of a friend’s long awaited firefly proposal. (The fiancee waited until firefly season, which is now, apparently, and pretended to catch a firefly midair when it was really the ring.)
So love is, literally, in the air! Are you feeling the full swing of summer romance?
Personally, I’m not. I didn’t scream for joy when I saw my sister’s hand on FaceTime. I’m happy for her, but it feels like we’re living different lives (when she called, I was half asleep typing my “how we’re living section” and knee deep in regretting my last date).
I don’t think I’m cynical per se. I’ve always been one to sneak an I like you note into his locker, and Kelly rolls her eyes every time I tell her why I like someone: I feel like myself around him / I like his friends / He makes me feel safe / We’re Emotionally Connected. (She promises she’ll be supportive when it’s the real deal.)
Perhaps I’m just exhausted. People like to say that modern dating is like sampling. You’re supposed to see what works for you and what doesn’t and leave more sure of what you want. Dating apps, especially, help further that mindset. After all, it preys on our desire for efficiency: to move through our options as quickly as one can. If one doesn’t work, fifteen more pops up. Sampling is safe in New York, a city of infinite possibilities and infinite get-togethers. My most recent lesson snapped me out of auto pilot—I can’t deal with guys who’ll take you out to four dollar-sign sushi restaurants and ask to split. In hindsight, isn’t that obvious? Why did I need to spend a week purging through my likes to find that out?
My list of excuses on why a Hinge match won’t work out runs long—study abroad, college graduation, entrance exams—and boils down to the simple idea of wrong timing. My friend and I, both chronically restless people, agreed the other day that the turbulence level of your personality is directly correlated to how likely you’re in a committed relationship. It’s unlikely that I’ll meet anyone I’ll want to commit to for the foreseeable future, and every bad date forces me to make peace with that.
On the flip side, good dates are annoyingly deceptive. Slow walks home at 3 am, kisses that feel forbidden in the backseat of a taxi, an awaited when can I see you again text. It took me a long time and many bell hooks’ quotes to stop confusing these moments with love itself. Of course, I can see myself falling in love with you on a 49th floor penthouse and running off to Europe—you, me, and the rest of the world baby. But after saying that one too many times, I fear that spark is the bare minimum.
Anyway, I deleted my apps last week. In this season, the world feels quieter, smaller without them.
K: Seclusion sits at the heart of romance.
I’ve been watching Love Island episodes back to back this week, trying to get through the season five Casa Amor recoupling arc before sitting down to discuss my thoughts on the show, partly because Casa Amor is Love Island at its most explosive and conniving, its chaotic aftermath one of the most anticipated segments of televised entertainment, ripe for analysis and cultural commentary—and partly because I, really, really needed to know who was getting dumped from the island next. (I’m not done with the season do NOT spoil it for me!!!!!)
The other day, while floating alone in Ryan’s apartment pool, it occurred to me that “seclusion sits at the heart of romance.” A common practice of reality TV shows, especially ones revolving around love and dating, is the sequestering away of its contestants, who are flown out by producers to both literal as well as social islands, far away from their old lives and ties. For the duration of their stay, they are not allowed to contact family or friends, post on social media, access the Internet, or extensively—if at all—engage with personnel unaffiliated with the show. The idea is to optimize contestants’ physical and psychological environment for compelling romances to take flight.
Love Island is filmed in a luxurious villa off the coast of Spain, but inside, the furniture is IKEA-esque, minimal, and vaguely reminiscent of summer camp. Contestants share identical water bottles and mic packs, and even some six weeks into the program, beds remain indistinguishable from one another (everyone sleeps together in the same room). The only personal belonging I’ve seen from a contestant that isn’t makeup or swimwear is Ellie Bellie, Molly-Mae’s stuffed elephant that she sleeps with. It’s obvious that you don’t bring yourself onto reality TV—only a still-shot of whichever angle you hope will sell to potential partners or, more likely, the public. (There is, arguably, “a desire for wholesale adoration” that comes attached to the sorts of people attracted to televised dating.)
The fact that such a barren and clean-slate environment is what “optimizes” the chances of love and attraction blossoming between contestants implies to me that love, in its ideal and distilled form, is something we believe can be isolated, pared-down, and stripped of context. I don’t want to pay my bills, I want to run away to Europe with my faceless paramour. I don’t want to just find someone and settle down, I want to be whisked away, made to suffer, and flung about in the throes of love with such passion that I forget who I am. If it’s nationally televised, all the better.
Obviously, getaway islands are sexy: sunny weather, sparkling water, room service, bikini-clad girls and shirtless guys, etc. “The thing about summer romance is that when the weather is warm, you feel different; you are different,” says Kovie Biakolo. “You feel more free, more beautiful, more of who you want to be; more of everything good.” Love Island ensures that all the raw, material components of an extended holiday are there to facilitate sexual tension and butterflies. There are free drinks, beautiful bodies, the possibility of love, sex, fame, and money. The fecundity of it all is overwhelming.
But I also think of the survivors of shipwreck, the empty shores to which deposed kings are exiled, Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball out of loneliness, delirium arriving in tandem with nightfall. That’s the double-side of island romance, and if you ask me, our modern interpretation of “ideal” love as a whole. It seems like we’re constantly cleaving ourselves from our everyday lives, setting out to sea for a glimpse of our own love islands, straining our necks over whatever good thing is already in front of us to admire a make-believe mirage of what we think will complete us, of who we hope is coming just around the corner—and do that until we go a little crazy.
Where’s my august, pulling up by the cobblestone road and saying, Kelly, get in? Where’s my Conrad Fisher, complicated and all the more desirable for it, making me cry at the carnival? No wonder we so often find ourselves stranded. Do I want to be saved or do I want to get into even more trouble?
Our lives today look nothing like the lives of our predecessors. Technology, industrialization, postmodern sensibilities, the increased anxiety and collective psychological isolation of people today have all made historical models of love more or less obsolete points of reference. I’m never going to experience what Allie and Noah had, not because I’m undeserving of magical love, but because it’s not 1940 anymore, and I would never give someone who chases me down in the street the time of day.
Though I might poke fun at Camille’s on-and-off relationship with Hinge, I’m not interested in judging her, just as I’m not interested in judging someone for going on TV to meet beautiful people and sunbathe. Who doesn’t want to fall in love, or at least roleplay it for six weeks? Who isn’t secretly convinced they are one swipe or outlandish meet-cute away from stumbling into the thing that is going to save their life? It’s a novel and weird world. I think it’s so neo-romantic of Cam, actually, to keep swiping. She is one of the most steadfast and on-trend champions of love I know.
Looking to how people have loved in the past for pointers on how to love today is like looking at an instruction manual on operating a landline to assemble your new smartphone. In that way, we are all marooned from love. Or, at least, from any concrete, dependable idea of what love ought to look like or encompass in the twenty-first century.
My brilliant friend
K: Ryan and Rishi, for hosting me this week in SF, taking me to beautiful places, and being two of my oldest friends. I feel so fortunate to have you both in my life. Congratulations on your internships and enjoy the rest of your west-coast summer! 💕🥭