Here I am in my living room, with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of apple cider in the other (how am I even typing, right?), doing a re-run of Sex and The City, currently on season 4. Carrie just got engaged to Aiden (and we all know how that ends), Samantha has issues admitting that she is in love with the handsome CEO she’s been f**king the last couple of episodes, and Charlotte is splitting up with Trey. Overall, it’s a shipwreck.
However, SATC is not the only shipwreck around. It’s a Sunday night, and I’m wearing what comes to be described as a dressing gown (though nearly not as elegant as it sounds — think fluffy purple flannel bathrobe), combined with sweatpants meant to be seen by my eyes only, and for some unexplained reason — sexy red underwear. I guess a girl should not stop hoping she will miraculously get some fun.
The mid-20s are an admittedly weird time to be single. There’s always family meetings where relatives ask for most recent updates on your relationship status, and the grandmothers worry when they’ll meet their great-grandchild. Then, there are the random run-ins with people you’ve known from the now-ancient history called ‘high school’, which by default have updates in the form of engagement/wedding/pregnancy/second baby. We get it, Karen, being a mother has given you a purpose in life the rest of us can’t even begin to fantom. And it feels so weird and #CantRelate because the other half of us are drunk by 3 pm on a Friday and can’t remember to pay the electricity bill on time.
I had hit a rough patch this summer when my LTR just ended overnight — the guy (we’ll call him Lars) I was living with for over a year and planned a future with went to visit his parents back home in Scandinavia. Three hours after Lars had landed, he announced he wasn’t coming back, to our home, for reasons beyond my comprehension. I was utterly shattered — how could that happen?
To spare you all the painful detail, we kept in touch and tried keeping the relationship alive regardless, but it eventually came crashing down in flames. I was left in the same apartment with all the ashes, all of his things he hadn’t picked up, and a yellow pillow I hadn’t changed the cover of hidden in the depths of my closet.
As months passed, I realised that moping around the apartment singing and crying to Gaga’s “I’ll Never Love Again” won’t do anyone any good, especially not to my poor neighbours who stoically endured those tough times. It was time to get back out there, start healing my broken heart, and see the other fish in the sea people kept telling me about. As it turns out, there really are some fish, but no one warned me about the tons of plastic floating around.
So here comes a serious question — how do you people date these days? I haven’t been “away” for that long, but let me tell you — it was enough to forget all the nooks and crannies of what-is-called seeing people (as if you go around with your eyes closed in all other situations).
But there isn’t a more appropriate term for this it seems. According to a Quora thread as a reliable source, seeing someone is meant to describe the time when you get acquainted with them, may or may not sleep with them, and are in no way attached to them or exclusive. At a later stage (what does later mean??) comes the dating period, where you’re still not in an official relationship, but are allowed to develop an emotional attachment (who gives the permission?), are presumably exclusive, and you can take them out on a night out with friends, because mixing pleasure with friends (what?) should not in any way happen during the previous period. Only after comes the relationship part, but I still haven’t managed to get the gist of how it is any different than dating, to be honest.
It may sound somewhat straightforward put down black on white, but the reality is 50 shades of grey (pun intended, I guess?). A close friend of mine, let’s call her Sarah, in an attempt to prepare me for the sea-weed-fish-plastic jungle out there, shared the ultimate seeing someone experience (I would’ve said dating, but that would’ve been wrong, right?).
“You are texting with someone via one or more social media platforms because no one asks for a phone number anymore. Clearly, there’s interest, but no one actually initiates meeting up. Instead, you wait to accidentally meet somewhere through friends, or until the divine powers decide that fate has to bring you together, at least for a few dates. You have fun a couple of times. Then one person slowly fades/ghosts/benches the other, or does any of the number of things that we have now named and for some reason recognised as acceptable behaviour.”
Claire Certain, Global Head Of Trends at dating app Happn, has decided to make a list of these behaviours to simplify the havoc of the dating landscape as if mastering the terminology ever helped anyone score a goal. In the list, she explains that benching, otherwise known as bread-crumbing because why not have multiple names for a dreadful action, is when someone you’ve been dating (I think that seeing is the right word here but hey, what do I know) stops agreeing to meet in person but continues to contact you over message and social media.
And haunting has got a whole new connotation too — it no longer means that you have a ghost in your house (or that you shouldn’t have binge-watched Bates Motel). Nowadays, haunting is when the person who has previously ghosted you makes a reappearance, but instead of having any direct contact with you, they’ll probably like or follow your social media, which is a whole new level of having an unfinished business if you ask me.
Going through the list to read that FBO is now the pinnacle of dating (Facebook Official, keep it up), I noticed that many (if not all) of these modern relationship slangs have a common denominator — social media. Of course, it doesn’t come as a surprise because I mean — hello!, but I can’t help but wonder — is this what human interaction has come down to? Can’t we leave bread-crumbing to Hansel and Gretel, and find our way back to each other IRL?
“It is exhausting.” — Sarah, who has been officially single for over a year, explains.
“So I met this really cute guy, we spent the evening chatting and he asked for my Instragram. We started texting there, but it bugged for a while so we moved over to Whatsapp. In the meantime, he sent me a Snap but it expired before I could realize what it actually said. Then he posted a story, while he wasn’t replying to the last message I sent him, and sent a direct photo, but I have no clue if it was meant for me or he just sent it to everyone in his friends list, you know? The whole thing just spiraled out of control. You have to go around checking all these different platforms just to get ‘left on seen’ on seven different technologies.”
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not all one-sided. A dear friend of mine, who for the purposes of this article we’ll call John, is perennially single, but, surprisingly, I must say remarkably insightful when it comes to others’ relationships. Too bad he can’t take his own advice, I guess. John, much like Sarah, has gone through his fair share of the ‘seeing someone’ experiences.
“Okay, so the last one, right? I thought it was going somewhere, flirting at work, hanging out on happy hours, dancing in clubs… I decided to let her know what I thought about the whole thing in person, but she said she’d rather talk on Facebook. So I send her this nice, a little long message perhaps, to which she responded by saying she’s flattered and “thought” I was perfect. Everything she wants, everything she needs. And then some. Except she didn’t “feel” I was right. A lack of cardio-cognitive synchronization. Thing is, she likes another guy. She wishes he was more like me. But he’s the one she likes. Friend-zoned? How about example-zoned? Anyway, the thing I can’t understand is, why was it so difficult for her to tell me this face to face?”
It is a good question, albeit one I have no answer to. When having the chance to meet someone and talk face to face, why do we opt for hiding behind a screen? Does it make us more comfortable knowing that we can take our time to respond and not bother with body language, disregarding the fact that the other side might read into every emoji, character, and punctuation received?
As John once said, dating after all turns out to be a lot like an intense game of chess. The main difference is that there’s little chance of anyone playing the latter is going to end up canoodling when the game is over. In both, first comes the opening move to position your pieces, so you have the best chance to strike successfully. As the game moves on, you transition into the middle game, which is crucial because it can develop in many ways. You can lose the advantage you’ve gained with the opening move, make up for the not-so-great start, or simply decide that the game should end there. But the ultimate move is the closing move, the game-ender. All moves leading to the close will be judged on how successfully they enabled the player to finish the game. Even though in dating, making all the right moves doesn’t guarantee a great close, here comes the last thing I cannot help but wonder — how do you know if a given game is even worth playing all the way to check and mate?
