Weekend Essay: The Trouble With Swiping for Love

When it comes to sifting through prospective partners, my friend swipes left (i.e., vetoes) too quickly for my taste, as I ogle their profiles over her shoulder. Maeve does a rapid scan of the first photo or two, sees some impossibly foreign-sounding name or that he’s based in “Little Ferry,” and it’s curtains.Most people who are “on the apps” are guilty of the same. More interesting is that they seem utterly unimpressed when truly beautiful faces grace their screens. After all, if we’re not swayed by looks on a platform that’s entirely photo based, what will be enough to rouse our interest? Admittedly, there is an inherently misguided assumption in that question. Perhaps there’s nothing lacking in any of us, but a greater insufficiency embedded within the world of digital dating.It’s as though all that swiping has numbed us to the particulars and special features that might be the sparkplugs of affection. Beauty, humor, special qualities, intelligence, a colorful life story — it’s all reduced to two dimensions. It’s all flattened and unhelpfully democratized. The thing is, I’ve never experienced anything more than magnetism at first sight. If I’m to fall in love, let alone be the cause of someone else’s bewitching, I need enough time and real-world space for love’s peculiar alchemy to do its work. We all need a chance to grow important and unique in the eyes of our beholder. We need him to know about our half-a-dimple, the charming way we order french fries with coffee, and our penchant for crying every time we hear Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” We all need a chance to redeem ourselves from the digital era’s resting state of boredom and from the snap judgments people have grown accustomed to making with trigger-happy fingers. When you stop and think about it, it’s unrealistic to expect a long-term relationship to flow so easily from the shortest-of-terms dating process.In a talk with celebrity interviewer Kristine McKenna, Joni Mitchell once said:“I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: ‘If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.’ What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love.” Ms. Mitchell’s words often echo in my mind. I think about the transformative influence one can have and the bonds one can cultivate when two people remain together in one place and maintain a single focus for some time. I think about perennial growth and the way in which a single person whose face is more familiar to you than anything in the world can, at times, be recast in different lighting and seem, in the best of ways, like a stranger.Carrie Bradshaw, the hopeless romantic lead in HBO’s “Sex and the City,” makes several impassioned speeches about love over the course of her six seasons. In one of her more memorable tirades, she turns to her tragically avoidant boyfriend and says, “I’ve done the merry go round. I’ve been through the revolving door. I feel like I met somebody I can stand still with for a minute … don’t you want to stand still with me?”Yet how do we stand still and comb through the layers of complexity each of us bears in an age in which the most ephemeral of virtual first impressions so easily and often thwarts our chances of ever even meeting?Even when a more weighty chat does take root, too many of my friends fall short of making it to the first date, reporting woefully about the discovery of damning political differences. “Turns out he’s crazy conservative,” or, “Found out she was a radical feminist” aren’t uncommon ends to these very brief affairs.In one of my favorite books, Joshua Halberstam’s “A Seat at the Table,” the author writes, “Arguments don’t change points of view; people do.” And that’s just it — a dating profile is nothing more than a weak, surface-level argument. Without the roots of friendship or courtship, it’s hard to forgive and love the person standing behind it.So how should we, in times like these, go about falling in love?I think it starts with slower swiping, finding that third dimension, and listening with a whole lot more heart.

Weekend Essay: The Trouble With Swiping for Love

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