ode to internet love
on dating apps and small loves
A year after my breakup, I found myself uploading photos of me to a dating app profile. I needed six of them - sharp and flattering- and a good bio to summarise the palatability of my existence to complete strangers. This mandatory preliminary requirement made picking my best photos feel thrillingly shallow. I also needed to answer question prompts to help summarise my personality while keeping it within the acceptable bandwidth of ‘date-able’: Netflix or nightclub? How often do you hit the gym? What do you do after work?
I was 25 and disappointed- in myself, my dating record, and in men. So I wrote looking for serious disappointments only as if to preempt a known conclusion.
Often, I’d swipe right and find the app rejoice into a ‘Congratulations!! It's a match!!’ banner. This signalled pre-existing attraction, and it was proof of being wanted even though it reduced me to an object of desire. How did I get here? Perhaps, from a place where I witnessed a relationship go bankrupt on love, and my own self-worth reduce to a vessel of too much need. Back in that place, there is a video reel of ten years centered around a singular, familiar face, and this video plays on a loop. This place was in me, it constituted me. Back then, I’d pretend I didn’t know this, but I did. Every time I’d run through a round of swiping left and right, I was hoping he’d show up on my screen.
About the dates themselves: I believe I started everything with the preconceived assumption of incompatibility, or rather, the understanding that eventually, everyone is incompatible anyway. And yet, on Friday nights I found myself shampooing my hair, putting a date-night-appropriate-dress on, and winging my eyeliner. I got good at the process - picking up half baked conversations, sitting with the awkward static between strangers, ordering my drinks. I resized and repackaged so many goodbyes, it practically became a hobby. Dating apps have a way of rewarding the impulsive and the detached- you could commit and take it back or you could not commit and still come around. Being on them was a juxtaposition of thrill, overwhelm, decision fatigue, and boredom. Eventually, you must return to your life. In a sense, dating apps get it: all romances, including the pursuit of romances, are performative. Whether we admit it or not. Once you’re on the app, you can’t pretend to be above it.
I met M., tall, blonde and blue-eyed, a day after we swiped on each other. He likened me to a French actress, and called the thrill of bacon-wrapped prawns 'cheap' and 'highly unoriginal'. Despite considering both those comparisons wholly inaccurate, I wanted to go out with him. We quickly graduated to Instagram where he flurried my account with likes on posts all the way down to my life in different cities, with different friends. Meanwhile, I was stalking him without admitting my excitement and curiosity. The restaurant we picked for our first date wasn't serving alcohol, and it was too late to relocate. Sober dating is akin to loveless dating - there's no candlelight warmth, no buzz - just jitters. The flirtation was cold but we were creatures on the same spectrum, politely agreeing on everything without delving into nuance, for nuance could pave way for potential disagreements we didn;t have the energy to follow through. Later that night we took a walk and recounted the plotlines of our previous relationships. We described the kind of emotional mess we were, and I wondered if this is where I’d always be- telling a new man why the last man isn’t in his place, starting new romances on the ruins of the last one, and forever chasing love without ever being in it.
M. had been through a divorce himself, one he had neither asked for nor seen coming. He had a tattoo of the world map on his arm to symbolize the tectonic shift of it all. Newly single, and very very lost, our blue-eyed man made traveling across countries an act of salvage. I didn’t know what to do with myself, he said, and so he looked up some articles on digital nomad-ing, and began the work of moving on. He figured if he couldn’t tether himself to the woman he loved, he could tether himself to entire cities. I was envious of his courage to eradicate all sense of permanence, I thought, it isn’t so easy for me, to just snap my fingers, take a flight and forget about it.
Turns out the only thing better than getting drinks was not getting drinks. When we met again, we spoke of my worries about reducing my dating life to symptoms of failed relationships, and he said he understood, without pointing to the irony of this discussion while we paraded our availability on dating apps. Honestly, it's hard to tell if he would have disagreed had I said much else, anyway. But for the first time since the end of my relationship, I witnessed a sparkling example of what being with someone else would look like; this feeling of want was quite different from the other wants I felt within my last relationship, it was anticipatory and marked by the possibility of zero or limited fruition. M. and I would flirt until it was interrupted by a socio-political discussion which we’d discuss until one of us was flirting again. If dating apps provided you with a fraction of a real relationship, then I was starting to realise that a fraction was all I could handle, that whole wasn’t something I was prepared for anyway. On my way back home from our second date, I wondered if M. and I will ever meet again, but something about the way he said goodbye told me we would.
After a while, I couldn’t keep up with M.’s flirtation, but the feelings were mutual and conspicuous, even in sobriety and mornings after. I liked meeting him. There were no rules to break. I could leave whenever I wanted. I could hoard all the affirmation I needed without any accountability. The options open to me via dating apps fatigued me, but they also dwindled the space my past relationship took. But as more weeks passed, M. wasn’t just a source of affirmation, he was becoming a person I looked forward to. I developed an ongoing hobby of gauging him by bombarding him with questions, and he never looked like he had been asked something he didn’t want to answer. And although we discussed a lot of answers, really, we were asking the same questions- how do we let our guards unhinge? how do we agree without making echo chambers of each other? how do we disagree without losing the other? how do we leave and why do we stay?
When he got back from his vacation, M. and I discovered, over bowls of soupy ramen, that we had exhausted all conversations about his trip over real-time social media uploads. We had accidentally re-dialed to default mode, and could only bounce old conversations off of each other to pass time interestingly. Yes, I felt pressured to be interesting to him, felt scared that we were no longer strangers giddy with the possibility of submerging into each other, felt anxious about swimming waters of familiarity. In the coming days, dinner was eaten on the couch, new playlists were made, and my hot showers had to wait for his cold ones to finish. I discovered my singular bedside table wasn’t meant to accommodate two reading glasses, two books, and two cups of tea at once without creating clutter. Yet, in all this clutter, M. and I thrived. We witnessed the intimacy that comes about when two curated personalities distill into their actual messy selves. The more this intimacy happened, the further I drove away from the nostalgia of my previous relationship. The quest for something new and shiny had disappeared, and in its place was a funny-blue-eyed-liberal dream who liked the right side of the bed and checked his emails first thing in the morning.
My favorite thing about M. was his curiosity about things he didn't understand - laundry segregation, local politics, flavored coffee ... he carried this uncluttered sense of peace that one only finds in the company of someone they carry no baggage with. He loved food but didn’t make a fuss if it was badly made. M. was the kind of person who could both admit to and call out shallow performances, without causing a single strand of hurt. To me, he represented a fleeting sense of possibility, meaning what we had was clean- it lacked past mistakes and allied resentments. But the parts of M. that showed up in flaws and vulnerability- his restlessness with being left alone for too long, his insistence that any tension be diffused right away … the parts that were struggling and weak to the possibility of breaking apart- they made me uncomfortable. It was as if the build of possibility had disintegrated when I wasn’t looking. But M. didn’t pretend to want anything different from what we now were, and at times that was too much for me. It was too real for me.
In the weeks that followed, I was irritated by his dinner preferences and my curtailed shower time. I had given up one half of my bed and all my free hours to him. I hated how he’d reduce the volume on the speaker when my music was playing, and trail behind me into other rooms even though I wanted some space. But really, I resented that M. was no longer my idea of M. That he was an actual person emerging from my hypotheticals of him. That he was funny and gorgeous but also flawed, confused and needy. That he was a real person who looked nothing like the person I had spent years trying to love.
The truth about internet love affairs is that they're often smoke dissipating to reveal an empty theatre. When we stop subscribing to the date-able, non-fussy label the app assigns to its user, when the person in front of us becomes more than just a binary of Netflix or nightclubs, we don’t know what do do with them. Internet love architects a love built for romance but those of us who arrive here with unresolved loves might just set ourselves to fuck up. Which is to say, that when M. announced his departure out of the country, I was relieved. I even pretended to agree with him when he blamed our timing and not our compatibility.
Still, saying goodbye to M. on that Wednesday morning made me cry- not so much because I missed him- but because he reminded me of how pure an emotional reaction to affection can be. In leaving, M. taught me that the best iterations of partnerships should grant you peace, not fireworks. When he left, his ghost was all over my room: his reading glasses on the side table, his pile of clothes on the floor, the extra takeout, and un-scented moisturizer. M. was reduced to the vessel of possibilities he originally represented on my dating app. And I missed him, even the parts of him that weren't remarkable.
In the empty of my room, I decided it was time to finally break that cycle of recounting old broken loves to new potential ones. There was a suitcase of loneliness in my metaphorical attic and it needed unpacking.
In truth, M. and I met at the wrong time because he was ending his journey in reclaiming his solitude just as I was starting mine. It was a duplicitous compatibility- we both wanted to be free and certain, but not at the same time. Perhaps, then, our timing really was wrong. But in the brief time we dated, he was a real person present at the end of my days, and a part of my daily routine. I wanted to be the woman who watched his late night TV, shared his food, and gave him advice. I wanted to be a woman ready for arguments & reconciliation. But truly, I wasn’t this woman yet, and I couldn’t render myself to his things even if I tried. I suppose, ripping my own Band-Aids off would mean admitting that what was desirable about M, even what wasn't- was all a fantasy. It was etched on a shared reality, but it couldn't multiply into perpetuity. An ode to internet love is more than an ode to M., it is an ode to the transience and limitations of love. Love that is finite. Love that runs out.
I view dating apps differently now. They no longer represent a debate between the glow of a serendipitous meet-cute vs. bland-shallow-love. Dating apps are manufacturing units for a romance that births and dies in the advantage of laying your cards before hand, and verifying what you're dealt. I understand this love isn't sexy, but if you're patient- it could become a real thing that houses mutuality. M. and I are now reduced to the occasional meme exchange, a back and forth of life updates, if any. One of us asks how the other is doing and the other says "I am fine" because we no longer delve into nuances, and that reduction is fine too.
A life with M. is now a variable - unknown and unknowable. Still, there was someone to know in him, I just wouldn't be the one to know.
All artwork by Ankita Khanra. Find more of her work on her Instagram