Don't look too closely, love

On a scale of "I'd-die-for-you romance" to "Hinge makes me feel spiritually ran through", what is your outlook on love?

When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

—Martin Buber

There was a time when love was dumb and beautiful. It held prolonged eye contact across a crowded room. It happened while you were stuck beside them on a five-hour flight. It didn’t consult your preferences. It was the preference, indescribable and inconvenient, the way rain prefers to pour on the day you forget your umbrella.

Information (too much, too soon) deletes Eros, the spirit of love. Romance requires a blurriness, be it distance or the veil of naivety. We all want serendipity, but meet cutes don’t happen on the apps, matchmaking services, or anything else that starts with data because Eros doesn’t like being seen—this is what happens in the Greek myth: when Psyche lifts a lamp to look at her lover’s face while he sleeps, they are split up and she is cursed to never see him again.

We didn’t want to kill Eros, we just wanted to know what he means. So, we asked too many questions. We looked too closely, picked him apart, and called it a trend, an aesthetic, an accessory. We plotted attraction on memes and organized them on rosters and forgot how to feel it.

Outsourcing Eros to software

Algorithms are good at connecting people with mutual interests, political alignment, attachment style, and music taste. It’s calibrated for safety, similarity, compatibility, and even outcome…but we all agree that it’s missing the feeling of desire. The gaze of wanting. The I-can’t-look-away. I know this feeling because I feel it every time I see the waiter bring plates to my table.

when the delivery guy hauls a stack of boxes into your building lobby

I once matched with a guy who, in our very first conversation, asked me to go to Tokyo with him for our first date. The chances of that happening without dating apps are near zero. In a way, dating apps let you find your value by operating in an open market, but you’ll forever feel like you were picked from a pile, that you should shut up and feel content for winning some kind of numbers game because you had no chance otherwise anyway (maybe I am a h̷o̷p̷e̷l̷e̷s̷s̷ incurable romantic).

Another thing about the algorithm is that it prefers certainty, and I am down bad for mystery. The irony is that even when you’re being serious and intentional, marking yourself as “serious and intentional” ruins that unspoken something-something. Alternatively, if you don’t explicitly say what you’re looking for: (for men) you’re more likely to be ignored because someone else’s profile provides more certainty, or (for women) you’re more likely to attract people who will ruin your life. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Due diligence weakens Eros. The minute someone asks “What are you looking for?”, “What have your experiences been like on Hinge?”, or “What were your past relationships like?” Eros is gone. I’m not saying ignorance is good or that we shouldn’t vet people, it’s that when we try to categorize living humans into some kind of type (“sensitive young man”, “crypto bro”, “golden retriever”, “black cat”, “Pilates princess”), the connection loses its soul, almost like how you kill a good joke by explaining it.

I don’t think dating apps are bad, even though I empathize with the “optionality makes you numb” sentiment. However, the issue here isn’t even about putting your eggs in different baskets, it’s DO YOU EVEN LIKE YOUR BASKETS??? (see:

steph :)

talks about #ihatemybf)

Romantic perfectionism vs. True desire

The poet Anne Carson once wrote about how Eros can lead to humiliation because it’s a slap in the face to anyone who wants control and permanence around something naturally incontrollable and elusive.

Humiliation and rejection hurt. Yearning aches. Embarrassment can last longer in memory than physical injuries do on the body. One of the major reasons people use dating apps is because it reduces that pain. We get binary responses (i.e., match/no match, reply/no reply). When we strive for romantic perfectionism, we make desire a problem when it was supposed to be the point. Eros needs nuance.

When we outsource Eros to software—when we tell it “Here’s my type, my hobbies, my icks, and my love languages; bring me someone I won’t suffer for,” it becomes the worst kind of god: one that gives us exactly what we ask for. True desire doesn’t obey. True desire comes uninvited. We need more Pride and Prejudice and less Terms and Conditions. So, even when there are plenty of fish in the sea, we feel lonely—not because we can’t find someone, but because we never get to fall. One doesn’t climb into love, one falls into it. Falling is irrational. It defies taste and reason. That’s why it feels like losing control.

In Desire is Dead,

Lauren Hall

says that Eros is supposed to be brutal: “it’s debilitating, devastating, overwhelming—even if it is one of the greatest driving motivations for humans. Why? Because at the heart of desire is wanting something you do not have.” In Greek myth, Eros travels between Mt. Olympus and our world, forming couples between gods and mortals, because it’s only a love story when one party is capable of dying and leaving the other utterly broken. Eros and death are linked: Italian literature frequently plays with the words amore, love, and morte, death, and it’s also why love stories where one person dies (Titanic, Romeo and Juliette) are so archetypal.

We say we want love—and we do—but we forgot that love is totally irrational, and there’s no room for the irrational when everything is optimized or curated. Sometimes, love is what shouldn’t work: that off-script, strange interaction that, in hindsight, was poetry, but you failed to see it that way in the moment because you were fixed on the practical configuration. Eros thrives in what’s unpredictable: in misdialed calls, in the confusion between ‘a friend’ and ‘a crush’, in not knowing. Butterflies don’t hatch from the quantifiable percentage of similarity.

Emily Dickinson said, “the heart wants what it wants, or else it does not care.” My version is: “If I don’t feel like breaking rules or making exceptions for him…maybe I don’t like him that much.” (🤪)

When we ask to be understood too desperately, we lose the pleasure of misunderstanding: Transparency is also boredom. Calculated compatibility is also polite staleness. Fire needs friction. Eros hides his face.

How can there be intimacy without vertigo? How can there be a story without mystery and the risk of death? Desire doesn’t want to be understood, it wants to be felt. Do you want to be correct or do you want to be enchanted?

I didn’t take Tokyo up on his offer. A gut instinct told me not to.

xx

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