personal ad
we saw your public declaration of horniness and really dig your vibe.
31f, straight, brooklyn writer girl with a comically large dog. someone once told me i look like millie bobby brown’s doppelgänger but i think he says that to every brunette he wants to sleep with. likes: surfing, yoga, hiking, trad climbing, $17 smoothie bowls, literary fiction, reality tv, jack-in-the-box 99 cent tacos, diy punk, lefty politics, canvas tote bag virtue signaling, old toyota 4runners (tacoma will do in a pinch), and men who bleach their hair in lieu of going to therapy. seeking a lowbrow brilliant creative type to make the burden of being alive a little more fun.
That’s the personal ad I was supposed to submit ahead of an event last week. It wasn’t a dating event, per se; it was a lit reading. Still, I couldn’t do it. I skimmed the ads that had already been submitted and immediately got the ick. Sure, it sucks to be reminded that I’m actually the most un-special normie in all of central Brooklyn — a 2020s NPC from the Lena Dunham cinematic universe —, but the real problem was the exposure of the entire enterprise. I was expected to perform my singledom, to sing for my supper, in an open forum for anyone to see.
I couldn’t help but wonder… is dating now a spectator sport?
Dating, at least in the traditional, monogamous sense, requires earnestness and a collective delusion that two un-special people will combine forces to create some sort of special pair. Dating apps allow us to conceal that corniness behind anonymous profiles seen only by others who have agreed to suspend disbelief in pursuit of getting laid. But now, those apps and the plausible deniability they engender are cooked.
For the past year or so, people much smarter than I have been writing about the demise of dating apps. They’re hemorrhaging users. Their revenues are slipping. To stay in the black, their parent companies are putting features and hotties behind paywalls, further alienating their midnight Romeos and matching Juliets. Still, the apps have left their indelible mark on The Culture™️.
More than a decade of swiping created a generation that views romance as something that happens in isolation. Gone are the days of grocery store meet cutes. Hitting on strangers in bars is a rarity. Even sliding into the DMs — a seemingly natural move for recovering app daters — is now borderline taboo. We’re experiencing the backlash to online dating hell, but in the long-overdue pendulum swing back to IRL connection, we’ve stalled out. We’re caught in some Bushwickized USO dance purgatory; flirting happens at approved times, in designated spaces, supervised not by a youth pastor, but probably by a podcaster.
And these new (well, old, but what’s old is new again) forums for dating are increasingly public: The Hot Young Singles newsletter (RIP); Angel Food Mag’s “earthly connections;” Chartbook’s new personal ads; that Instagram account that interviews online clout-chasers about why they’re single. Even the events, like NYC-DSA’s annual discourse-bait/speed-dating event and the Make America Hot Again VP debate/singles mixer, are replete with professional photographers. Work crushes are out, but pick me! pitch deck presentations are somehow in. Taken as a whole, it’s kind of like a horny talent show.
So why take the stage? To start, people just don’t have community networks like they used to.1 Plus our individualistic society is built upon a squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease reward system. Plus remote work and school ran roughshod over basic social skills. Plus cheap entertainment executives keep spoon-feeding us a media diet of reality dating shows. Plus the nefarious long tail of gifted-and-talented programs. Plus influencer culture. Plus the good old fashioned fear of rejection — getting shot down by the one person who gives you butterflies feels a million times worse than getting a middling response to your online ad. Plus, plus, plus…
I don’t mean to moralize. I don’t chat up handsome strangers in the wild. And I do trot out my internet persona to make an ass of myself online at least once a week. We’re all simply doing our best to navigate a world stubbornly opposed to having the amorphous project of falling in love encroach on everyday life.
But just as many users are feeling “dating-app fatigue,” I’m feeling performance burnout. I just got a new job, where I metaphorically tap danced my way through something like seven rounds of interviews, trying to demonstrate that I’m smart but not a know-it-all, funny but focused, a team player but ambitious enough to one day be a leader. Now I’m trying to ingratiate myself to new editors over coffee and wow agents over Zoom. Online, I post jokey fit pics and absurdist polls so hopefully the hundreds of people who liked my bikini selfie will also read my forthcoming essay on natural disaster recovery. Meanwhile my friends are performing even more consequential public image high-wire acts: one was recently stressing about the right way to share the news of her Emmy win, so she might finally get a promotion; another is weighing which media outlet to offer a tearful interview to, so maybe her US visa application gets back on track. To treat dating as yet another market in the attention economy feels like shit.
So I wrote a thousand-word email screed about how I can’t stand begging for attention, or affirmation, or love. Hypocritical, huh? Unfortunately, life is full of messy contradictions, and trying to write my way through them is my coping mechanism. I hit send because I figure I, an un-special central Brooklyn normie, can’t be alone in this. So lowbrow brilliant creative type, hit me up, I guess.
There has been much breathless coverage of the boom in clubs — especially running clubs — as de facto dating services. Unfortunately this is a case of the media manufacturing a trend, rather than reporting on it. Everyone in a running club has already bagged a solid 7.5 and they have brunch plans after this, sorry! Maybe these trend stories are some shady MAHA psy-op, IDK.