in the bad place
'Instagram dating coaches,' 'lovebombing,' 'anxious attachment,' and killing myself in front of you, changing the trajectory of your life forever
Instagram knows that I have recently gone through a breakup.
This is, admittedly, a genre of essay post I usually scroll past. It doesn’t interest me; too many people are doing it, and not many people are saying anything novel. However, I have learned that at my worst and most frustrated, I am not above producing the same kind of slop that regularly makes me roll my eyes. So, I guess, this one is The Dating Edition. You will never hear me talk about it again. If I do, please assume I have been kidnapped and someone has put a gun to my head, and if not, then fly me out to Dignitas.
Instagram knows I am back on The Apps, for my sins. Seven years away and the landscape has changed dramatically. Friends are telling me it has gotten even worse since Covid, which I can well believe, but since I was last single, Tinder has collapsed, Bumble materialised out of nowhere, Hinge appeared from the most pathetic and abject pits of hell, Feeld arrived, and Her got considerably worse since I last used it in 2016. Where are the coding lesbians? What are gay women doing for dates now? I haven’t ventured out into that arena just yet. Mostly because I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. It’s embarrassing to be so out of practice that I was better at being direct and flirting with women at 17 than I am now at nearly 26.
At first, I felt like Louis Theroux and his wry smile at the orgy. I filled out my prompts, did a little giggle to myself, entertained a few light conversations that were clearly not going to go anywhere because the breakup was still too raw. However, since then, I’ve had a life-changing fling with a man from a faraway country that ended in him going home and me getting more emotional about it than I would like to admit, in more of a ‘smile because it happened, don’t cry because it’s over’ way, but crucially, I was still crying. I have also been unceremoniously flaked on by a number of men in their thirties who oddly seem more unavailable than men in their twenties. My brothers, I am blessed with the gift of youth and opportunity, but you are not getting any younger. You send GIFs by way of flirting and cannot communicate like a grown adult when you’ve lost interest.
I think the worst part of all of this, though, is that Instagram is aware. It knows I’m lonely. It shows me content accordingly: a million of the same annoying copy-paste white American women with a shit-eating smirk, spouting mind-numbing pop psychology bullshit about ‘ghosting’ and ‘breadcrumbing’ and ‘practising detachment.’ The rational part of my brain tells me this is overly simplistic nonsense. It tells me that I know this is all overly simplistic nonsense. But unfortunately I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which feeds precisely off overly simplistic black-and-white moralising nonsense, so whenever I see one of these videos, my eyes go black and roll into the back of my head and suddenly I am possessed by the spirit of a credulous idiot. The fear driving it is that one of these videos will one day reveal to me a new, crucial piece of information that will make me realise I have been living my life all wrong, that I have been approaching my relationships incorrectly and shooting myself in the foot. If I consume all possible information, compulsively check everything, I will have it all worked out. Instead, it has convinced me I will never again find love, and that everyone is out to hurt and deceive me. I have watched myself become tangibly more mentally ill as I consume this garbage.
The whole enterprise is a particularly cynical grift that exploits people with much of the same anxiety as myself, though maybe not on such a pathological level. I do have a diagnosed and certified mental illness, but I see a lot of it in others who are also navigating the dating scene. The anxiety is a simple one: we are all desperate to love and be loved. We are all desperate for companionship. We are all also suffering from this psychic sickness where we are supposed to act like pretending you are in a relationship for three months but not actually calling it that won’t lead to feelings developing on at least one side, because you’ve been simulating that for an extended period of time. We’re supposed to pretend that cancelling on someone you have supposedly built a rapport with last minute because something or someone better came up is run-of-the-mill and not really fucking rude, actually, or that having sex with someone and blocking them the next day is normal and not despicable, dehumanising behaviour. We’re supposed to pretend that if a man is giving you the absolute bare minimum and treating you as if you are just a convenient vagina, then the onus is on the woman for entertaining that behaviour. For being delusional. For not realising that ‘he’s just not that into you, babes :/ ’.
Engaging with this sort of content is simply a way of self-soothing the fear that the outcome is out of our control, which, fundamentally, it always is. I’ve spoken in a previous piece about Instagram therapists teaching what I call ‘emotional management a priori.’ If we keep ourselves abreast of every possible eventuality and why these happen, we can steel ourselves against anything, just in case someone will lie to us, just in case someone will cheat on us, just in case our hearts get broken, even if there is no evidence this will definitely come to pass. The logical conclusion to this is, of course, that if any of this ever does materialise and you are emotionally impacted by it, you didn’t prepare enough. It is all your fault for being too soft and too sensitive and too permissive of these chimerical bad men and their typical bad behaviour, which you could have avoided by exercising better judgement. It feels as if shifting the blame to rest on women for tolerating mistreatment or not managing their possible emotional reaction prior to the event, and subsequently letting men off the hook for their shit interpersonal conduct because it is simply to be expected, is the default mode of operation in these circles. It is the call of the post-pandemic, post-MeToo, mid-2020s heteropessimist.
Back in October, just a few days after my own breakup, a video went viral of a woman whose partner uprooted them from LA to Texas, only to brutally dump her via written note once she had settled them into their new home and blown all of her savings on the move. The fact so many people — people of all genders — were blaming her for ‘moving for a man despite not being married after three years,’ or ‘not picking up on contextual clues that he wanted to break up by telling her he wanted to move back to Texas’ (???) was not lost on me. As someone who moved to Australia for my partner of seven years only for the relationship to fall apart immediately on our return, it struck me that most of the people sticking their oar in seemed deeply uncomfortable with the simple fact that love and desire put you entirely at the mercy of someone else. No one is infallible in this regard, but working towards this illusory goal by trying to sanitise relationships writ large, proclaiming it “low agency,” “low accountability” or “not taking responsibility” to love someone and trust them and be hurt, demonstrates a belief that one can simply avoid this fate by making better choices than the poor woman in question. It is a belief underpinned by insecurity. It also assumes, incorrectly, that should it happen, it will ruin your life irreparably.
A sad byproduct of this avoidance of pain at all costs is a certain emotional numbing, which leads to a complete neutering of any heated, passionate, or particularly devastating matters of the heart. It is so evident in the way people now talk about heterosexual relationships in particular. Intensity early on is ‘lovebombing;’ communicating when you want to communicate is ‘double texting’ and therefore ‘chasing’ and therefore bad; steamy flings have become sterile ‘situationships.’ Leading someone on and manipulating them by showing just enough affection to give them false hope is ‘breadcrumbing.’ Being cruelly abandoned after making yourself emotionally or sexually vulnerable is ‘ghosting.’ The matter-of-fact language attempts to remove the humanity, the inevitability from it all. Take it from me: you can do everything right. You can date someone who is instantly into you, was never on the apps, plays none of the stupid games we all feel the need to play. You can date someone who worships the ground you walk on for the best part of seven years. You can be with someone you love like nothing you have ever loved before, who you would trust with your life, who promises you they want to marry and have children with you. It can all still end in heartbreak foisted on you when you least expect it, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It is still not your fault. You may as well acknowledge it might happen and breathe through it all if it does come to pass. You have to live your life anyway.
What I really hate about all of this, though, is the smugness of it all. We are told simply to ‘focus on ourselves’ instead of trying to find a relationship in such a rotten landscape — and in the meantime, what? Become an island, wall ourselves off from the rest of the world? Deny ourselves the fundamental human urge to love, be loved, express love, receive love, just because some people are seemingly incapable of being considerate and decent? 'Do the work,’ which I suppose involves training yourself to talk robotically about human connection like a large language model instead of like a person, and listening to these self-satisfied girlbosses who supposedly have life all figured out even though they make their living as ‘lifestyle content creators’ (not a real job by the way), harping on about how ‘he just doesn’t like you that much 😌’ or ‘if he wanted to (and you were beautiful, thin and self-possessed like me) he would 😌’? If a man is lonely, it is everyone else’s fault, and we discourse ourselves a whole manufactured epidemic out of it. If a woman admits she’s lonely, everyone else drills into her that it is entirely self-inflicted, a product of her own delusion, poor emotional regulation, and lack of self-respect.
I’ve been rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being recently. It’s my favourite. The central tension is in the title: when our existences are heavy with duty, we feel ourselves lose our grasp over our own autonomy and agency, but often these responsibilities we feel can be mandated by fate, leading us towards some sort of higher purpose or fortuitous situation. When we let go of all obligation, including those towards other people, our beings become light with freedom. But releasing the obligation for basic decency in our conduct towards others, simply because we like the feeling of being unmoored, does not mean something else will not weigh on you. Namely, the fact that little by little, you let go of your own humanity, too; the part that allows you to feel love, and passion, and contentment. This is not an endorsement of swinging in the opposite direction — no one is forcing you to lock yourself into a situation out of pure dogged commitment if you are not enjoying it! — but there are a few core tenets that anchor everything. Treating people like human beings who exist independently of your orbit and not simply to serve you is one.
Perhaps I am not looking for anything serious or earth-shattering yet, either. This life is still too new to me. But I do still expect ‘casual' to encompass basic dignity and being treated like a person. I will not cease to be shocked when it does not, because cheapening this behaviour, banalising it, intellectualising it as ‘narcissistic’ or ‘avoidant’ or something men just do, makes it seem like something we should expect by default. Is this not a desperately sad way to live? I will not cease to be soft and sensitive and easily broken, because that is also how the love gets in. I will not focus on ‘self-optimisation’ or ‘going to therapy’ instead, or assume prior responsibility for guarding myself against someone else’s poor interpersonal behaviour just in case it harms me. I take no solace in any ‘healing’ that resembles closing myself off to the potential for love and the potential for hurt, because they are two sides of the same coin that will never exist without the other. I fall in love easily and write about the people I hold dear with the intensity of a medieval Persian poet. This is what it means to be alive, isn’t it?
Thank you all, my lovely subscribers, for being so patient with me. A combination of breakup/PhD (which I am admittedly not doing a whole lot of right now)/SAD is beating me over the head with a blunt instrument currently, so I am mostly writing during my very erratic spikes of energy, with this one taking me all of about an hour because I got angry about the state of things. I am, however, writing something about my last few months which has kept me busy — it really is a labour of love and I would love to publish it somewhere, but it is currently at 19,000 words with no signs of slowing, so who knows, maybe a novel in the making? Either way, thank you again for being here. It means a lot.
Really enjoyed reading this. It's almost as if dating and relationships have been made into a marketable product where the marketers don't actually want anyone to be happy. Every week there's a new buzzword to learn or a habit to be wary of in your significant other. It all means ugatz but contributing to a soulless society.
I love this even though it made me cringe. This whole meta “double guessing” what someone really means takes me back to my youth in the Deep South where a simple comment like “looks like it’s windy out today” really meant “you go get a hairbrush and a mirror.”