The Lonely Hunter, page 11
Dating is grabbing the best you can get, I thought, like a fire sale.
That didn’t seem quite right either, though Dylan’s unpleasant outlook did get distressingly close to my own observations. Not just that I was being judged, but that potential dates were assessing what they could get from me and how little they would have to invest to get it. Sexually, of course, but also romantically or emotionally. How needy they could be in texts, how much attention they could expect, how willing they were to respond to my neediness. The sexual marketplace wasn’t just about your personal value; it was about how much someone could extract from you, like in a mining operation.
The term “emotional labor” has come to mean the extra mental and emotional effort, mostly made by women, that is often unacknowledged and unpaid but is necessary to keep things running. Things like managing household duties, remembering family birthdays, keeping track of what needs to be done to make a functional life for other people. The term was coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, and the way it’s used now has gotten away from her original intention.
She told writer Julie Beck in an interview for The Atlantic in 2018 that she saw that much of what was being described as emotional labor, like chores, is actual labor. Her original intent was to draw attention to jobs like flight attendant or nurse or childcare worker, which demand people moderate and perform their emotions in a certain way.
“The point is that while you may also be doing physical labor and mental labor, you are crucially being hired and monitored for your capacity to manage and produce a feeling,” said Hochschild. I could understand why this definition creep had set in over the last four decades. So many women feel the work they do is unacknowledged, especially in relation to cishet men, and this was a way to describe the unseen internal work of family life. It was part of a larger trend of monetizing the demand for unpaid emotional labor that became bigger and bigger after the 2016 election.
At first, posting a Venmo or CashApp “for emotional labor” was something I noticed activists doing, usually Black women who were being asked to donate their time and expertise for free to the public, and even to private institutions with the budget to pay them. This was an entirely reasonable response to white people’s thirst for education and information and their reluctance to shell out money in exchange for it.
Then, in March of 2017, I remember seeing a friend, another white woman, post that every man should Venmo a woman for International Women’s Day. For some reason, it bothered me. While it’s always fun to get money, reading her half-joking tweet, I realized what I wanted far more was for a man to read a book by a feminist author, support an artist who didn’t share his gender, show up and be kind. Five dollars for a coffee wouldn’t offer the meaningful changes to my life that men understanding misogyny would.
Over the next several years, the idea that all relationships and interactions are essentially transactional took up more and more space, extending beyond dropping a Venmo handle. Listening to a friend in crisis, talking to your roommate about chores, planning a bachelorette party all became some form of emotional labor that was owed compensation. A term that had been intended as an anticapitalist analysis of actual workloads had instead turned interpersonal relationships into a capitalist system, where you could pay someone rather than be a decent person to them. Like a corporation paying for the right to pollute the environment.
These acts used to be considered part of being in a community; critical examination of who is doing the most work for the least payback in a community is always necessary, but this change in language had turned community-building into something that could only happen within capitalist parameters. To borrow that framework, it struck me as a net loss.
I will say that coming home from a bad date did make me feel that even the most speculative encounters came at a cost, though not necessarily one that could be paid back in United States dollars.
But in terms of literal money, I had thought a lot about the costs of dating during my experiment. I tallied up what I spent on drinks or food, what I spent on making myself look good, or on clothes. It cost plenty, and this was just the preview. If I did ever meet someone I wanted to commit to, they could potentially determine my lifelong quality of life. I didn’t mean in just the emotional sense, though that was relevant—another of my mother’s sayings was “marry a rich man and you’ll pay and pay and pay.”
Yet, if my mother hadn’t had a partner with a home, she would be in a much tougher spot than the living room. It was sincerely scary to think that I might end up with somebody who could bring me down financially, or to whom I could become a liability. The divorce and custody battle my mom had gone through with my dad had been devastatingly costly, leading to one of the most desperate times of my childhood. Economic survival is still as much a part of couplehood as anything else, even if we pretend it’s not.
The greatest liability to future me could be remaining single, and eventually growing to an age where there weren’t family members left to turn to in an emergency. My income had been high for about a year. I didn’t know for sure whether it would last. I suspected it wouldn’t. Having grown up with very little money, thinking about making plans or opening a savings account turned my mind blank with anxiety. I knew I would owe a lot in taxes, and I wasn’t remotely prepared. I was approaching my midthirties with absolutely no plan for how I’d pay to live into old age.
Dating is a retirement plan? If so, I had to admit I was a bad economic bet for anybody looking for a 401(k) partner. I didn’t have much economic value, and if Dylan’s assessment was correct, my value on the sexual marketplace wasn’t where it needed to be if I wanted to get anywhere close to Jake Gyllenhaal. But I couldn’t think about these dates as a means to a secure future or as a business negotiation over the assets of my humanity. That left only the immediate pleasures or displeasures of the process.
Late in June, I met a woman named Katherine at a party. Because I had been talking about dating a lot, lots of people had been talking about dating to me. It’s sort of like when you learn a new word and then start hearing it everywhere.
“I go on a date almost every night,” Katherine told me, after we discovered our mutual pastime, then smiled like that was a superb thing. She had a very rich voice, full of enigmatic delight, like the narrator of a fairy tale.
“That’s wild,” I trumpeted in my own unmodulated bray. “How do you do it?”
I’d felt somewhat proud of my measly two dates a week and Katherine had so easily shown me up. I wanted to at least commiserate on the horribleness of it all, to prove I’d been down in the trenches, too, by offering some negative observations about mating rituals. Instead of saying how gross it was, she smiled.
“I just love it!” she crooned. “I love meeting new people, learning about them, connecting over something. There’s always something to learn from everybody, I think, even if you’re not interested in them romantically. I’m always excited to talk to a new person.”
I believed her. Some people do have that capacity for human engagement. I was no introvert, but this level of excitement for everyone who crossed her path made Katherine a powerful dater.
Dating is being excited about meeting new people, I thought, and tried to apply that perspective. Even when I grinned and laughed and tried to approach every interaction with the enthusiasm of a thousand burning Katherines, I wasn’t really answering the question of what it was for.
“Dating is…” I’d think, walking to meet another Dan/Matt, trying to fill in the blank.
Dating is a way to pass the time.
Dating is a social call.
Dating is to get laid.
Dating is patriarchy.
Dating is feminism!
Dating is a wish your heart makes.
Dating is…
I didn’t know, and I understood that I didn’t know what dating was because I wasn’t sure what I wanted the outcome to be. It was like hammering together a frame without knowing if you’re building a house or a rocking chair. Dating was pleasurable to Katherine because it seemed like an end in itself. I’d started from a similar place. I’d forced myself to tell other people in my life that I was trying to date. Did I dare admit that I wanted more? Having achieved one goal, I wanted to set another one: to find an actual relationship. Whatever that meant.
CHAPTER 7
Expectations
Sometime in July, I was sitting on the side of a hill in Fort Greene Park, listening to a man talk. It was about that time in the summer when all the fresh, pale shoots of the spring have thickened into mature green leaves. The tough grass had had its slim points ground down by hundreds of feet passing over it. Things hadn’t yet begun to shrivel, they just looked tired. A recent rainstorm had coated everything in mud, which was now turning to dust as the moisture steamed away. It was too hot. The man talked, and I kept shifting into the shade as the sun moved over us; he followed me, an orbiting body.
This hillside had been a part of my life for many years. I’d climbed up and down and all around it. I’d ridden a garbage bag wrapped around a cardboard box down its slope when it was coated in snow. I’d drunk wine from water bottles with friends as twilight descended, watched soccer games, eaten picnics, petted many adventurous dogs, and observed the trees blossom, turn gold, then shed their outerwear.
Dating had given the hillside an added dimension. Now I could map one spot to another: there’s where I’d walked with the Egyptian tech developer, that’s where I’d lain with the woman recently arrived from San Diego who brought a blanket and homemade kombucha, there’s where I’d made out with a guy who messaged me later to ask if my pussy was clean. I told him I regularly dipped it in a bucket of ammonia, then blocked his number.
The spots created a surveyor’s map that lay over the hill’s topography, and here we were, adding another point. I’d call this point the Very Interesting Man, because he was. He’d just moved to the United States from India about ten months before, and he’d spent most of those months traveling around to different states, many of them places I’d never been and wondered if I ever would. Traveling seemed like something one did with a partner, and I didn’t know how to drive. Initially, this man’s stories made him more appealing, like he could be somebody I would travel with.
He had ended up in New York for grad school, working on a fascinating project that would, as far as I could understand it, definitely benefit all of humanity. He also hadn’t asked me a single question about myself, no matter how I hinted that I, too, might have some thoughts to share. The appeal of his interesting life faded quickly.
It was common for men to not ask me any questions. Sometimes I’d feel half in love with a woman just because we were having an actual conversation rather than a series of monologues interrupted by brief moments where my date was thinking about what they’d get to say once I stopped talking. Not everyone was like this, of course, but it was bad enough that if I suspected a guy was that type, I’d start to test how long he would go without needing any information about me. This man had been stream-of-consciousnessing for a good forty minutes and I no longer had any urge to interrupt, having been lulled to a complacent drowsiness. My neck had started to ache from turning toward him, so I’d just stopped, instead staring at a distant tree. He hadn’t seemed to notice.
I’d tried to talk to my friend Marian about the imbalance I’d observed between men’s and women’s expectations of mutual understanding on dates. She’d admonished me.
“Well, you have a tendency to focus on other people,” Marian said. “Like, it’s great you ask a lot of questions; you seem genuinely interested. But it’s a way of hiding a little.”
This was a fair point, and it reminded me of my first date in the spring, the one that had inspired the whole experiment, where I’d tried to maintain some anonymity by focusing on him. I didn’t want to share myself with people I didn’t like, and I ended up guiding those dates like a therapist, gently probing one of their answers after another without revealing anything.
But Marian undermined her point a little when she added, “And all men are like that, anyway. You have to interject.”
It’s not that useful to draw binaries around behavior based on gender, and I felt a little guilty doing it. Anyone can act any way at any time. Who knows what oblivious thing I was doing on all these dates that never went anywhere? Perhaps I was annoying people with something they blamed on my gender that actually had to do with my awful personality. Plus, to be fair, the Very Interesting Man genuinely had a lot to share, even if he didn’t read any of my cues, and it was possible he didn’t know what else to do. Right after we grabbed coffee, he’d admitted that this was his very first date on Tinder.
“Welcome!” I’d said. “I hope it’s fun for you.”
That was about the last thing I’d said. People willing to meet me spur of the moment, or sometimes at all, were often new to apps or new to New York City. They were enthusiastic about the experiment of online dating or making connections. This guy was both, and he could have just gotten carried away. When my coffee was done, I wanted to politely part, but then he sat down firmly on the hill. I’d felt pressured to join him.
There was a pause in the flow of words, and I glanced at him, wondering if I’d missed something. A question, finally? He was looking out over the field below, as I had so many times. Its bare, sandy center was expanding as more and more people used it for sports or a dog toilet.
The silence became awkward. My mouth was dry, like when you wake up in the morning and pry your lips apart to gasp in the first breath of consciousness. I had no idea what he’d last said, and my own thoughts were far away.
“What are your parents like?” I coughed.
“Very conservative,” he said. “They care about what their neighbors think, what everyone in their community thinks, but they’re very unhappy.”
See? He was interesting. Then silence again.
“Do they approve of you?” I asked, since he had no curiosity about my family.
“No, we’re very different. I have a much more liberal mind. Since I’ve become more successful, they have fewer complaints and it’s easier being far away.”
He told me his folks had their marriage arranged by their families, and I wondered aloud what they’d think of Tinder.
“They’d hate it!” he chuckled. Based on his parents’ attachment to community perception, I gleaned that a lot of people he’d grown up around had ended up in arranged marriages. The only person I’d grown up with who had expected that arrangement, that I knew of, was a girl in my sixth-grade class whose parents were from Albania. One day she came into the gym crying because her family had told her they’d picked out her future husband.
My best friend, Billie, and I had gathered around her, confused and upset by the news, since the three of us made a little trio. The situation was beyond our limited understanding, but it seemed wrong. Plus, she was crying, so she couldn’t have felt good about it, according to my twelve-year-old logic. We lost touch after middle school, then eventually followed each other on Instagram. She was married, though I couldn’t tell if it was to the man her parents had picked out for her. They appeared very happy and had a few children. One of them was a little girl who could have been a clone of my childhood friend. I wondered at times if her mom would make the same choices for her.
At twelve years old, knowing what adulthood would look like in such a specific way was inconceivable to me. Did the knowledge reconcile my friend to the circumstance? Did it pressure her to accept something she didn’t want? Was it a relief to not have to think about those matters in college or young adulthood? Would it have been worse to do it like I was doing now, in older adulthood? There was a part of me now that thought an arranged marriage didn’t seem like a lamentable fate if what you wanted was simply marriage. But that would be a heterosexual marriage, of course, and just that was enough for me to dismiss the idea entirely.
“Choice” in relationships is a murky concept. Family structures always inform how people go about seeking a partner, or how they refuse to. Reactive rejection of the status quo is its own form of behavioral control. Billie grew up in a household that centered family above all else. Within five years of our friend’s arranged engagement, she met the man she would marry. By our early thirties, Billie had a growing family with the guy she’d started dating at seventeen. I did often think that she’d been too young to close that window of possibility, and that it had changed and shaped her when she became part of a pair so soon.
The things she had acquired, however, were far more obvious and certainly more culturally valuable than whatever self-exploration I’d managed to do in the same amount of time.
“Would you want an arranged marriage?” I asked my date.
“No, I can’t imagine doing that now,” he said, with a significant look at me. The implication that he was imagining something more serious than a coffee date was enough to make me finally stand up, my knees creaking.
“Well, I gotta get home,” I said. “Let me walk you to the train station.”
As we went, he talked more about his graduate-degree project, which filled the time. There I bid him adieu, saying, “I hope this has been a decent first Tinder experience.”
“It’s been amazing!” he said, which puzzled me. We shared a brief hug and he went on his way. Later, he messaged me to say what a great time he’d had, and I realized he hadn’t seen anything questionable about how we’d interacted at all. I responded in a way that communicated I would never go out with him again, something like Good luck with the rest of your life! but nicer.
Though my date had seemed extraordinarily confident in himself, there’s no way it had been easy for him to move to a new country and reconsider everything he’d once thought about how his adult life would look. I didn’t think I’d be brave enough. I was living a pretty commonplace life, at least based on my own parents’ history. Being unmarried and childless in my thirties didn’t feel like a very radical thing where I was raised.
