James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Feelings

  • What To Do When You Don't Know What To Do

    Read to the end for a great TikTok

    I don’t have the answer to the question I posed in the title. It’s kind of a bait and switch that way, and something we never do in content marketing. One of the first rules of writing for the web is that you always answer a question you ask in titles. But that is work, and this newsletter isn’t work, even though it sure feels like it sometimes.

    That’s not true. This never feels like work, because sometimes work is enjoyable. This newsletter is a weight around my neck! But, and hear me out, that’s okay.

    I have learned that this resentment is a feature of the things we love and know we should be doing. I learned this from a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressler. I am only about halfway through it, so if it takes a weird turn into unpleasant spiritual mumbo jumbo or some other objectionable direction, I will retract my endorsement (he has already said some eyebrow-raising things about depression and anxiety, but I am choosing to overlook them). So far, so good. I like his approach.

    The Enemy is Resistance, and It Comes From Within

    That’s basically it: the obstacle to creating the art in our hearts is not big and scary and implacable, it is merely our own reluctance. It does not matter what form this resistance takes—we can overcome it. Here’s a highlight from the book:

    There’s a lot of power there! We are our own worst enemies, our own greatest champions. It’s all in us, baby!

    I haven’t gotten to the part where he explains how I can beat resistance, but I’m looking forward to finding out so I can start writing again.

    Oh, shit. I’m doing it now, aren’t I? Ah. Well, I’ll give him that one.

    Poetry Break

    the past is so horribly fast.

    —from I Have a Time Machine, by Brenda Shaughnessy

    How Do You Picture a Year?

    This isn’t a Rent reference, this part is literally about how we imagine the flat segment of time called a year, divided into the 12 months we all know and love. Here’s a TikTok about it:

  • Let's Celebrate Five Years

    Dear God, That’s a Long Time

    In October of 2016, I published my first newsletter. Since then, I have finished 1 blog post, 0 short stories and 0 novels. This newsletter is the only substantial writing I’ve done that wasn’t work-related (where I do a lot of writing).

    I can’t blame COVID-19, because that’s only been an impediment for 2 of those years. I can’t blame my brain tumor, because that didn’t happen until 2018.

    I have not been writing the newsletter instead of those other things that ostensibly amount to my raison d’être, but the evidence is clear: I have not been writing fiction. I have only been writing this.

    Sidebar: I have also been writing work-related material, as my primary job is as a content writer. The muscle gets exercise.

    I started out writing these newsletters as an exercise to keep my juices flowing. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the intervening years since I wrote the first issue, which I called a pamphlet. Here it is:

    The Collected Foremania
    Pamphlet 1: “Debate”
    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️ “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk…
    Read more
    9 years ago · James Foreman

    If this newsletter seems disconnected, that’s because I’ve been writing a lot of different things and said to myself “this is newsletter content!” and then set it aside. I collect it here tonight for you to enjoy and to clear my drafts, as it were.

    Pretending to Play

    In 8th grade or so, we were given the choice between band and gym. Terrorized by communal showers and sports I didn’t understand, I chose band. I didn’t play an instrument during middle school band, but I was there for every practice, and I took a baritone home every night and enjoyed the travel of the keys for a few minutes before putting it away. During recitals, I pretended to play. If anybody noticed that my tuba never made a noise, they didn’t say anything.

    For reasons I don’t remember, I played football in 8th grade. We never scored a touchdown. I played for an entire season and never learned what a down was. I didn’t understand any of the rules. I ran fast when they told me to, and threw my body against people I was told to throw it against. I was told to listen for audibles. I didn’t know what those were. I faked it. Nobody noticed.

    I played on offensive, defense, special teams. I was good at it. I hated every minute.

    The list of things I hated about the experience is also a list of waypoints through my 12 year old mental geography.

    A List of Things I Hated About Playing Football

    – competition

    – proving myself

    – “hitting the showers”

    – running laps

    – doing pushups

    – committing violence

    – having violence committed against me

    Sidebar: I have a pet theory that one of the reasons football persists as a national game is because of the armor you have to wear. Sorry, I meant to call them pads. Whatever you call it, it still looks like armor. Every major civilization develops warfare to the point where people wearing interlocking plates heave themselves against other people wearing similar gear.

    Like some instinctual regression toward armor, we’re drawn to both wearing it and watching people who are wearing it fight each other. Eh, it’s not much of a theory.

    It won’t be long until we grind the gears

    But carry on, we’re on to something here

    – The Surprise Knock by The New Pornographers

    The Anti-Participator

    Difficult People, the late tv show about my kind of people (I don’t think you’re supposed to like the leads, played by Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner, but I do anyway) made a whole episode around the idea of the participator. Billy starts dating a guy who eagerly volunteered to be a magician’s assistant while on a date at a magic show. Billy and Julie, the annoying, obnoxious, judgmental, insensitive main characters, are shocked and dismayed to find that out about somebody who they otherwise like.

    I am not a participator.

    I have always said that there are two kinds of non-participator who doesn’t like to participate in “can I get a volunteer from the audience” stuff: the “aw-shucks-please-don’t-pick-me-ha-ha-I-actually-love-it” and ruin your day non-participators. I am better than I used to be in that I will smile and go along with it but I won’t volunteer and I won’t actually do anything. I am not a Yes And kind of guy. I’m more of a “please don’t talk to me.”

    The Outdoor Center

    I went to a private school in West Virginia for high school and junior high. In seventh or eighth grade, we were forced to spend a week at a camp with limited amenities run by hippies. It was not the best environment for 13 year olds.

    I don’t know who might have thrived there but it’s hard to imagine that five days of “roughing it” to private school kids under the watchful eye of crunchy, early-90s granola crusties had much positive impact on anybody, including the crusties.

    I had to do this at least five times that I can recall, each time for a week. This always took place during autumn, because that’s when school was, and it was always extremely muddy. There were communal showers.

    These are three of my main memories:

    1. five days of not bathing, as a teenager. The alternative, showering with other boys my age who were way farther along in adolescence than me, was unthinkable

    2. a fellow student in my grade, shirtless, muscular, walking around the “dorm” (barracks) popping his pimples at the rest of us

    3. another student, widely considered the strongest and toughest of all seventh graders (not the same one as number 2), picking his fellow classmates out of the crowd, at the cheers and encouragement of his peers, and bestowing upon them wedgies so atomic that they qualified as neutron bombs—I have memories of watching from behind a pile of firewood as he held up a poor victim’s underwear waistband, to the cheers of the rest of them

    How Not to Participate

    If there is a canonical story for non-parcipators, specifically those of us who were at the mercy of crusty granolas in the early 90s/late 80s, it’s this:

    I was likely identified early, by the crusties (also called camp counselors or whatever) as a Shy Kid who kept to himself.

    Whenever we were presented with an option to do something “fun” I always receded to the back. When participation was required, I was nowhere to be found. They were crusties but they were smart, and they clocked me early. They identified me as a Shy Kid Who Needed To Come Out of His Shell.

    They initiated a Fun Game. They had a deck of cards and anybody who drew the one single Joker card in the deck was designated the “assassin” who was supposed to privately signal the other students (I think with an “ok” sign) whereupon the victim was to theatrically “die” as if struck by God’s disfavor or whatever. This is a great idea for bringing a kid out of his shell, I think. I don’t know if it would be tried today, but back then it made sense.

    Having identified me as a Shy Kid, they arranged for me to draw the Joker and thus become the kid who would be the center of attention. They thought this would bring me out of my shell. It probably worked very well on the shy kids before me.

    They had never encountered a Foreman before.

    This Story is About a Different Foreman

    This story illustrates how we Foremans, in our larval stage especially, approach events or situations that others might find invigorating, interesting, or exciting (situations and events you might also call “new”).

    This brother started at Linsly at around the same age that the rest of us did (I have four brothers, so you will never know which one I’m referring to unless I name him, and I won’t do that here).

    Every day, this Foreman left the house and walked to school, for the first few days of his first year (this private school, with uniforms, is within walking distance of our house). He came back every day at the appropriate time, and seemed fine. Nobody suspected anything was amiss.

    A few days into this incredible first week of school at a new place with new people where he had to wear a uniform, my mother was approached by the man she had hired to do some plumbing work in a part of the basement Where Spiders Are (and where my mother resolutely refused to go). It was not the spiders that kept my mother away from the work that needed to be done but the plumbing. It was the rare home improvement task that was beyond her.

    Sidebar: my mother’s ability to do seemingly everything and anything related to running and maintaining a household is probably a big part of why the gender roles modeled for me are anything but traditional.

    The plumber came up from the basement and said “ma’am there is a young boy wearing a suit in your basement.”

    My brother, the Foreman, instead of walking to school, hid in the one place in the house he was pretty sure my mother would never look for him. He spent all day there and reemerged at the end.

    No muss, no fuss, no tantrums, no drama. He completely, imperceptibly, declined to participate. Faced with a new school in a new place, he said “No, thank you” and quietly extricated himself.

    The thing about tantrums and drama is that they bring attention right back to the person who’s throwing it. By making a big stink about how you don’t want to participate in something, you are, by default, participating in it.

    Okay, Back to Me

    I did not know that these crusties were trying to get me to participate, but it wouldn’t have mattered. No attempt to make me participate, no matter how clever, was ever going to work.

    Instead of reluctantly shrugging my shoulders and joining in the fun and realizing that I could fit in anyway, as it should have gone, I took one of my few friends aside and asked him if he wanted to be the “assassin” instead. I didn’t want it.

    If it was all secret, and I believed what they had told us — that it was completely random that I had been designated the secret center of attention, then nobody would know.

    A perfect avoidance! My friend agreed and proceeded to “assassinate” our fellow classmates instead of me. I retreated to anonymity.

    After his first few assassinations, the game was canceled. One of the counselors specifically singled my friend out, having identified him as the assassin, and said “you’re not supposed to be the assassin.”

    The game they these granola crunchies had concocted, perfectly tuned to bring a shy kid out of his shell, shattered against the power of one kid who absolutely, unequivocally refused to join. They had never before encountered an anti-participator.

    I don’t relate this to celebrate my family’s inveterate rejection of group activities. It’s not universal to every Foreman in every scenario. I’m using a shaky throughline among members of my family to make a point about myself. I don’t like being an anti-participator. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think it’s okay, maybe even good, maybe even great, to participate in some things.

    I very strongly dislike essentialism of any kind. People are unique. Who they are, where they were born, where they grew up, etc. can inform their lives but they don’t define them. I would never assume anything about anybody for what they are, because I don’t think those things are very instructive. It makes for lazy assumptions about people.

    Having said that, when my 4 year old nephew acts like a Foreman, I feel a palpable delight. We’re inevitable.

    Anyway, next issue will have a lot less navel gazing.

  • Rise and Grind, Dirge and Dance

    It’s time for a pep talk

    One of these days, I will dance again. I have danced a few times, but I have too much shame and a poor body image and other associated inhibitors to do so as often as I am dancing in my head. I love listening to dance music, especially anything that sounds like this:

     

    The original title of this was “A Dirge for the Dead and Dying” but I thought that was a little too morose for what I wanted to write today, and not reflective of how I feel and also not the kind of energy I want to pop into peoples inboxes on a Sunday evening. Be warned, though, I’m going to talk about death, because it’s on my mind today, especially, of all days. 

    Today is in My Calendar as Miles Day

    Today is the seventh year since my nephew, Miles, died in a car accident. He was alone but listening to music, and it was late at night. I have put myself in that car with him many times since. I sit with him as the end comes, and he’s not alone at all. 

    My brother, his father, memorialized him with a website of our memories of Miles and the gifts he gave us. I encourage you to visit anonymousish.com today and think about that golden-haired boy with us.

    This is a Dirge Day

    In accessing the mourning part of my tapestry of available feelings, I am reminded of my friend Elicia Parkinson, who also died young, and recently, and suddenly, and without telling anyone. Of course she didn’t tell anyone, she didn’t know it was going to happen, though I suspect if she had known she wouldn’t have mentioned it. I wrote about her when it happened and this is a part of what I said: 

    Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there. 

    Everything Happens At Once

    We are blessed to experience time linearly, at a rate of sixty seconds per minute. Everything that has ever happened has happened already, and is currently happening. Imagine a long string held vertically, as if to entice a cat to play. Every event occurs along that string, stacked vertically, from the beginning of the universe to its end. Everything ends, you see, even the universe.

    I take great comfort in this. Endings are built into the fabric of everything. Order and chaos are not opposed forces, they are best friends. Order knows that chaos wins in the end, but it still stacks up the blocks that it knows chaos will one day knock over. Even though chaos claims everything eventually, order keeps us safe until we can’t be safe anymore. Endings are inevitable, but the greatest glory is for those who fight for a lost cause.

    I Won an Award 

    Our office had a lovely little superlatives survey that culminated in a lovely little awards ceremony at the company picnic. It was a nice way to show our mutual admiration for each other, and more reasons for me to feel so lucky about where I work. Here’s my award:

    Believe it or don’t, I’m known around the office for my relentless positivity. Having been faced with some challenges of my own helped me get to where I am, but it does not originate in a hospital bed. My secret is that this positivity does not come from that stuff at all but, instead, comes directly from Miles.

    Miles and I both struggled with anxiety and depression. My tattoo is a constant reminder of the light in the darkness. It was pulled straight from a page of writing Miles had done. It stuck out to me because it was on a page by itself, as if he flipped over whatever he was working on and scribbled this down. It’s a mantra. It’s a prayer. It will be with me until my own story ends.

    Well, unless my arm gets bitten off by a shark or bear or something. I suppose I could also lose it to a necronomical infection and chop it off with a chainsaw, and then replace the lost hand with the same chainsaw, but I’m not really a cabin-in-the-woods kind of guy.

    Feeling Sorry For Yourself is OK, But Don’t Let it Last

    Last night I was deep in my feelings (the bad ones), and then I happened to look at what day it was, and I instantly felt like a very large ass. I smacked myself (mentally) and told myself to pull me together.

    It is tempting to dwell on the things we don’t have. It is easy to see another person enjoying what we wish we had and feel envy. It is especially infuriating to see someone squander something we value.

    The cure for this is to make a list. It doesn’t have to be a long list. In fact, it can be just one thing that you have: rent money, a healthy body, a partner or a pet who loves you, etc. There is somebody in the world, probably not very far from you, who would love to have what you have. If you’re alive and reading this, I can name at least one thing for you.

    When you next find yourself in your feelings and feeling down about whatever it is you’re down about, remember that you are alive, right now. Rejoice! Now is all that matters, and right now, you’re right here.

    That’s something to celebrate.

  • How Dating Apps Work in 2021

    I know you’re curious

    I’m writing this for two reasons.

    1) to educate. 

    Many friends of mine have been in long term relationships (LTRs in online dating parlance) and are fascinated by how single people find other single people in 2021.

    2) to vent.

    I have come to the conclusion that nobody really enjoys online dating, and this is a way for me to complain about it. I think my complaints are weighed appropriately and not entirely baseless, but I encourage conversation!

    How Tinder Set the Fire (Sorry!)

    Tinder was invented as a normie version of Grindr. Much lamentation is made about “hookup culture.” I can’t help but read some of this consternation as coded (and maybe unintentional) homophobia, since the “hookup” we twist our pearls about was, for most of modern western history, the only way our gay brothers and sisters could be anything resembling their true selves. I won’t do the gay plight the disservice of trying to summarize it, so I will stick to what I know.

    How Grindr Revolutionized Dating

    Grindr was uniquely suited to the traditional bathhouse culture that gay men cultivated through centuries of persecution, finding mates in private underground clubs where they could be pretty sure the people they encountered were looking for the same thing they were. 

    There was no depth. Nobody was there looking for a relationship because relationships were punishable by death. They got what they could when they could. The digital version of this is a photograph and a few sentences of demographic information, maybe with some light contextualization. 

    Grindr was a way of simulating that process in a way that the traditional hetero apps simply weren’t doing. If these big dating websites weren’t outright banning same-sex relationships, they weren’t exactly endorsing them, either. Grindr allowed gay men to connect to other gay men. I doesn’t matter whether they used these connections for sex, as far as an external observer like me is concerned, because any relationship was (and in many cases still is) illegal. 

    How Tinder Ruined What Grindr Invented

    As happens so often, the hetero breeders like me saw how much fun everybody else was having and tried to replicate it. Tinder began with the premise of Grindr (photo, a couple sentences, looking for sex) but for heterosexual men and women. There were other features of Tinder that gestured toward equality between the sexes—for example, both people had to select the other before any messages could be exchanged. Other apps try to limit the ability of men to be awful (because hetero men are always awful) by using a similar mutual matching, with an additional layer of security: a man cannot message a woman until she messages first. 

    What Online Dating Looks Like Now

    If you approach these apps with a deep certainty of your own inadequacy then you will be rewarded with constant reinforcement. 

    This reinforcement does not come from anybody intentionally. Nobody is being careless with your feelings. But it feels like it.

    Online dating has become a literal version of judging a book by its cover. The old adage also included the word “don’t” but online dating proudly and enthusiastically encourages users to judge the books only by their covers. A book cover gives you basic information: a title, an image, maybe a blurb. Tinder does the same thing. 

    To continue the metaphor, you can flip the book over and see a little more information. You might get a few more photos, or a whole paragraph. Don’t expect more than that, though. You won’t get it. 

    How Tinder Works 

    You swipe. You are presented with a photo and a blurb. You can immediately swipe left (reject) or right (accept). If somebody you accept also accepts you, that is a “match” and you can move to step 2. 

    For most men, this is rare. 

    I’m not complaining! This is how it’s always been, for a long time. Men are granted vast privileges by society, and one of those is the permission from society to be horny. Men are allowed, and expected, to approach women and initiate the conversation. There are many, many exceptions to this. 

    If you ask most men on online dating (OLD, in the parlance of online dating) what their experience is like, they will tell you that it’s a lot of right-swiping (thumbs ups) with very few matches. 

    Women will largely report the opposite. A woman on OLD gets a huge number of likes and it becomes their unenviable duty to sort through the masses of suitors for one that they find desirable and/or not a creep. This criteria is different for every woman, despite what some male users of online dating like to pretend. 

    That sounds fun, like a game, you might be saying. Sure, it can be. Except

    Every App Does This Now

    Even Match.com, the old, reliable, venerable boomer of online dating, has succumbed to swipe-fever. If you use their app on your mobile phone, you’ll find the familiar interphase of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid and all the others. Every app does this, now. You might get more context from an app like Match or OkCupid, but the fundamental method of selecting mates is consistent across all platforms: here’s a photo, here’s a sentence they wrote about themselves, now decide. Left or right, you swipe. If you reject them, you never see them again. 

    This is the way of things in 2021. 

    Some Canards of Celibate Losers

    Forgive me for the strident tone against these men, but their complaints are offensively reductive. Even a casual perusal of message boards dedicated to such expansive concepts as “relationships” will show you that these men are hopelessly cowed by the perceived superiority of men with abs. 

    Because these men lack imagination or, apparently, empathy, they are obsessed with the men they perceive as better than them. They see tall men with muscles and flat stomachs and think that these are the reasons why those men are successful and they, short schlubs, are not successful. 

    They attribute their success to physical characteristics because that’s all they see in the women who interest them. Attractiveness is all that matters to these men, so that means only men they perceive as attractive are successful in getting the girls they also think are attractive. 

  • How Dating Apps Work in 2022

    I know you’re curious

    I’m writing this for two reasons.

    1) to educate. 

    Many friends of mine have been in long term relationships (LTRs in online dating parlance) and are fascinated by how single people find other single people in 2021.

    2) to vent.

    I have come to the conclusion that nobody really enjoys online dating, and this is a way for me to complain about it. I think my complaints are weighed appropriately and not entirely baseless, but I encourage conversation!

    How Tinder Set the Fire (Sorry!)

    Tinder was invented as a normie version of Grindr. Much lamentation is made about “hookup culture.” I can’t help but read some of this consternation as coded (and maybe unintentional) homophobia, since the “hookup” we twist our pearls about was, for most of modern western history, the only way our gay brothers and sisters could be anything resembling their true selves. I won’t do the gay plight the disservice of trying to summarize it, so I will stick to what I know.

    How Grindr Revolutionized Dating

    Grindr was uniquely suited to the traditional bathhouse culture that gay men cultivated through centuries of persecution, finding mates in private underground clubs where they could be pretty sure the people they encountered were looking for the same thing they were. 

    There was no depth. Nobody was there looking for a relationship because relationships were punishable by death. They got what they could when they could. The digital version of this is a photograph and a few sentences of demographic information, maybe with some light contextualization. 

    Grindr was a way of simulating that process in a way that the traditional hetero apps simply weren’t doing. If these big dating websites weren’t outright banning same-sex relationships, they weren’t exactly endorsing them, either. Grindr allowed gay men to connect to other gay men. I doesn’t matter whether they used these connections for sex, as far as an external observer like me is concerned, because any relationship was (and in many cases still is) illegal. 

    How Tinder Ruined What Grindr Invented

    As happens so often, the hetero breeders like me saw how much fun everybody else was having and tried to replicate it. Tinder began with the premise of Grindr (photo, a couple sentences, looking for sex) but for heterosexual men and women. There were other features of Tinder that gestured toward equality between the sexes—for example, both people had to select the other before any messages could be exchanged. Other apps try to limit the ability of men to be awful (because hetero men are always awful) by using a similar mutual matching, with an additional layer of security: a man cannot message a woman until she messages first. 

    What Online Dating Looks Like Now

    If you approach these apps with a deep certainty of your own inadequacy then you will be rewarded with constant reinforcement. 

    This reinforcement does not come from anybody intentionally. Nobody is being careless with your feelings. But it feels like it.

    Online dating has become a literal version of judging a book by its cover. The old adage also included the word “don’t” but online dating proudly and enthusiastically encourages users to judge the books only by their covers. A book cover gives you basic information: a title, an image, maybe a blurb. Tinder does the same thing. 

    To continue the metaphor, you can flip the book over and see a little more information. You might get a few more photos, or a whole paragraph. Don’t expect more than that, though. You won’t get it. 

    How Tinder Works 

    You swipe. You are presented with a photo and a blurb. You can immediately swipe left (reject) or right (accept). If somebody you accept also accepts you, that is a “match” and you can move to step 2. 

    For most men, this is rare. 

    I’m not complaining! This is how it’s always been, for a long time. Men are granted vast privileges by society, and one of those is the permission from society to be horny. Men are allowed, and expected, to approach women and initiate the conversation. There are many, many exceptions to this. 

    If you ask most men on online dating (OLD, in the parlance of online dating) what their experience is like, they will tell you that it’s a lot of right-swiping (thumbs ups) with very few matches. 

    Women will largely report the opposite. A woman on OLD gets a huge number of likes and it becomes their unenviable duty to sort through the masses of suitors for one that they find desirable and/or not a creep. This criteria is different for every woman, despite what some male users of online dating like to pretend. 

    That sounds fun, like a game, you might be saying. Sure, it can be. Except

    Every App Does This Now

    Even Match.com, the old, reliable, venerable boomer of online dating, has succumbed to swipe-fever. If you use their app on your mobile phone, you’ll find the familiar interphase of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid and all the others. Every app does this, now. You might get more context from an app like Match or OkCupid, but the fundamental method of selecting mates is consistent across all platforms: here’s a photo, here’s a sentence they wrote about themselves, now decide. Left or right, you swipe. If you reject them, you never see them again. 

    This is the way of things in 2021. 

    Some Canards of Celibate Losers

    Forgive me for the strident tone against these men, but their complaints are offensively reductive. Even a casual perusal of message boards dedicated to such expansive concepts as “relationships” will show you that these men are hopelessly cowed by the perceived superiority of men with abs. 

    Because these men lack imagination or, apparently, empathy, they are obsessed with the men they perceive as better than them. They see tall men with muscles and flat stomachs and think that these are the reasons why those men are successful and they, short schlubs, are not successful. 

    They attribute their success to physical characteristics because that’s all they see in the women who interest them. Attractiveness is all that matters to these men, so that means only men they perceive as attractive are successful in getting the girls they also think are attractive. 

     

    Rax King is a good follow on Twitter, and she’s a great writer. You can read the whole thread to get context, but I think this tweet gets to the larger point I’m making: none of this shit matters to most women. She’s agreeing with me—it’s the rare grown woman cares about abs or muscles. Some might care about height, but if a woman rejects you because of how tall you aren’t, why would you be interested in them? I would apply this logic to every rejection: why obsess over somebody who rejects you? 

    Even the word “reject” feels too harsh to describe the action. It’s much harder to reject somebody than it is to swipe left on them. You can’t engage the feelings part of yourself in the process of using these apps, because if you do, you can all too easily interpret a casual swipe in either direction as far more than it is. A swipe feels like a slap. It isn’t. 

    I think this is why so many people hate it. I say that because I think that’s why I hate it.  

    Swiping is Great (for What’s it’s Good For)!

    The swiping method is great for its original intended purpose, but because every online dating app uses it, people stop using these apps for what they’re useful for (hookups) and try to bend the paradigm into a relationship-finder. This is bad. This is a mistake. It’s also inevitable.

    The curve of dating apps in the hands of heterosexual westerners always bends toward finding meaningful relationships.

    These apps aren’t good for that for all the same reasons it’s good for finding a casual hookup. If all you care about is one night of fun, you probably don’t care about their thoughts about having children, their religious preferences, or even what they do for a living. These things all matter tremendously when you’re looking for more than that. You can get that information on some of them, but it takes a few taps. This is not a process that rewards tapping. 

    Yet still, nearly every profile I see has some version of the statement “I’m not looking for hookups.” I’d say they’re using the wrong app, but since they all do the swipe thing, I would be wrong. 

    These Apps Don’t Play to My Strengths

    I had the most fun and the most success on Craigslist. This was many years ago (14?) and I could just write weird things that would get people to email me. I had a lot of success with that approach, for obvious reasons. I define success as a lot of first dates and a few relationships that I value. This is a great example of the stupidity I was posting. I was young and foolish then, I feel old and foolish now. But still, that foolish idiot had a dating app where being a creative idiot was rewarded. 

    Complaining is Pointless

    When you’re faced with a situation you don’t like, you have two choices: participate or opt out. If you want to get a date online, you play the swipe game. That’s just how things are right now. 

    The Third Option: Wait

    Dating online now is not how it always was. People will reject the swiping thing eventually because it just isn’t conducive to the pillars of strong relationships: sharing, affection, mutual understanding, chemistry. If your only criteria for the people you date is how they look, you’ll always end up disappointed. It’s fun at first. But it doesn’t last.

    After the swiping thing runs its course, something else will replace it and we’ll have something new to complain about. 

    Wait Jim, I Thought You Weren’t Dating

    It’s true that Fiona Apple radicalized me against the myth of a forever partner, but I wrote that over a year ago and maybe I’m ready for something else. I dunno. Life is short and I am simply trying to enjoy it. 

    It’s been working for me so far. 

    Tell me I ain’t got no chance, I say “screw it” 

    Suddenly I’m not sick

    Won’t you be and bring me home