Dating : Love In a Time of Questionable Neologisms

My booking app tells me that I attended my 361st yoga class today. This means that roughly every other day for two years, a teacher has instructed me, with a good dose of mumbo jumbo, to contort my body into any number of the poses classed as “heart-openers.” Because I am an A student, I have done as I have been told. I am starting to ask myself why I bother.

I remember when I was in my twenties, I would sometimes encounter groups of single or divorced women who were the age I am now, and I would see their faces turn sour and dark when they talked about men. I found their bitterness puzzling, even distasteful. My God, if compassion were something that could be beamed back through time, I would send them some.

A week or so ago I saw a profile on Tinder I wish I had screenshotted. I had no interest in this particular specimen, but what he wrote just seemed so…zeitgeisty. “Emotionally available,” he had written. And then: “Casual only.”

Process that.

In the few years I’ve been on my own, I’ve dabbled in the dating apps from time to time, but never longer than two weeks at one go. This is about as much as I can take without crushing my spirit. You really don’t have to be invested in any particular person to be affected by this Williams Sonoma catalog of blithe emotional pathology. Thumbing through it will still break your heart.

And still, every few months, I steady myself to try again. Back in June, I went out with a guy who not only wouldn’t stop graphically describing female genital mutilation (the subject of a documentary he was producing), but texted me Further Reading on the subject the next day. Even though my date with him felt like some combination of a TED talk and a movie in the ‘Saw’ franchise, I have come to realize that it was by far the best of my bad dates, because his wild inappropriateness was at least in good faith. I think of some of the other first dates I’ve been on in the past year: the landscape architect who bellowed at me for 45 minutes about how stupid podcasts were as a form, who told me that cats were filthy animals who track their shit all over one’s bed, and then, when I unaccountably still tried to find some common ground by mentioning the potted plant I had just acquired, mocked me for not understanding that plants don’t want to be imprisoned indoors. (He texted me afterwards to tell me how attractive he found me. Yay?) Then there was that super-hot English professor who called me up after I skipped home from our date to violently yell at me about everything he found lacking in my character, and who is the reason I am too scared to go back to my favorite bar in Ditmas Park. Oh, and do y’all remember the 6’4″ guy who yelled at me because all women are heightist and refuse to date short men? Pick your battles, sir.

I, too, am a human animal. Am I not entitled to be moved by a sharp jaw or the long lean lines of a body or a learnedness that matches my own? Must I really turn psychological detective and investigate for empathy-deficiency, horror of intimacy, and whatever other affliction I haven’t encountered yet but surely will?

In every yoga class I’ve ever taken, it’s been almost all women on the mat. And it seems to me it is almost always women who take on the labor of introspection, of striving towards self-knowledge, of practicing radical compassion even when our truest impulse is to surrender to misanthropy — all this, while also trying to tone our muscles to appear palatable to men. Sure, I am generalizing; I am being unfair; I am being ultra heteronormative to boot. It’s just, there’s all this new terminology I encounter now among men in the dating arena, words that didn’t exist when I was younger — words with just enough of a ring of authenticity to them that you are almost prepared to believe that not wanting to form relationships with women is a philosophy or an orientation. We used to just call these guys “dicks.”

We’re over here trying to pry our hearts open without anaesthesia and they’re over there coining specious new words. One grows tired.