What Can You Learn From Online Dating 86 Men Across 7 Platforms?
Today’s Recommended Reading on Human Connections Starts With
Katharine Smyth On The Mind-Expanding Powers of… Online Dating
If you’ve put in time on one or more of the dating apps for any length of time, or have a friend who has, you’re aware of the experience’s many downsides. In a NYT column, Katharine Smyth serves up some refreshing lemonade: app dating, can be, yes, “deeply demoralizing, a parade of indignities that throws into relief not just our self-absorption and banality, but our nihilism,” but in a good way! Through dates with 86 men across seven platforms (her record-keeping is both efficient and evocative of an Arya Stark litany: “David the orphan … Nathaniel bone broth … Shawn with rainbow tattoo … Shane sheepskin sex”), Smyth discovers that world-view expansion is an underappreciated upside of modern dating. Her bright-side take isn’t cloying, it’s fresh, affecting, and, unbelievably, life affirming.
If You Read One Piece Today About The World’s Ominous Embrace of “Malignant Individualism,” Make it This One.
On a slightly less positive note, The New Yorker’s piece, “Why Do Americans Feel That There’s No One To Help Us” is an essential, short read with insight from an essential (height unknown) figure — Robert Putnam. With his landmark 2000 study of social capital, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, Putnam anticipated and explained the decline of communal experience in the U.S. Here, in a piece that links the breakdown of community to “a deepening sense across the United States that the unique American experience is in real trouble,” he warns: “‘We’re all in this together’ is now out of fashion.” It’ll be fascinating to see what Putnam makes of social networks in his upcoming sequel to Bowling Alone, out in 2020.
A Shy Guy’s Guide to Making Friends
In Forge, Michael Thompson talks about moving past the usual advice for shys (“act confident” “stand different”) and leaning into thoughtfulness.
An Introvert Gets Uncomfortable
“If what you’re saying makes you feel like a loser, you’re doing it right!” is a thing that should be said during more conversations. As it happens, it’s the guiding affirmation yelled during a workshop called “How to Be Sociable.” In this NY Mag piece, Jessica Pan recounts her experience in the class, which promises to teach participants how to make better connections with other people. The way to do that, according to class instructors, is to share intensely personal, potentially humiliating secrets with total strangers. The class, part of the School of Life, founded by author Alain de Botton, was one of many episodes captured in Pan’s new book, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.
