The TOA Guide To Not Dying Alone (Or Being Vaguely Zen About Doing So)
Being single can be beautiful. Hanging out with your friends 24/7; making out with attractive individuals without feeling the need to hitch your wagon to theirs long-term and pursuing a life entirely without compromise. All luxurious, underrated things! But sometimes you might stop and think “I want to meet a person that makes me feel all melty inside.” Or conversely, “Jesus, if I go on another mediocre Tinder date and have to make small talk about what I do for a living, I’m going to hurl my smartphone into the Spree.” Sure! Also valid.
We have all the options — dating apps, websites, sex-positive parties, bumping into someone in a bar IRL — but dating in this generation can sometimes feel more difficult than ever before.
But dating might actually be getting better. Sex Outside the Lines author Dr Chris Donaghue believes that we may have overcome the sexist, sex-negative habits of previous generations: “Millennials are far more comfortable with dating more than one person at a time, have a healthier perspective on the role sex plays within dating and assessing romantic compatibility, and there’s far more female assertion and empowerment. The gift of this is that people can be more authentic and honest, which means building actual intimacy and truly getting to know someone.”
This is a sunny take on things! But it may make you feel actively worse if you’ve been trying to meet someone for a second without much success. However, Happn CEO and founder Didier Rappaport implies you shouldn’t be discouraged if finding the right person seems harder than it was for your parents. He believes singles may need to use dating apps rather than simply relying on kismet thanks to the increased speed of “the daily rhythm of our lives.” He argues that the average city dweller’s pace of life now “deprives us of opportunities to get to know the people around us. Finding the time to stop and say hello to someone is less easy and we’ve lost the habit of doing so, which makes it even more difficult. Singles might easily approach people they don’t know in a bar or a party but who would start a conversation with a stranger in the line at the supermarket or waiting for a train at a station [these days]?”
Of course, there’s always the chance that something other than your frantic gym->work->German class routine is undermining you. Future of Sex podcast creator Bryony Cole notes that dating apps can be completely magical when they do the trick, alluding to a study which concluded that couples who meet via dating apps are far more likely to get married sooner and to another study suggesting online couples were less likely to break up once married than couples who meet IRL. However, she also suggested these same apps may lead to users being overwhelmed by choice. “There’s always something better a swipe away — we’re not just doing that in dating but in our careers, too. There’s all this freedom that we’re now afforded which gives us all commitment issues about shacking up with someone.”
But it seems just as likely that plenty of singles have the opposite problem: wanting a relationship because they think they should be coupled up. For Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop, it’s essential to differentiate between societal pressures and what you actually want. She said “I have never married, never wanted to be married, I’ve never wanted children, I do not want a relationship, I’m extraordinarily happy being single and I cannot wait to die alone.” This is something Gallop is “extremely and deliberately public about, including the fact that I date younger men, because we don’t have enough role models in our society for both women and men that demonstrate you can live your life very differently to the way society expects you to and still be happy. Not just happy, but ridiculously, ecstatically, gloriously happy.” She continued, “I would love many more people to actively stop and think about what would make them happy including: Do they really want to be in a relationship? Do they really want to get married? Do they really want to have children? Because when you stop and think about it, maybe they don’t.”
OK! You’ve sat with Gallop’s words and let them marinate. Maybe you’ve done some journaling or therapy or the next best thing — talked to your best friend over the best part of two bottles of Riesling about it — and you’ve located Your Truth. Yes, you genuinely do want to find someone to spend all day spooning with and not (just?) because you’ve internalized society. So what’s next? Despite what your mother may have told you, holding out until the fifth date isn’t doing you any favours: Donaghue claims “Sex is one of the best ways to build intimacy and to learn about someone — far more than a coffee date allows for!” Similarly, Donaghue argues using dating apps or websites “allows you to meet many different people and helps build dating skills — boundary setting, communication, flirting.”
The advantages don’t stop there. Rappaport argues dating apps have one key edge over meeting someone in real life, since they allow users to actually get to know the attractive stranger who caught their eye “before you decide if you really like that person and want to meet in real life… you get a bit more background before you move further.” In other words, you get to skip the date with the person you initially thought was so magical and full of potential — well, right up until the second hour they spent talking about their Paleo diet.
And yes, using apps to avoid dates that would probably never work out is smart. However, there’s also something to be said from retreating from the digital side of things. Cole is a big believer in practicing “being more human.” In a nutshell, both developing your “creativity, imagination, mystery, sense of intuition” and trying out the more day-to-day stuff, like getting off your phone and talking to someone. She even recommends taking the ultimate IRL-romance baby step: going up to a complete stranger and giving them a compliment. Not necessarily because that stranger will respond to your quavery “Cool t-shirt” by hoisting you up onto a white horse and galloping off with you into the sunset, but because doing so encourages you to hone all those qualities that offline dating requires, like braving potential rejection, running the risk of seeming like a massive dork and talking to someone you don’t know very well.
So, to recap: Use dating apps because life’s fast. Cut down on dating apps because they might kill your capacity for commitment. Use dating apps, but to practice flirting, weed out the hot weirdos and to date more efficiently. Go on less coffee dates, go on more sex dates. Stop thinking about tech and try and be a better human.
This is advice which is as great as it is disparate. Something which just goes to show that while it’s 2018 and Elon Musk can rocket-launch a convertible into space, there’s still no set formula for being less single. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe you’re meant to struggle with it, be alone for a little or a long while, make your peace with being solo forever and then run into the love of your life in a karaoke bar while you’re wailing along to the chorus of “Feeling Myself,” finally feeling yourself. Or not! Maybe you die alone. And as Cindy Gallop puts it, that’s just as much of a happily ever after, too.
Written by Sophie Atkinson/images by Rosalba Porpora
