The Sophist 3: The one about the secret dating society that eats you
Sometimes it is good to do things that are exclusive, if only to remind yourself that things that are exclusive are absolutely terrible. Recently I applied to join an exclusive dating app - you fill in the online form and then they check out your Instagram to decide if you’re cool enough and have enough cool followers. Then they ask for testimonials from people already using the service to say how cool you are, and then about a month later they get back to you. I know. It’s unspeakable bollocks, and for that we shall refer to the app as Wanker, which is not actually its real name. Wanker claims to be the home of an elite global community of ‘creatives’, a word commonly used to describe people who have heard of punk and think they could use it in a really great pitch for Red Bull. Anyway, I decided to apply to join Wanker - partly because I wanted to see exactly who these awful people were on there, and partly because I wanted to become one of them immediately.
Weeks later, the Wankers said they’d reviewed my application, and that I would unfortunately have to remain on the waiting list. It was clear to me then that they hated single mothers with Instagram accounts full of small children and Ed Balls, and that I’d have to picket their offices with placards. Then Leonard Cohen died and suddenly the Wankers said I’d been accepted after all, which either meant they’d decided I was actually cool, or that Len’s death had freed up a space for me in the geriatric quota. Either way, there I was, listening to Famous Blue Raincoat for the 307th time that day, weeping, while furiously scrolling through all the other little Wankers, and oh my god (oh my god), the state of this thing. The first rule of Wanker is that you don’t talk about Wanker, so I’m probably going to get chucked off it without ever getting laid by a Silicon Valley CEO with aspirational gang tattoos, but I simply must tell you what my eyes have seen.
Firstly, there are big people on there. People in famous bands, people who run dot com companies that we’ve all heard of, people off the telly. I’m sure some of them are lovely. I mean I haven’t found the lovely ones yet, but I’m sure they’re there. So let’s examine someone I have found - we’ll change his name to Aidan. (Because he’s actually called Adrian.) Aidan, 34, from Brooklyn NY, is wearing a blank expression and a hooded sweatshirt that says PornHub on it. His complexion is as white as guilt. His chosen song is Suicide is Painless. I can't see what his soul looks like, because Aidan doesn't have one. In fact, Aidan wears the same blank expression in the photo where he is holding an eagle as in the one where his eyes are bulging with blood bruising. (No idea.) There is only one photo of Aidan smiling, and it was taken at school when he was about nine, before he learned that the darker your heart, the more manipulatively you can fuck women with it. The last photo in Aidan’s Slideshow of Self shows him on stage, in front of a crowd of thousands of adoring fans. I squint into their adoring eyes and wonder why they can’t all have adoring sex with Aidan for me, because, as the newest Wanker in a global community of Wankers, I really don’t want to have to do it.
Then I find a man whom we will call Antonio. Antonio is from Stockholm, with lush cascading black hair piled into a manbun on top of his head and skulls tattooed on his bulging shoulders. In every shot he wears sunglasses, and a cigarette that seems to be posing for its own photoshoots on the edge of Antonio’s lip, too cool to venture inside his mouth. In Antonio’s Slideshow of Self, the final photo is a picture meme that looks like the Netflix logo. Only, instead of saying “Netflix and Chill?”, a dating slogan that we all now know refers to casual sex, it says “Netflix and Choke Me?”
Antonio is just here for friends!
Further scrolling reveals a man with a photo of a dog as one of his profile pics, which I find quite endearing. Finally, someone I like the look of. The dog. Except it’s a dog posed in exactly the right way, and fed through some majestic Instagram filters to look like the sort of dog you could make love to on a rugged mountaintop. I mean ffs - this dude has only gone and fucking filtered his fucking dog.
That night I go out to a party in unreal life and scroll through face after face as they push past me to get to the bar. I mean, I go out. In London. I speak to a friend who has been on Wanker for a while. I say how awful it is. He says that he’s never got together with any girls from it, and that he doesn’t use it for dating - it’s just for his profile, to promote himself, to be visible on that platform. I wonder if he’s going to add a punchline to what he’s just said because he’s quite a sarcastic, funny guy and that sounded like Newspeak. But no. He doesn’t say anything else. So this is where we are at now.
I don’t know, perhaps it’s me who’s at fault here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have a photo of Victoria Wood in a matching yellow mac and woolly hat in 1986 as my picture. Perhaps this does not speak of machine sex in 2016. Perhaps I do not want machine sex in 2016. Perhaps it all comes from my dad quoting Fiona Pitt-Kethley at me and telling me that everything in life is about sex, but sex is always about something else. Which may have been odd advice for a man to give his fourteen-year-old daughter, but all I can say is that it really gives you a fast-forward button through most of life's mysteries.
Leonard Cohen wrote a poem called Happens to the Heart, in which he said, “Every soul is like a minnow, every mind is like a shark.” He wrote it in his 80s, when he knew that death was coming, and sent it to his fan forum in case he died before publishing it. I’ve been reading it again and again these past weeks. Wondering if Cohen meant that the minnow, that vulnerable tiny fish darting about the ocean, is our soul, at risk of getting eaten by our own mind, by our own shark? Or do our sharks eat other people’s souls?
When you meet someone new, it’s their shark that produces the clever words, the story they want to tell you, and yet it’s their minnow that actually talks, on a non-verbal level. And everyone has their minnow. And everyone has their shark. And so many of us fall for the wrong person, for the ones who dazzle us with their shiny-toothed predator, and then we're surprised when they don't nurture us. But how can we be surprised when we didn't look more closely at what they had done to their own little vulnerable fish? I went to my friends Tom and Matilda’s wedding this summer, which was in a field, under a tree, and listened to their speeches about an early date they went on, for which Tom had brought homemade cheese and pickle sandwiches. There wasn’t a dry eye in the field. I thought, here are two people at home with their own minnows. Not overly governed by shark. Sure, you need snapping teeth to stay ahead in the big bad city, but you also need a minnow to stay alive in yourself.
And then I look at Wanker, and everyone posing in a competition for the best photo in the best light on the best day, and realise what the problem is: it is a celebration of sharks. These are half pictures. These are half lives.
So I download a different dating app, one that lets any old loser in, and uses GPS on your phone to tell you who you’ve crossed paths with today who might be interested. The first person I recognise in my area is the guy who works in the local late-night Turkish grocery shop. He’s spelled the name of his college wrong, and his hair appears to be having an argument with his ears. Now if it was his boss, the older man, I might be swayed, because the older one is there when you sneak over at midnight for a pack of ten moonlit cigarettes, and he has the gall to open them and lean over the counter to put the first one in your mouth. And then light it for you. I mean, leaning over the counter to put the fag in your mouth - that’s pretty much a sexual relationship as far as I’m concerned. In my head, I’m already going out with that man. But the sight of his scruffy assistant on my phone is wriggling my minnow in all the wrong vulnerable directions. My shark can’t take it. My shark fears a loss in status. My shark is glistening its horrible teeth and telling me to go back to Wanker and try and get off with the twat who invented Uber.
If you think this story is about to reach a clever ending, I haven’t written one yet. But here’s the poem; read it out loud and tell me what happens when you do.
xxx
https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/happens.html
(And as for the exquisite illustrations, they are painted by Louise Androlia who is now available for commissions at www.louiseandrolia.com. She can paint anything!)