Tragedy, Swipe Left
Why mourn the loss of my nuclear family when I could just make another one?
Shortly after my father died, I found myself doing a number of things out of obligation. I organized the funeral in my mother’s stead and gave the opening eulogy, managing, for the benefit of the assembled mourners, only to cry briefly. I spent several long weekends that winter at my parents’ house on Long Island, dragging garbage cans to a dumpster parked in the yard — death has a peculiar way of turning possessions into trash and trash into possessions, and my mother required help distinguishing the one from the other. I called my brother in Massachusetts, encouraging him to finally go back for that elusive graduate degree. I visited my estranged uncle in Delaware and accepted both his durable power of attorney and several articles of hand-me-down clothing that did not actually fit. And, as the weather warmed from spring to summer, I made myself a profile on the dating app Bumble.
Why Bumble? Why a dating app at all? I’d so far drawn a hard line against them in my life, having never swiped another human in either direction, and I wasn’t entirely sure why it seemed like an appropriate moment to start. I’d returned to work in body, but my mental wellbeing remained in transit. At times, I could barely focus on the particulars of normal conversation, silently counting the minutes until I could return home to watch “Law & Order” and fall asleep on my couch. Other times I became manic: cooking myself elaborate Sunday dinners, cleaning the lower shelves of my refrigerator, folding my freshly-laundered T-shirts into perfect squares.
In a way, I’d been bracing in anticipation of this moment for several years. My father, a physicist, a self-taught artist, a mathematical genius, had suffered from heart problems for the past decade. My mother, my brother, and I had become as much his caretakers as his immediate relatives. He’d had a daily pill regimen to manage, sodium to avoid. He’d become a risk for falling on uneven sidewalks. My mother had his cardiologist’s phone number committed to memory. As a small family, we tried our utmost to keep him alive and well amidst the vicissitudes of his heart-health. So when he passed away unexpectedly in late December while taking an afternoon nap (the doctor deemed it a “sudden cardiac event”), I simultaneously felt that I was free of my obligation to his care and also that I’d failed at it. And in the aftermath of such a failure, all that confounded determination needed to go toward something else.
Discovering app-dating in 2016 was sort of like discovering hot yoga or a band called the Arcade Fire. All the think pieces about hookup culture had already been written, slagged in the comments section, backlashed and counter-back-backlashed ad infinitum. It was what I imagined someone in the late 1990s might have felt in finally succumbing to a Prozac prescription. Fine, okay, I give up. This is the way of the world now — like credit card finance charges or high cholesterol, yet another aspect of modern life warped by the demands of instant gratification.
Nevertheless, I posted the requisite pictures. Me at a wedding. Me with a dog. Me wearing funny sunglasses. Me in happier times. The idealized version of myself was what I actually wanted without realizing it. Not dates or companionship or distraction, exactly, but an escape to my former life. The one where my father was still alive and my parents were still on track to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the one in which my brother and I saw each other regularly and had something approaching a healthy sibling relationship. The one in which I was still in my early thirties and ten pounds thinner, sitting on a beach in the early afternoon, smiling, mercifully unaware of what came next.
In my first two weeks on Bumble, I went on 18 dates. Logistically speaking, that’s one date for every weeknight and four on weekends. To do this, I established a system. Dates could not be scheduled more than a week in advance. Once a date was booked, it could not be rescheduled in pursuit of a newer prospect. Names went in my Google calendar; stars in the app designated upcoming dates for ease of reference — who they were, what they looked like, the particulars of our texts quickly refreshed before our drink or our green juice or our walk in the park.
All told, I did this for three months. I swiped people during meetings and standing at urinals in public restrooms. I swiped before work and after work, and whenever I awoke in the middle of the night, squinting into the sickly glow of my phone screen. Every smiling face and twinkling text-message contained the promise of compassion, of companionship, the idiot allure of a blank slate.
On some level I knew how pathological this was. But at the same time, I wasn’t really hurting anyone other than myself. I wasn’t sleeping around; the vast majority of my dates were polite, singular affairs for which I didn’t even attempt a goodnight kiss. I held the door, I paid for drinks. Most everyone was pleasant and engaged, and I tried to return the courtesy. Laura was a speech pathologist from the West Coast, recently transplanted to Chelsea. Andrea was a yoga teacher with a teacup Chihuahua. Diana couldn’t meet this Thursday, but how about a Saturday morning coffee? I could report no horror stories to my friends. We simply had our allotted time together, an hour or two of back-and-forth, job-interview efficient, a handful of genuine laughs and the occasional serious moment. Then a thank you and a hug that dissolved into the Chinatown night or the crowd at Grand Army Plaza or a parting of ways at an intermediate street corner, the walk sign blinking from red to white.
I was likely spending several thousand dollars a month on drinks and transportation, though cabs to and from dates were worth the expense for the 15 minutes of light napping they afforded me. Between my work and dating schedules, I averaged about five hours of sleep a night. I sometimes struggled to remember small details or accidentally reversed the syllabic order of words. I got a low-grade cold that lingered for weeks. The refrigerator in my apartment was empty save for several containers of almond butter. This I ate directly from the jar in lieu of meals, with the occasional hard-boiled egg, telling myself that I’d stumbled upon a clever life-hack and not a symptom of my own emotional distress.
My father had always been single-minded in the pursuit of his personal projects. He was a consummate builder of things and methodical collector of spare parts that might one day yield beauteous use. As his oldest son, I suppose I approached app dating with a similar practicality: I imagined it was my responsibility to rebuild my family in the wake of his death. Every evening, sitting across from a stranger, talking about our jobs or the latest New Yorker issue, I silently wondered: how soon might I realistically fall in love with this person? How long would that actually take, based on an hour’s worth of conversation and accidental knee-brushes? Would we live well together — would I get on her nerves or she on mine, did we have similar taste in furniture? What would my mother make of her as a prospective daughter-in-law, or as a parent to grandchildren? What, exactly, was the shortest distance between this moment and a future in which my nuclear family had been reconstituted?
Of course, no person could withstand this kind of scrutiny, nor would she want to if she knew. That part was on me. But I’d also like to think that a not-insignificant part was due to the distorting power of app-dating. The endless revue of people, all squeezed into the confines of a few images, myself only one of millions, like gears turning invisibly against each other to power the dynamo of perpetual dating. I’ve heard that people meet and get married. I’ve heard that people have limitless weeknight sex. Me? I wanted to connect with as many people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that none of them ever threatened to become real.
There’s an aphorism in the tech community that says, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” meaning, essentially, that the unintended quirks of your product design come to be the attributes that most distinguish it. In the case of dating apps that feature is unlimited choice, which has the perverse effect of enabling you to avoid making decisions altogether. They inflate your expectations in inverse proportion to your capacity for emotional commitment. I mean, why can’t you just swipe yourself a partner to replace your dead father, to comfort your traumatized mother, to distract yourself from the pain of adult life? Why choose one person when you could choose anyone? Because, what about her? Or her, or her?
There wasn’t a particular moment when the fever broke. Rather, the artifice of my routine simply became unsustainable. I left plans in uncommitted limbo, or I double-booked myself and then abandoned both dates the morning of. By then, December had returned and my low-grade cold had settled into a dry rattling cough. The holidays were upon us; it was frigid, people were out of town, the sun set at four in the afternoon. Friends told me I didn’t look well.
Late in the month, my mother came to visit — ostensibly for an informal Chanukah, but in fact because it was the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, and neither of us wanted to be alone. We had a quiet dinner at a restaurant near my apartment, and then spent the rest of the evening looking through family photos: mom and dad at a barbecue in New Orleans a few years prior; their wedding album, resplendent in the greens and browns of the 1960s; photos of him doing nothing in particular, just being in the world, being alive. We both cried and hugged, and then I made up the sleeper sofa in the guest-bedroom for her. She couldn’t bear driving home to an empty house that night, nor would I let her.
A few days later, I deleted Bumble. I didn’t really know how else to stop. I was still swiping in restrooms, but the feeling of urgency had become something much diminished — something more akin to a habit or an addiction. Sometimes the thing you’re doing becomes the thing itself, and you forget how it got that way. So I trashed the app and scrubbed the various phone numbers from my contacts, the lonely first names and occasional emoji I’d imbued with my fractional domestic reveries. I went back to yoga class and bought an open-ended ticket to an island resort in Mexico. At least the delusion of self-improvement came with the fringe-benefit of actual self-improvement.
I still miss my father terribly, every day. I still dream of him. And occasionally, I think about how easy it would be — with a few taps — to return to that never-ending reel of gratification, that shimmering moment of potential, never quite resolving into consequence or loss or feeling. But I’d like to think that I know better now, at least on good days. Because when the product is fantasy, no amount of swiping will make it real.
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