A Category Error

“Cherry lips and fishy tips” by Summer De Guia

I was 13 or 14 when I started entering rooms and immediately scanning for cute boys. I didn’t dare approach anyone then, nor would I now, honestly, though my shoulders might pull back into straighter posture, an automatic response to feeling seen, like a male peacock fanning out its colorful plumage.

I’m not dating anyone now, not that I don’t want to, I’m just not. I’m mostly passive on the apps. My profile exists but I’m not doing a lot of swiping. I have a habit of checking in sometimes to see if anyone “liked” me, and am typically mildly horrified by the results: zero likes, or men I would never, ever go out with (conservatives, “moderates,” 50+ year olds who “finally want to settle down” but have never had a girlfriend, and once, a professional clown).

Despite living mere miles from one of the largest cities in the United States, I somehow keep seeing the same men over and over again on the apps. We’re circling each other, like flushing toilet water. The last time I opened Hinge, I saw I had a “like” from a man I matched with two years ago, who I had a conversation with on the phone. I remember our rejection of each other being mutual. But here he is again, attempting to give it another go.

I was texting with my friend Betsy last night (a dear pal whose Substack you should read). I’d been working on an essay about this phenomenon all day, and I described my position to her as “waiting.”

Waiting, Betsy wisely remarked, is the wrong word. “Waiting implies that everything else we do is secondary.”

Betsy is slightly older than me, farther north of New York, and not active on the apps at present. For her, a romantic partner feels more like a nice-to-have than a necessity.

Then I think of my girlfriends in their mid-30s who want to get married, have biological children, all of it. For them it might be the right word. Waiting implies a future on the other side of longing, and for them, there is one. Because they want children, time imposes its own deadline.

When I open a dating app, it’s usually because I’m bored, and have already scrolled through my Substack and Instagram feeds. It’s somewhere on the boredom scale between Pinterest (mildly bored, where I sometimes look at outfits) and LinkedIn (so deathly bored I might start picking scabs or hangnails). It’s on-my-couch-at-4pm-on-a-Wednesday bored, not stopped-at-a-red-light bored.

The word “waiting” is wrong. I was writing an essay about what it means to remain open while structural conditions make intimacy hard. I was making a category error, mistaking a structural-ethical question for an actual, smaller, stranger thing that is happening in my body. Structures don’t arrive in consciousness as structures; they arrive as habits of feeling. I’m not “waiting,” I’m half-assedly searching for a person to love with the same amount of attention and care I devote to picking a hangnail.

Boredom looks like affect-flatness, and that flatness seems like the only available posture that doesn’t cost me anything. The alternatives are worse. If I check the apps and feel genuine hope, I feel naive, or worse, desperate. If I check them and feel genuine despair, I criticize myself for wanting a romantic partner at all, as though it’s proof of my insufficient healing. Boredom is affectively cheap and reputationally free. It lets me continue wanting without having to look like someone who wants. It’s armor against being seen feeling, in a culture that has a diagnosis ready for every visible want.

Visible wanting doesn’t just cost something personally; it makes the search harder, because any whiff of desperation reads as pitiable and unattractive. Wanting becomes entertainment for other people once it gets big enough to look deranged. It’s a serialized podcast about a real-estate-client-turned-stalker who faked a twin pregnancy with a man she never had penetrative sex with, to try to convince him to date her (five stars). How gauche.

Some women I know have already swiped through every available man within a five-mile radius. They’re looking for men approximately their age and finding that those men want someone ten or fifteen years younger. They’re forced to list “35, wants kids” as a constitutive fact that reads as confession whether they intend it that way or not. I’ve said the same thing back to more than one of them, some version of: I see plenty of men who want kids. They’re in their 50s.

I find the search boring even though the stakes, to me, are not boring at all. I want someone’s lap to lie on while I watch Love Island or Engrenages, a French crime procedural nobody’s heard of. I want someone to eat the weird soups I always make too much of. I want someone to have sex with, who tells funny stories that go on slightly too long, who absentmindedly rubs my neck while we sit on the couch together, quietly reading separate books.