Some Third Thing
Learning to live with unfinished edges
With deep shame I will admit that I’ve developed a compulsive swiping habit. When my last situationship sputtered out a few weeks ago, the silence felt like every vibrating ping on Earth died at once. I plummeted deep into the dopamine vacuum and installed myself on the couch (bed, other couch) like a human metronome: swipe-swish-swipe, clocking microhits of validation the way a cocaine rat presses a drug button. Each right-swipe promises potential to patch the vacancy he left. It’s a familiar loop:
Lacan said that the ego is founded in misunderstanding. In what he calls the mirror stage, an infant (jubilantly!) spots their reflection and cathects to the glossy, unified “ideal-i” avatar in the glass. The infant, who previously perceived themself as a body-in-pieces of little fingers, arm rolls, and diaper explosions, longs to be that whole. Ego is born as a story the child can never live up to. Language (“That’s you!”) fastens the mirror image to social codes, locking the kid into a lifelong chase to reconcile self-story with sensory mess, the messy reality of a body.
What if the dating app profile is a reverse mirror, a projected self in fragments (bikini-clad torso, favorite dinner spot, hands cradling a dog-eared psychoanalytic tome) that exploits our fantasy of wholeness? And what if, by stitching a stranger’s pixels into a seamless story, we trick ourselves into thinking we might finally cohere, too?
The payoff isn’t merely their “like,” it’s the stray miracle that, in seeing them stitch my fragments into wholeness, I’ll feel sewn together, too. I show you the torso, book, and witty prompt and you imagine a well-balanced, creative-but-financially-solvent real human (in reality: questionable). My own shaky ego borrows your fantasy for structural support.
Once you notice the reverse mirror, every trope glows. Look at the people in their fifties flashing photos from their Bush (Sr) era prime. They’re banking on you quilting the 19 year old complexion to the 56 year old in the coffee shop. (Same goes for the shockingly proficient FaceTuners- did you think no one would notice your teeth are 12 shades whiter online? I say this as someone with more dental insecurity than an adolescent Martin Amis.)
Or the “moderate,” a new witness protection program for Trumpers in blue states. They trust you’ll braid “loves dogs, moderate, decent teeth” into “safe to fuck.” You won’t! None of us will!
And, my least favorite: the person who’s absorbed just enough TikTok psycho-babble to pass the initial vibe check (“seeking emotional availability!” “willing to have hard conversations!”) but has never been in a relationship longer than a year or two.
Each gambit asks you to weave contradictions into coherence so, even if you aren’t the lover who will (finally!) complete them, the user behind the mask can borrow the completed picture for themself.
And I’m no innocent spectator. While I’m decoding their fragments, I’m uploading fresh ones of my own, hoping they’ll do the stitching, too. It’s a mutual design project: you stitch me, I stitch you, nobody looks too closely at the seams.
The real trouble arrives in reality. The initial meeting is basically quality control: does the live specimen fit the fantasy I assembled? Never. They’re two inches shorter, think there are “two sides” to Palestinian genocide, and have less emotional bandwidth than my fourth grader. When the patchwork fails, the illusion frays. The golden retriever in me (tail betwixt legs) relaunches the app, tweaks the profile, and swipes even more relentlessly. No offense to dogs.
It has to stop.
I need to set the phone aside and sit with what’s left: my pulse, the half halo of my bedside lamp, the maniacal thrust of dishwasher water emptying itself into the kitchen sink. My body, my stories, and some third thing- alone in a room at night.
This is the third thing: something older than algorithms, roomy enough to hold ripped edges without asking for unification. Call it grace, call it a higher gravity, call it god’s tender gaze. The seams don’t disappear; they’re suspended in that larger weave. And, held there, the pieces stop rattling for a moment and remember they belong to the same cloth. Mine, yours, ours.
Coherence isn’t something another person grants. It’s the slow recognition that every piece has always been part of something larger, even in the dark.
Some minor housekeeping:
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