Swiping and Writing: On Hinge as Muse

There is a part of me that still cannot take online dating seriously, this despite the fact that I met my current partner on Hinge (and I take him very seriously). Possibly, I had heard too many horror stories by the time I created a dating profile. For many years, my mother would cheerfully draw my attention to every Dr. Phil episode, which featured a woman who had been scammed, deceived, and left bewildered or heartbroken by a prospective love interest she’d met on the Internet.

I’ll admit, too, that though I tried multiple dating apps, some vestige of an old-fashioned, out-of-date, Victorian past self persisted in the belief that people should meet each other for the first time in real life. One of my strongest convictions, prior to capitulating to Coffee Meets Bagel and Tinder, was that the means by which a couple met constituted a vital component of their love story. In my own wildest fantasies, this took the shape of a Henry James academic conference. To lock eyes across a physical space, filled with scholarly heads as amply endowed as the craniums of William and Henry, strikes me as far more romantic than “matching” through a screen.

At their algorithmic heart, dating apps are utilitarian. An individual’s life is reduced to the bare essentials of what fits on a mobile display. It occurred to me early on that many of the features of dating apps would translate well to writing: Be pithy; avoid vague, generalized descriptions; likewise, eschew ornate, over-the-top phrases, bad similes, cheesy metaphors, and platitudes. Typos are a turn-off to agents, editors, and potential lovers alike. What is a dating profile, after all, if not a series of miniature creative writing prompts (“The key to my heart is…” “Biggest risk I’ve taken…”)?

For all my criticism of online dating, I cannot deny the learnings I have extracted from it, about people, about desperation and the need for human connection, and, to use a Jungian term, about my shadow self.

There is an aspect of online dating that lends itself to storytelling. Everyone is a stranger, and owing to the sheer abundance of strangers, everything feels low stakes. On occasion, that paradoxical combination of the human search for love and the impersonality of the Internet enables a glimpse into someone else’s life. It’s like walking past a house where the shutters suddenly fly open. There’s the sense that even if the sight is mundane, you really have no right to look, and yet the temptation is irresistible.

I felt this way when a divorced father told me that despite being with friends at summer camp, his young daughter still cried on the phone. An academic in Italy shared a video of his favorite spot in Rome, where one could see the Tiber, the Castel Sant’Angelo, and Saint Peter’s Basilica simply by turning one’s head. A financial researcher sent photos of the dinner he had just cooked, and I took in every detail with the enthusiasm of a voyeur: the pasta and chicken, the careful plating and uninspiring dishware. If only for a moment, I had been given a direct window into a life with no bearing on my own—every writer’s dream.

In a post on X, Lauren Groff wrote, “I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets.” This sounds right. Online dating has never informed my fiction, but it provides fodder for the Muse that is both serious and ridiculous, thought-provoking and asinine. What to make, for instance, of faceless profile pictures that depict nighttime trails leading nowhere (creepy) or turbulent seascapes (are you Poseidon)? What does it mean when a beloved pug or a Russian Blue takes pride of place over a human? Or when images become a real-life game of “Where’s Waldo?” The challenge: to pick out who you might be dating in a baseball stadium, in a group of ten men wearing identical tuxedoes, in a vast wilderness. Whatever the content, more often than not the matter of other people’s lives makes for a good story, even if that story is one that exists solely in your head.

To give credit where credit is due, I doubt the aforementioned Henry James conference would have yielded the variety of results I’ve had, both good and bad. If anything, bad dates are exemplary of the chasm that invariably exists between nonfiction and real life, between text and flesh (and, on occasion, between photo and flesh). As Vivian Gornick wrote in The Situation and the Story, “But whether that self is posited as whole or fragmented, real or alien, intimate or strange, the nonfiction persona—like the persona in novels and poems—has kept re-inventing itself…” It’s a worthwhile thought exercise to ponder how dating apps may serve as a platform for self-expression and, by extension, self-delusion. What is the persona one creates line by line, through words and images, and how does that sense of self translate to others when situated in the “real world”?

Eventually, I came to approach my dates with a kind of anthropological fascination. To borrow a Jamesian term, I began to see myself as a “restless analyst” of dating. I had no interest and every interest, and I cared only to the degree that, in an echo of Lauren Groff’s X post, every date should yield some few precious drops of inspiration, some resonant and noteworthy detail I could, even a decade from now, draw on for my writing. My Proustian madeleine is a sandwich comprised of walnut butter, cream cheese, and Medjool date jam slathered on thick slices of black bread. I had this singularly delicious sandwich on a singularly bad first date with a cartoonist, who had rancid B.O. and the kind of soft, subdued voice reminiscent of serial killers and mad geniuses. Halfway through the date, and right about the moment he confessed he had no idea who Anne Boleyn was, I began to wonder how I might turn him into a character. It occurred to me that he might be thinking how to turn me into a cartoon.

For all my criticism of online dating, I cannot deny the learnings I have extracted from it, about people, about desperation and the need for human connection, and, to use a Jungian term, about my shadow self. The briefest of exchanges has led me to the films of Setsuko Hara, to Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, to D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake.” Had I not found a partner, I would still have discovered András Schiff’s interpretation of Bach’s Partitas and Antonioni’s Red Desert. For the span of an hour, a day, a week, another life is pulled into one’s orbit, and the fruit of that encounter may be no more than a shared love of Sargent’s “Smoke of Ambergris” and Éric Rohmer.

I think of friendships I have that remind me of loaves of stale bread. My foray into online dating encouraged me to reconsider the standards by which I measured the value of human relationships. To know someone briefly did not mean I had wasted my time, just as to know someone for many years, even decades, did not mean I had invested my time wisely. Upon receiving a piece of good news the previous year, I found it strange that the first people I turned to on my phone weren’t my friends but relative strangers I’d “known” for a couple weeks or even less. I discovered I didn’t like to talk shop with other writers (on Hinge), that, in fact, I had no interest in sleeping with another writer. Do not ask me how I juggle multiple assignments, how I make time to write a book, or worse, what I have written and what I am working on. Clue: If we met on a dating app, I will never tell you. Gatekeeping is real.

Not long after my partner and I connected on Hinge, I sent him a snooty message along the lines of, “The very nature of dating apps is anathema to the purpose for which they are built: to generate human connection.” I think I just wanted to use the word “anathema.” But he replied with enthusiasm, and I was glad I’d found someone who wasn’t scared off by long texts that took up one’s entire mobile screen (or, for that matter, the word “anathema”). I remember sending him my favorite verse from Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and vital quotes from Henry James (“There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery”). In a way I still fail to understand, the transition from screen to East Village, from emoji to face, from text to human voice, felt seamless. “You have an amazing vocabulary,” I said to him, meaning it. “Your texts turned me on,” he replied politely.

My foray into online dating encouraged me to reconsider the standards by which I measured the value of human relationships. To know someone briefly did not mean I had wasted my time, just as to know someone for many years, even decades, did not mean I had invested my time wisely.

It’s true that we did not meet each other at a Henry James academic conference. We never locked eyes across the ho-hum platters of sliced fruit and crackers that seem a requisite part of every academic event that promises food. He has never read James. He is shocked I have never read Bolaño, that I don’t share his passion for Duras.

In my more romantic moments, I wonder if every online dating interaction may ultimately be construed as a narrative in reverse, like characters on a page waiting for a chance to step together into reality. All it takes, in a way, is “swipe right” to begin the story.

“I don’t think ‘habitudinal’ is a word,” I said to him not long ago.

“It is,” he said.

I studied his face, a cross between François Truffaut and Jeremy Irons. “You’re bluffing. I’ll bet you a kiss.”

He picked up his phone, typed the word into a search engine with one finger, and showed me the entry on Merriam-Webster. “Habitudinal,” I read. “Relating to or associated with a habitude.”

“I think sometimes you’re not real,” I said.

I have never been so happy to be wrong; I have never been so happy to lose.