Dating at the end of the world is a lot like politely accepting a Band-Aid when you’ve been screaming for a tourniquet.
It’s no longer a question of being in it for the long haul — hell, we’re not even in for the night. A lot of people I know barely even bother getting their rocks off before splitting into the hazy air outside. Phone numbers? We don’t even know names. A Tinder profile deleted in the time it takes to roll over. A Grindr profile that’s blocked you before you say goodbye.
We’re all just rushing, speed-driven toward an obligatory obsolescence. So busy looking for the next high, the next distraction, the next body that will sigh for us while we yield to one another. This is modern romance. This is modern courtship. This is pomo love. Take it or leave it, it’s what’s on offer.
I’m not bitter, I’m not jaded, I just see the world crumbling (as it always has) and my generation reacting as we best see fit. Fuck it, fuck everything, fuck you, fuck everyone, fuck me, fuck fuck fuck, who fucking cares. Pregnancy? “Easily” taken care of. Sexually transmitted infections? Don’t ask, don’t tell — it’s all stigma, anyway, isn’t it? It’s just a cold for our sexual bits. It’s nothing to worry about it. (I don’t disagree and that makes me either part of the existentialist dreading problem or part of the reframing sexual politics for the future solution, depending on how one perceives it, depending on how I practice it, depending on who wants to judge.)
A long time ago that was really only a few months, I felt joy at getting to know potential partners. Now I feel nothing but rage, not yet at rage-fucking ability, not yet at the point of weaponizing sex, but I can taste the allure of it all under everything else that passes my lips.
Each generation has had their reasons to be angry. Anger seems to be a perpetual gift, the inherited trauma of all those that came before seething in our beings as we struggle to come. Why is my generation so angry, anyway? Because we’re fucked past the point where fucking matters, that’s why. This isn’t like the ’80s and the AIDS crisis and the fear. This is different (but similar). This is a primal aversion to a global trajectory we didn’t launch, we can’t stop, and we see the inevitable macro ending in every personal instance of failure that we experience. Every time we can’t, every time we don’t want to, every time we fake it, every time we do and can’t think of why we bothered. Every lust for life slowly curling into the fetal position, no longer wailing for comfort, accepting that the world’s teat isn’t there for us, accepting how it’s gonna be, how we’re gonna be, how attachment theory somehow works on a global scale.
We don’t so much move on in our heads as move on to another body. Some body. Any body. One that can make the howling of the outside world quiet for the moment. It doesn’t last, but what does?
We swipe right for the moment to forget. We forget what we’ve swiped. Then we do it all over again. Postmodern love.
It’s not just the midwinter that’s bleak, you know.
