By Teresa Mettela
Call me cynical, but romance is a dead language.
Dating in the 21st century makes me feel like an 80-year-old grandma stuck in the body of a 20- something. Is it just me or are your thumbs also too big for iPhone screens? My chubby fingers don’t belong in this intricate game of toss and catch. If you can’t package yourself in an aesthetically pleasing perfectly-punny Instagram bio, consider yourself hopeless like me. The hook. The bait. The trap. It’s all written in an invisible handbook when you download Tinder - you didn’t get the memo? We know our first lines. Our pitch. The move. It seems that everyone besides myself has given into the Hunger Games arena that is dating in 2020, but I’m not convinced.
Komal Kapoor, author of Unfollowing You, explores the messy business of “feelings” via social media.
“You have turned me into a cliche:
I check if you’re online
A dozen times a day
lol at your Snaps
{you’d be such an entertaining date}
and I wonder if you tweet about me
Or is there some other pizza-loving bae?”
Kapoor describes that itch we all have to check our social media a hundred times a day. It’s an addiction. A thirst. And it amplifies when we’re in love. Suddenly we’re calculating the perfect time to text back that special someone. We check our crushes’ Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for updates and obsess over innuendos that probably weren’t even about us. It’s messy and exhilarating. Two extremes that somehow go perfectly together when under cupid’s bow and arrow.
Then, you’re dating.
“You created us
a Netflix profile
naming it our own
version of Brangelina.”
This is when social media becomes our best friend.
We think songs were made just for us. Facetime calls turn into virtual sleepovers. Netflix accounts were basically created for Friday night dates. You start watching shows together even though he’s the only person in the world who hasn’t seen The Office yet. Social media binds people in ways we don’t even realize.
That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when he leaves your text on read is all forgiven when the same someone drops heart emojis on your Instagram picture the next day.
Can love be born from a foundation of likes?
I still don’t know.
I fall victim to staring at my phone, waiting for those three little dots to appear. We can play hide and seek for hours on end. I clutch my device, making sure I feel it, shoved up against the fabric of my denim jeans - where it’s always been. I need to know the second someone texts me. Only to reply three hours later. It’s all for the feeling of control. We feign our authority for edgy personas and power moves. Social media gives me the one thing I always want more of: time. I can choose my words carefully. I can be a surgeon with her 10-blade. A painter with her brush. My fingers dance across the screen; they fall and fumble all the time, but you’d never know it.
We talk about how social media connects the masses. It serves as a vehicle for reunion and life. A renewal of friendships, love, and lust. Double-tap to like. You know the drill.
But what about the divide? Social media thrives on jealousy and miscommunication. Gossip spreads like wildfire and many of us get burned. We get canceled. Ghosted. Unfollowed.
“In moments of stillness
it is still your page I refresh.”
Now, here we are. Stuck at a crossroads. Can I text you? Will you text me? How many days are too many days without a “good morning” or “good night”? Of all the notifications popping up on my phone, I hope and pray that one of them is from you. In the days passing you archive our photos together, erasing our existence and I do the same. It’s a competition, isn’t it? I stop reaching for my phone, but the chill of its metal casing burns through my pockets. Avoiding you is impossible when you’re just a couple clicks away. I can’t help myself. You smile at me through my screen and I instinctively smile too.
I love you. I hate you.
“I no longer wonder
what it would be like
to build a life with you.
I can unfollow you now.”
*Sources: Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, and back covers of the poets’ poetry collections are referred in the introductions above. Photos are from internet.