There isn't an ex of mine within a 10-kilometre radius that I haven't tried to get back with in the last two years, four months, and seven days of being single. Somehow, there are enough of them here, owing to the fact that Indians who study engineering, as these men and I did, end up living in Bengaluru, if not the actual Silicon Valley.
It's true that you only realise the value of something once you've lost it. That happened with each of these people, who seem more special now than they ever did before. But their lovability and eligibility may also be exaggerated by the simple fact that I already know them. After all, we made it through the initial unknowing and courtship, through ‘making it official' and the honeymoon period, through subsequent times of conflict, boredom, or just happiness, sometimes for years, until something or the other gave way. And we still had love for each other after.
Why We Keep Going Back
Now, out in the open, faced with the task of selecting a ‘life partner' from a sea of people I have nothing in common with, familiarity could never breed contempt. Familiarity now means safety (they won't kill me!), comfort (they already know me!), a certain automatic release of love, gratitude, inside jokes, even an appreciation for my own life, because of its depth and history (somebody actually loved me for years and I them! mad!). Perhaps it is why we still long for love lost even when inundated with endless options on dating apps. (Those remaining exes in SF might be the ones to go after next, who knows!)
Familiarity is now the antidote to hours of trying to get a new person to know you, warts and all, and vice versa, with the mad hope of being understood and seen by a complete stranger. There is no evidence that the investment is worth anything, or will ever succeed. And try as I might to detach the process from its desired outcome, of ending up in a meaningful relationship, the process itself often disappoints.
There are people I met on the apps who became some of my good friends in the city, even if we decided not to date. But equally often occur experiences so sour that they make you question the very concept of “dating”, and your foolish hope of finding someone ‘special'. Why else would the universe make you wade through so many unpleasant experiences, if not to tell you to give up on your idea of “The One”?
Patience As A Gift
There was the time I met this man I grew increasingly unsure of—he insisted on choosing the place, he ordered most of the food, but also indicated he'd like to pay—and after I said I wouldn't like to meet again, he insisted I pay him back (just don't offer to pay in the first place! Why make flimsy offers you won't stand by later?) Then there was another promising prospect—he was cute, and we'd been texting intensely for days—when, suddenly, just as we were deciding where to meet, he went silent. I had no choice but to block him—that was better than sitting around and looking at my phone for hours, waiting for the reply I was due—but it was still a tattered bandage over my yet again dashed hopes. There was another man who decided, a few silent weeks after some initial meetings, that he “wasn't in a place to start something new”. There was also the guy who, after a week of banter, chemistry, and regular talking, stopped replying when I asked him what he wanted in any relationship, in principle.
I was far from properly liking any of these people. But the hurt isn't so much heartache as it is from impatience and loss of faith. Each time the premise of the dating app is violated—that people will at least try to get to know each other sincerely; that the obstacle to a real relationship will be incompatibility or other issues discovered over time, not ‘unprofessionalism', dishonesty, and uncouth behaviour ad infinitum—you lose the energy to believe, to be emotionally invested and decent yourself. And if you think it's only women who're dealing with stupid men, there's evidence to suggest that men, too, are sick of being cancelled upon and treated badly. The ‘Women-in-Male-Dominated-Fields' trend, however, which are memes based on women being the first ones to flake or lose interest in a guy, also suggests that is just women retaliating by finally giving men a taste of their own all-too-convenient medicine of losing fucks at the drop of a hat. God knows I've lost interest in people I just started talking to, perhaps because of who they were, or because life got in the way, or because I stopped seeing the value in trying harder than anyone else.
Hurt, Hurt Everywhere
There is little incentive to muster the courage, energy, and know-how to deal with strangers politely—unlike with people you've known for a while. A friend in the same predicament as me believes that we live in a generation of hurt people hurting other people in an effort to prevent hurting themselves—while perhaps hurting themselves anyway. That technology is the root cause of this apathy?—malaise? insincerity? self-preservation?—is a common diagnosis, one that I partially believe in. Dating apps have famously ruined love: by compressing people into six pictures and some boilerplate ‘witty' text, and making you think endlessly about these ideas of yourself and another, until the many-sided humanity of everyone involved becomes moot; by having a business model fundamentally at odds with the problem it's trying to solve—for every couple it creates, a dating app loses not one but two ‘users'; by dangling the possibility of a new ‘perfect' connection at every turn, so if you find one thing you don't like about someone, you can just discard them and move on to the next. Soon our “AI concierges” are supposed to be dating hundreds of other “AI concierges” on our behalf, to narrow us down to the evermore “perfect” match.
Instagram seems to be reading between the lines of my WhatsApp chats, surfacing content that addresses these personal questions. “When someone can't meet your needs, it doesn't matter why. Walk away and don't compromise”. “He doesn't deserve you”. “The right man will chase you”. “Be in your divine feminine. Cut people off”.
Do You Love Yourself A Little Too Much?
I can't help but feel tremendously confused about whether this emphasis on self-protection, disguised as self-care, is really in service to us not abandoning ourselves (which is advice I could really use, frankly)—or is it more of the hyper-individualism that we deem necessary to a healthy self-concept today? They say growth happens in the difficult, messy spaces of human connection; your ego may not feel like it's “winning”, but you're being forced to change anyway. I wonder if the frequent conflation of compromise and ‘settling' with weakness or loss is creating a generation of emotionally stunted—endlessly seeking and isolated—people.
So, what should we actually do? Well, if I knew, I wouldn't be here trying to wring value from all my romantic failures in public. So now might be the time for you to stop reading—unless you're okay with less value, more entertainment.
Is the answer in arranged marriages after all, which filters for seriousness of intent and, hopefully, integrity? I did make a Shaadi.com profile once, but the crowd there seemed so besmirched by people doing it for the wrong reasons, with an app interface that took me back to 1995 and spam calls from suitors that put NoBroker to shame, that I didn't think anyone I'd love could be there. I uninstalled it in a day.
Should I simply give up on both the process and the outcome, and instead do things I love with the time recovered from the “dating overhead”? Perhaps I'll meet someone cool then. If not, I'll at least have spent my time the way I like to, and make more progress on things that are actually under my control.
Or, those remaining exes in SF—do I actually come for you?
An Internal Journey
I think the real remedy, apart from making jokes about it, is internal and emotional. The ‘engineering' metaphor seems to last: the proportion of people who are happily married is probably comparable to those students who make it to the top colleges; yet, nearly everyone sits the exams with an equal amount of self-belief, at least in theory, hoping to make it. Only, I enjoyed being consumed by studies more than trying to meet people I'm not sure I'd like. But the odds of finding a partner are also better than succeeding in an education system designed to meet the needs of only a fraction of the overall population.
Perhaps the resilience and detachment learnt in those teenage days would be the more necessary and valuable tenets to channel now.
(Sanjana Ramachandran is a writer and marketer from Bengaluru, with a book from Aleph coming out soon.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
