The Joker's Dating Imperative
Dating is the least fun thing there is given its extremely high stakes which is why men's insistence that it be fun and that women not take themselves too seriously is so frustrating.
Go on a dating app like Hinge right now and you’ll be bombarded with a litany of profiles made by thirty-something dudes all finishing the same exact canned prompt of “I get along best with” with “girls who don’t take themselves too seriously.”
This whole Jokeresque “why so serious?” male imperative is not just a passing dating trend. I think it actually needs to be critically examined.
Why is this so prevalent in men’s online dating profiles? I suspect it’s because these dudes have had their fill now of first dates that to them feel like an interrogation. After all, who are these strange women to so boldly ask a man they have just met what he’s doing with the rest of his life?
Isn’t online dating supposed to be fun, light, breezy, and casual—forever?
As these men get older, the women they are trying to bang start asking more and more “serious” questions of them like do you have a steady salary and do you regularly clean under your fingernails?
They don’t seem all that much interested in hearing about his epic trip to Mexico with his buddies or even care what TV he watches. They seem so serious, like they’re in a rush to skip past all the fun parts of dating and get straight to the point: are we compatable as life partners or not?
I empathize. I know exactly what that feels like. Because as a 35-year-old woman without children, I’ve been asked many very invasive and suchly pointed questions about my fertility plans by men on first dates for the last, oh, I dunno, ten years? After all, my entire life, whether I like it or not, is defined by my womb and what I choose to do with it. And behind every womb is a massive countdown clock ticking backwards from age 35, telling men exactly how many years with which I have left to choose until it stops being a choice anymore.
It’s serious, or so they tell me. I have to take all of this shit very seriously. After all, the stakes are laughably, tragically enormous.
So here’s the problem. I think the gamification of matchmaking by dating apps to attract as many male users as possible has *very* wrongly entrained an entire generation of men to believe that dating is best treated as a form of digital entertainment, like any other app they’d download to fuck around with while sitting on the toilet. And this attitude towards dating is carried over to how they treat women they meet on the apps: casually, as a form of diverting entertainment.
I think this is why men say they get along best with women who don’t take themselves seriously because these men don’t want to take them seriously. It’s all a game to them.
But at no point in the entire history of heterosexuality have women ever been able to approach matchmaking like a game. Family formation is not for us a choice we can ever take back or walk away from. As a woman, you only get one shot at becoming a mother and you have to make it count. And even having fun now is a tradeoff if your most valuable assets in the “dating market” are declining ones.
We have to take all of it very seriously, screams ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE.
Pretty much from the time that we’re ejected from high school, we’re already being told that we’re running out of time to find a partner of quality if we want to have kids before the ideal age of 29.
So from the onset, we’re warned BY EVERYONE not to fuck around by dating men who aren’t serious, who don’t take relationships seriously, who will burn through their partners’ limited family-planning time and not give a shit about it. A bad love match in your late twenties or early thirties could wreck your whole chance at having the family we’re told makes life worth living.
TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, screams everyone.
And so for the vast majority of young, college-educated women I’ve spoken to about their dating lives, there really is no partitioned life-course stage they feel that they can set aside for it to be taken “casually.”
I realize how hetero-imperative that sounds. But here’s the other thing: I know there are in fact plenty of straight women out there who definitely don’t want a family or a husband or even a committed relationship. But I also know these women tend to be pretty open, if not quite vocal, about what they do not want. After all, they know better than anyone that if you don’t have any higher-level expectations for partnership, then dating can indeed be super breezy, fun and casual, like a fling you have while traveling with someone you never really expect to see ever again. They know they don’t have to take anyone or anything seriously.
In fact, they date much like men their age do.
Meanwhile, their dating strategy starkly contrasts with that of most other straight women I know in their twenties and thirties. Most women this age are approaching dating with the rest of their lifecourse screaming at them from the sidelines, shouting, “Hurry up! You’re not getting any younger! Wrinkles and infertility are expensive problems and will cost you dearly in the damnable “dating market!”
From a woman’s perspective, dating has, I think, always been sort of this unrewarding slog. Every day we get older and—so we’re told—that much less desirable. And so we must brace ourselves for the hours and hours of invisible labor that go into preparing one’s mind, body, and spirit for any sexual rite, even one as tepid and unexciting as a first date over coffee. Women after a breakup will complain bitterly about having to be back on “the dating market” because of all the work it takes to look young, slim, and pretty for the absolute pleasure of sitting in front of a slovenly middle-aged stranger eager to recap the entire plot of Lost for your edification as you sit there nodding along, wondering what it is that you must have done in a past life to deserve a sexual life as fucking vapid and boring as this always is.
And that’s saying nothing about all the real fears and real anxieties that I think most of us feel around the prospect of meeting a strange man, given that every day we read headlines reminding us of how many women are raped and killed by men they met off of dating apps.
Take it all very seriously.
Though heterosexual courtship has changed a lot over the past several decades but what hasn’t changed is the existence of systemic gender inequity. But because in our patriarchal society we are still somehow debating the validity of feminism itself, it’s actually quite hard to get taken seriously as a feminist theorist who wants us to consider as social fact the impact of gender inequity on seemingly petty (i.e. feminized) matters such as dating, courtship, and family formation.
Right now, in large part because of online dating, the process of partnering is so thoroughly juvenilized that to frame it as a site of serious conflict, as an arena where two groups of unequal standing regularly interact and negotiate inequalities is to beg a lot of questions like, “Oh come on, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Y so serious?”
Meanwhile, game theory for the past seventy years doesn’t sound any less abstract but smart, brain genius men never have a problem applying conflict analysis to anything else. But dating? Pssh, they mutter. Grow up.
Anyway, all this is to say that dating is, in social fact, a contested arena and it should not surprise anyone that groups enjoying unequal status and resources approach dating differently because they are unequally privileged and resourced.
The framing of dating as a fun, distracting game, as a light and breezy encounter between two attractive people, is a delusion that the apps encourage so as to attract “average” straight men onto their platform. Obviously, dating doesn’t actually work like this in real life. The “average” straight woman is not given the societal freedom to treat her dating life as some kind of game. She’s in a hurry. She has to move quickly while evading those who mean her serious harm and unserious fuckboys alike.
But if dating apps gave off a whiff of the serious, hypermonogamous energy of, say, eHarmony, young men wouldn’t find the game so fun and so diverting. They wouldn’t sign up for it at all, at least not until they are 42, after their desk-job bodies have gone completely to pot. Because that’s when they’re ready to overcorrect and start taking dating way too seriously. That’s when the first date question that comes out of their mouths is, “So do you want to deliver me my promised scion, broodmare?”
But until then, they don’t want to take it seriously. It’s just a game. And it’s a game because they’re doing it on an app that is designed to reinforce that perception. These aren’t real women. These are non-playable characters in a game you play on the toilet. They have no right to take themselves and their lives so seriously.
