A Revolutionary New Dating Technique

I need to stop looking at headlines at night, or in the morning, or on my phone at mid-day. Truly, I need school to start so that I’ll technically be too busy to even glance at the cultural devolution tripping lightly along down the broad way that leads to candy, popsicles, and million degree weather.

But since I already did look, and as usual don’t really want to wade into the actual muck, but prefer to skirt along the edges, how ‘bout this interesting piece on the subject of Millennial fatigue with app generated relationships. The Wall Street Journal notes the rise of something called Slow Dating, which, as far as I can make out, distinguishes it from the the now universal, even though it was invented yesterday, Tinder version in that the user makes an effort to meet other people in person. Slow dating is now the latest thing. It’s revolutionary. It’s changing a generation.

Which leads me to what I’m really interested in, the word Slow.

I read something a decade ago, can’t find it now, about the rise of the Slow Movement—slow food, slow church, slow home, slow travel—and that it grew up from a sense of time poverty. The faster everything gets, the less time anyone actually has. You rush along at a million miles an hour with all your time saving devices and wake up to find yourself with no time—no time to eat, no time to sleep, no time to think, no time to be. And truth-ily this must be true.

But, having read nothing else about it, and therefore working my way out of my closed cubicle of philosophical and cultural ignorance alone without assistance, I think the idea of slow must not only be about time, but about the material friction that is missing from so much of modern life. When everything is too physically and materially easy, all the energy that you’ve saved just lets you stare into the abyss of yourself. Whereas when something is physically hard and takes laborious effort and perhaps even misery, you might be distracted from the black hole of your own psyche.

And truly, talking to actual people must count not only in the time category, but more so in the friction one. It is very difficult to toddle into an actual physical space where another physical, material, bodily, enfleshed person is and make contact with the real seeing eye and muck around in the recesses of a real brain trying to think of something for the fleshy lips to audibly speak. It is much easier to hunch over, quiet and alone, engaging but not engaging on, say, the internet.

The dating app approach to life gently and kindly removes all the uncomfortable friction of actually having to talk to another person. You have the idea of engagement—and again, I’ve never even once looked at a dating app so I don’t really know what it is like—without the actual engagement. Which is lovely, except that by use of the screen you are only distracted from yourself, you are not actually pulled up out of yourself in the way that real human contact requires.

The article uses the word Fatigue, which is also a perfect word. The internet in general, both in content and in form, delivers forth an easy and complete psychological drama that seems to demand nothing from my person, but really saps me of all my energy and leaves me in the uncomfortable place of apathetic and languid rage. Which two emotions don’t go together, but somehow they do.

Anyway, imagine the transformative effect for a generation to discover that, though hard, being with actual people is a lovely way to fall in love. It makes me quite hopeful really. Not completely hopeful, but vaguely less depressed than I was three minutes ago. Being both fatigued, and literally slow, I support whole heartedly this next iteration of the slow movement.