Who Gives a Fuck about Split Bills?
a reflection on the modern dating scene
Recently I had a long conversation with a friend about the absurd dating scene of urban zoomers. One thought that crossed my mind during the talk was how ahead of its time Bloc Party was when they wrote This Modern Love, or maybe, the same absurdities have been going on for a while. I’ve no shortage of friends who aren’t lucky enough to score a steady long term relationship from their school or college days, and sadly, I’m also included in that group of people. The only option for people like us is to plunge headfirst into what is aptly described by most as a ‘nightmare’ of a dating scene.
For many months, I’ve heard tales of woe from brethrens of the same grind, of wading through the swamps of dating apps and going on awkward dates. All of these stories are eerily similar, starting with meeting a stranger, sharing parts of their lives and growing perhaps too intimate too fast, one party getting overexcited, only to end up being strangers all over again. It’s like we’re stuck in this Groundhog Day of fumbling for connections when in actuality, we are too preoccupied with ourselves to have one.
Even the ‘strangers’ my friends meet have an uncanny pattern about them. All of them watching the same 3 shows, liking the same musicians, giving the same generic answers, and most importantly, wanting to get “more serious” yet also being emotionally unavailable. This volatile combo of traits gives birth to a loop of meeting, getting ghosted or ghosting until the whole thing becomes a blur. A collection of people melding into each other until we can’t discern one from the other in our memories.
From what I’ve gathered, this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to dating apps, but also people you meet anywhere. From run clubs, sport communities, haphazard bar meetings, none are spared from the dreaded outcome of going into a ‘situationship.’ This particular friend I talked with had a recent encounter with their new friend who disappeared from them mere days after implying that they “wanted to get serious.”
Not to mention the messy monthly internet discourse over the most unimportant aspects of dating such as whether a man should pay for the first date or should he split the bill. With the outcome of the discourse almost always descending into tirades and debates about gender when all of it is so very banal. This chronically convoluted world of rules and stages feels comical at first, but gets very depressing after a while. Are we really that starved of love?
We’re so used to instant gratification from the constant stream of short form videos that we never let things go beyond that awkward fumbling stage of getting to know each other. Either that, or we go too fast and dive in when we’re not ready for intimacy. Ultimately feeling embarrassingly naked even though all we wanted yesterday was to get closer.
Looking at this situation, it’s incredibly easy to say something like “romance is dead!” or “real love just isn’t worth it anymore” but I’d argue that it’s a case of us wanting too much while giving so little. We impose too many rules, too many criterias for finding love that we eventually get overwhelmed by the weight of it. We make a long list of all the things we want in a partner, ticking off boxes like we would to a daily to-do-list in our jobs until we find one small fault that makes us turn the other way around completely.
And when we do get to that one fault, which we will of course, we don’t take accountability for it. Whether it be split bills when you prefer to pay, or the way they answer your texts, a small trigger is enough to make us hightail it out of there in an instant, a lot of times, without a word.
A friend of mine once said that criterias are a way of protecting our hearts from harm. It’s a subconscious list we make from the long history of traumas that we’ve gathered from our past interactions to avoid us from our next heartbreak. While that act isn’t necessarily wrong, but when the list gets too minute and detailed, for me it kind of feels like closing us off from any meaningful interaction.
Romance movies often tell coming-of-age stories, where the protagonist, in their confusing teenage years, manages to fight off their malaise, gets with the love of their lives, and somewhat finds purpose in life. But what happens when we find love after we’ve come of age? When all of our traumas have already set in, when we can’t afford distractions in the midst of our growing responsibilities. Dating in your 20 something it seems, is to always let your rationality and romantic side be at odds with each other.
On one side we have that part of us that insists on finding ‘the one.’ The side that fantasizes at night to have a love like King Pedro and Queen Inês (no matter how macabre that story might be), to be loved until our dying days and beyond, até o fim do mundo. The other, more pragmatic side tells us things like, we can’t live off love alone, think about your career, etc. So to compromise, we make this absurd list that goes on and on, adding things from our romantic and pragmatic side until it conjures up this image of an impossibly perfect partner.
So when even one thing from that list doesn’t get crossed off we feel like we’re betraying ourselves. Only giving lukewarm responses when somebody approaches, emotionally testing the waters until the time we or they eventually leave abruptly, without a word, something that’s become all too common. There’s something existentially alarming about how easily replaceable we are in people’s lives. So we search for comfort in closure when there’s none to be found, fooling ourselves that we can do better until someone new comes along. Then the whole thing starts again, ad nauseam.
It repeats again and again because we let ourselves get out of hand, even though we desperately crave connection. Endlessly searching and holding out for ‘something better’ until we ourselves become the generic encounters. Giving the same answers on first dates, liking the same bands, melding into just another stranger in some other person’s memories. All the while saying things like “I’ve never got over that one person” or “love just isn’t the same as before.” When in reality you’ve never really let yourself open up like the way you did in your younger days.
A lot of times I find myself missing the simple, juvenile innocence of crushes, no matter how awkward they may be. But perhaps that’s what we needed to do all along to escape the endless loop of first dates and talking stages. Forget about split bills, or 3 day rules, or criterias and abandon your lists and rules. Maybe all we need to do is park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, and dream, like we did when we were seventeen.
