We Date in a Society

Why is everyone so obsessed with how everyone else dates?

I don’t watch the news, but I skim the sports section and “for you” tab on Twitter, so I feel I’m mostly abreast of events. This last week certainly flooded us with events up to our nipples. From what I can gather:

1. Following their playoff loss, the Washington Congressionals appointed a new secretary of defense, offensive coordinator, and special forces coach. All three turned out to be white nationalists on H-1B visas.

2. Elon Musk used stolen Chinese AI to deport all gang-affiliated USAID workers back to Massachusetts.

3. Kanye West and the Doo Wop Haters won “best girlfriend” at the Grammys.

4. Facing tariff pressure, the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Doncic and the Gaza Strip to Denmark in exchange for Greenland, 20 Dogecoin, and Justin Trudeau’s expiring contract.

This was the most discussed tweet on my timeline this week:

@lovesometaylor tweets exclusively about Taylor Swift and about bad boyfriends, pure coincidence I’m sure

Is she bragging or confessing? A brave victim or cunning manipulator? Is she grateful for IKEA boy or secretly fantasizing about Pavlov? And what’s the deal with the floor mattress anyway, did a dog type this?

More people chose to opine on a low-context dating-adjacent tweet from a person they’ll never meet than about anything else that happened this week. The same is true most weeks. For a supposedly private pursuit, people do love telling the public about their dating lives and the public loves to get its nose all up in it.

Why is everyone involved playing this game of confessions, gossip, moralizing, advice, signaling, and countersignaling? And is this actually helping anyone date?

Seductive and Anti-Inductive

The reason everyone has an opinion on everyone else’s dating life is, paradoxically, that no one has any idea what they’re doing and what’s going on.

Dating is kinda like poker. You gotta risk something to get something, but you have to be wary of busting out. You have your starting hand (e.g., your looks), you have your luck, but the best players know that it’s skill that comes through in the end. It’s important to read the cards, but more important to read the players: what are they hoping for? What do they think you have?

You could luck into a perfect hand early. You could squander most of your chips chasing bad situations. After playing for a while, you try to cash out a relationship, and that it matches what your luck and skill deserved.

Or maybe, dating was like that. People dated in communities where everyone agreed what the rules of the game were and what each hand was worth. Perhaps in one place guys always brought flowers and girls pretended to be deflowerable. In the next town over, bachelors go into debt to acquire a degree in tulipmancy. It didn’t matter what people did elsewhere — you could just look at what the local community nudged young people to do, and if you complied then a suitable match would be nudged your way.

I’m not actually sure this was true for most people in the past, I wasn’t there. What I’m sure of is that in the present, people feel that this has been lost. Today it’s hard to know what the chips are worth, let alone what the winning hand is.

The obsessive discourse around dating is people trying to figure out the rules while simultaneously trying to bluff themselves into a stronger position.

Here’s a sampling of things women said give them the ick about men that got at least a thousand quote tweets: