It Was Terrible Then Too. Just Differently.

Dating in the nineties was terrible in ways that required effort.

You had to show up. In person. With your actual face. No filter, no angle, no three business days to think of a witty response. Just you, live, in real time, hoping whatever you were doing with your hands didn't look as weird as it felt.

The men were liars. But they lied to your face, which at least required some commitment.

And if they wanted to disappear — which they did, they always did, some things are eternal - they had to actually stop calling. On a phone. Attached to a wall. Which meant you waited. Actually waited. Sitting next to an object that was not ringing, for days, understanding slowly and humiliatingly that you had your answer.

Brutal. Analog. Somehow more honest than what replaced it.

Now they just stop responding mid-sentence. No explanation. No conclusion. The conversation simply ends, the way a song cuts out when the wifi drops, and you're left holding your phone wondering if you said something wrong or if he died or if there's actually any difference.

There isn't. I've checked.

What I remember about the nineties is that dates felt like something was at stake. You got dressed for it - not the anxious, performative getting dressed of now, where you change seventeen times and photograph yourself from four angles to determine if you look like someone worth two hours of a stranger's time - but the getting dressed of someone who understood that another human being was about to see them and form an opinion.

Weight. There was weight to it.

Even the bad dates had weight. You were in a room. You had ordered food. You had committed to the next two hours whether you liked it or not, and somewhere between the starter and the bill you were going to find out something true about each other. There was no exit. Your phone could not save you. You had to sit there and be a person.

Now we have the apps.

I have opinions about the apps. I use the apps. My opinions have not softened my usage. We've all made our peace with our own hypocrisy.

But here is what the apps did that I didn't see coming: they turned people into a browsing experience. Everyone is a photo and a sentence and a distance in kilometers. Everyone is available and therefore no one is particular. You can swipe for an hour and feel nothing except a vague, creeping suspicion that you are doing something that was supposed to feel like hope but doesn't.

And then you match with someone and they're fine. They're perfectly fine. And you meet them and they're also fine, in the way that a hotel room is fine — clean, functional, completely interchangeable with the last one.

What the apps stole, specifically, is surprise. The unmanaged, unstaged, un-optimized surprise of meeting someone in a room and finding them unexpectedly interesting. It used to happen. You'd be at a party you didn't want to attend, and someone would be there, and something would happen, and you would have no information on them except what was right in front of you. No profile. No curated photo selection. No list of dealbreakers and green flags and what they're looking for right now.

Just a person. Unknown quantity. Potentially interesting. Potentially catastrophic. No way to know until you talked.

That's mostly gone now. Everyone arrives pre-researched. You've seen their photos, their job, their height, that one picture from five years ago they clearly still consider their best. You know so much before you know anything. And then you meet them and you feel nothing and you go home and open the app again because what else.

What the nineties had that I don't miss: men who treated rejection as an opening position. Men who confused persistence with romance because they'd seen it work in films and couldn't locate the difference between fiction and a restraining order. Men who would like to explain, actually, why you were wrong to say no.

The delete button is not nothing. I want to be fair.

But the nineties had something the apps don't. When there were fewer options they felt more real. You weren't sitting across from someone while one part of your brain quietly calculated whether someone better was available nearby. You were there. Fully. Because there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to check.

Presence. That's the word. We had presence then and now we have options and I'm not sure we made a good trade.

Dating now is easier and emptier. Dating then was harder and occasionally felt like something.

I've been on dates in both centuries. On multiple continents. In several languages. With men ranging from genuinely wonderful to why did I leave the house.

The era never mattered. The platform never mattered.

The only thing that ever mattered was whether two people decided, for whatever stupid reason, to actually show up.

That part hasn't changed.

It's still the rarest thing.

-Laura