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Talking Dating Apps With My Dad

by Aug 29, 2017
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Talking Dating Apps With My Dad

Omelettes and toast at one in the afternoon. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume I was just another millennial partaking in a trendy boozy brunch. But most of these gatherings take place at a stylish restaurant with a slight, hip tweak to the endless mimosas and a fusion of Korean barbecue with eggs benedict, not at a tattered diner that slung simple short stacks of pancakes and no-thrills eggs over easy.

I’ve always loved diners. A diner gives you what you want good and quick, and nothing else. The first time I went to a diner was Thanksgiving night many years ago. After the turkey had been packed in tupperware and the pies wrapped in cellophane, my father and uncles took my brother and I to a nearby New Jersey diner. We sat there for hours, eating cheeseburgers as the adults shot the shit about the Giants or whatever. It was from that night on that I always knew if I needed space to think or have a direct talk with someone, a diner was the best place.

“So what are you still on the uh, things?” My dad makes a swiping motion with his thumb against the air and I instantly nod.

“Tinder? Yep, still on that grind.”

I don’t hide the fact that I use apps like Tinder and Bumble from my parents. It’s not that they’re hip to millennial culture, in fact they’d be the first to deny that they’re hip, but I’m incredibly close with both my mom and dad. I’m not afraid to have frank discussions with them about tough subjects like politics, careers, life ambitions, and girls (although I will often keep the details PG for my mother’s sake). Although they understand why I use the apps, they don’t get the apps.

“You met any good girls on there recently?”

“Eh I go through dry spells and wet seasons. Right now, not much coming in.”

“What about that last girl you mentioned a few weeks ago,” my dad says between fork-fulls of hash browns.

“That’s done. She said she didn’t see us having much of a future.”

“You upset?”

“Not really, I kinda had similar feelings but I just was too lazy to end it.” I say this with a shrug and he doesn’t bother asking if I’m okay. He’s seen me heartbroken, exactly once. Everything bounces off me like teflon.

“She did say one interesting thing to me.” His eyebrows raise slightly at this. “She said that she had her own anxieties and she didn’t want to be responsible for mine as well. That she wanted someone with stability.”

After a sip of water I continued with the crux of my confusion. “The thing is, I thought I was doing a damn good job of like keeping all of that hidden. You know, playing it casual and all even when I feel clueless or nervous. So much so that my friend Meg actually suggested that maybe I shouldn’t be so guarded. Says maybe some of my bad luck is because I can be intimidating around them.” My father doesn’t respond, he just strokes his chin and squints his eyes.

“I know, it’s so perplexing. I have no idea whether I need to act confident, or let on when I’m nervous. And me overthinking this definitely can’t help the problem.”

For my entire life, he’s told me to “stop and smell the roses” and to “stay even keel.” My dad knows that I have this tendency to get too deep in my own head, to become my own worst enemy, to spiral into hypotheticals. Be secure and be in the moment. It’s easy to hear it a thousand times, but hard to do persistently.

“You want my advice?” He finally says. Of course I do.

“Way back before your mom, when I was dating like you, there wasn’t the internet or texting, or these apps–”

“Or computers, or television, or agriculture. Fire had just been invented.”

He smirks at my jabs and continues. “The thing was, I had a lot of these issues and feelings too. But I didn’t have any way to show it. You know, you had to call a girl or go over and see her. Otherwise, you had no idea what she was doing, and she had no idea if you were nervous or afraid or whatever. All she knew was how she felt, whether she was anxious that you weren’t calling or hoping you didn’t. There was a lot of effort to communicating, and as a result there was mystery too. Whenever you saw a girl, it was meaningful because that was probably the first time you’d gotten to talk for hours.

“Now, you can just shoot a quick message or go on her Facebook and see if she’s doing something instead of texting you. So I understand it can be hard for you. But like I keep saying, technology–there can be too much. And I wish there was some way that I could take it away. Then you wouldn’t have that stress. You could just enjoy the moment with a girl, because you’re not sure when you’ll see her again.”

I thought that over for a few moments. “The problem is dad, that I kind of can’t afford to be disconnected like that. Every girl that is on these apps has twenty guys messaging her at any given time. So if I want to play mysterious and all that, especially in the beginning, it’s easy for me to get lost in the noise. She might like me, but if I don’t text back within a day, even twelve hours, she might have gone from vibing with me to totally cold. Just because another guy kept talking to her and building a connection.”

“Even after you go out with a girl?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve gone out with girls on one or two dates, but because I was keeping them spaced out a bit for whatever reason, they’ll get back to me saying they met someone else or got together with another friend they want to make it work with.”

“Wow,” my father mutters.

“Yeah see, I want to be more mysterious, less accessible and all. But there’s always a very real risk that if I don’t keep in contact with a girl, that if I’m not that responsive, if I’m not adding them on Instagram and responding to every Snapchat, that I’ll miss out. And I still have to balance that with not seeming too anxious or clingy, because otherwise they won’t be attracted to me.” I rub my forehead, frustrated. “It’s like plate spinning while walking the tightrope.”

After a sigh, he finally replies. “I wish I knew what to tell you other than keep at it. Eventually you’ll find someone.”

“Or I’ll die alone,” I say wryly.

“You’re not gonna die alone, someone’s out there for you.”

After that bit of encouragement, we sit, eat, and talk some more about careers and the Mets’ playoff fortunes before parting ways. On the drive home, though I feel uplifted by his advice and counsel, I realize just how screwed I am in the digital age of desperation.

Unrequited attraction is easily the most attractive quality one can have in the dating app landscape, but inaccessibility can often be written off as ghosting. For every guy out there messaging a girl, he knows there are probably ten guys just like him she’s also chatting with. He has to stand out somehow, and unless he’s getting more attention than he’s giving, it’s very hard to stand pat and play cool while other guys are making moves. Even though I’ve preached on many a Bumble date that I don’t like to play the games and if I like a girl I’m going to be direct with it, in practice I know I can’t completely do that. As much as I desperately want to tell a girl that I click with that I like her, I have to play the game if I want her to like me. And that sucks.

Maybe some of the issues girls have today with “nice guys” and really forward dudes in dating isn’t just that dudes are morons (as one, I can confirm we are). Maybe the problem is that they have this expectation that guys will be cool, suave, Don Draper-esque men of solid confidence. After talking with my dad, a man who has always been a pinnacle of stability and conviction in my life, I’m realizing that it’s not true. Guys have always been this way, there just wasn’t the pressure to act on it, or a way to do so in the past. And unfortunately, there’s no advice that I or my wise father can give you to help you win the game or crack the code. You just gotta keep grinding, and get better.

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Josh T.

Don't call me a liar, but you don't have to call me a truther.

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