The Ghost of Dating Profiles Past

Tonight a few weird experiences involving dating apps happened. Firstly, I went on a Bumble date, my first date in over a month. It was... just okay. I am probably out of his league if we're speaking in superficial terms, but we really just might not be a good match. 

I reflected on the fact that, with each "round" of dating (the start of which is marked by the redownloading of the app), the first few dates/guys can sometimes be duds, just because you're overexcited to try anything new and you say yes to someone off the bat. Such has been the case with me. This guy probably will count as one.

Upon returning home, I perused Bumble once again and found that my first picture is probably to blame for my slim pickings at the moment - it's a picture of me in the woods being kind of goofy (the data shows men don't react to humor as well as they do to sheer attraction). Since I'm paranoid that either current or recent men will be offended if they spot changes in my profile right after a date with them, I leave Bumble and head over to another dating app to see if I can update my profile there instead.

Once landing on Hinge, I swipe through a few people only to quickly run into my ex, the guy I dated for a year. I was frozen. My heart raced. Here were all the photos I'd seen on his Instagram so many times, but they're separated now by little blurbs, meant to appeal to essentially every female except for me. There wasn't much there; a certain part mentioned wanting to find someone "who doesn't have favorites and is open to new experiences" seemed the statement that was most likely to be referring to me, and yet I felt that it didn't. I thought I would be upset by seeing his profile, but it was more of a comfort, knowing that he was still single, and that he was likely struggling with it just like me.

But it also felt deeply wrong. Here was his pitch to the world to find a partner (or a fling), and I surreptitiously spotted it. It was not meant for me. It seemed to break some kind of code of ethics. His looks surely serve him well enough, but his grammar did not. I saw that which he wanted to represent him most. It was neither garishly narcissistic nor sweetly familiar; he was portrayed as a man that would not be the kind I would endeavor to love, even though I did, but he was also not betraying himself to be a bad person. It felt disgustingly intimate for me to see that.

I knew that if I ever wanted to get his attention in the future, I could put some beautiful pictures of me on there so that he could eventually come across my profile. For now, though, I wanted to do nothing once I had already crossed that boundary.

I also happened to spot the newly updated profile of my most recent dating prospect. We ended over a month ago but had spent a month together. I am always sad to see updated profiles, because it means that whatever tactic they used to find me, they are now changing course so that they can find something different. This guy definitely had a bit of me in his blurb: "I want a slow, organic relationship", a direct reaction to the hard time I'd given him on not expressing feelings to me. By now the amount of things I saw that I should not have seen was making me sick, as though I'd walked in on my parents making love. I deleted the app.

We all course-correct repeatedly through this awful single season. Though I know myself to be a similar-but-different person to the Emily that both of these men dated, I now observe them looking for something a bit different, and it disturbs something deep in me, the source of those longing thoughts I have from time to time. I miss the former partner more than the latter, but their fates are fully out of my hands now. And yet I am spying on them. Nothing is sacred in the twenty-first century. The past is a player in today's game of love and war. It floats around in the ether, and the tech gods decide when it resurfaces. What an inappropriate commander of the tides.

The part of me that lacks self control is grateful for these ghosts that wander around us still, but I know that it is also not good for us to be surrounded in such a way by vestiges of broken hopes. We can reach all the way back in history, but it is almost never the mature thing to do, and it often muddles up the path we'd been walking on in the present.