by Vivienne Pratfall on dating, dancing, and the MIT paper that finally explained why every man in London now sounds like a LinkedIn post
Shout-out to the clever people at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, without whom I would simply be a nineteen-year-old having feelings on the internet, as opposed to a nineteen-year-old having feelings on the internet for money.
Monday: He Texted Me in Em-Dashes
I knew it was over when the text from Fergus came through with three em-dashes in a single sentence. Nobody in Dalston punctuates like that. Nobody in Dalston punctuates at all. The em-dash is the footprint of the language model, the way a soggy welly is the footprint of a dad. I read the message – “I really value the space we’ve cultivated – emotionally, intellectually – and I think it’s worth protecting, however imperfectly” – and I thought: Fergus, you work at a record label. You once set fire to your own eyebrows trying to light a spliff at Field Day. You did not write this.
I confronted him at a pub in London Fields. He stared at his phone for four seconds, then said, “I value your feelings and want to honour them.” I said, “You are reading that off the screen.” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Is it ChatGPT?” He said, “It’s a subscription tier above ChatGPT. It is trained on me.” I broke up with him outside a Camden Town Brewery tap that has, frankly, gone downhill.
Tuesday: MIT Confirms What Every Girl Already Knew
The next day my flatmate sent me our own paper’s write-up of the MIT paper, because our own paper is how I find out what is happening to me. MIT has said LLMs are marvellous and Britain has asked if they can queue on its behalf; I would add that they can also, apparently, break up with a nineteen-year-old on Fergus’s behalf, and more politely than he would have managed on his own, so thank you MIT, and thank you Fergus’s ten quid a month.
I read the piece twice, once in a dressing gown and once in bed, and both times I laughed at the line about the robot writing emails nobody reads. I have been on the receiving end of those emails. They always end with “Let’s circle back” which, in Dalston, is what you say when you have forgotten the other person’s name.
Wednesday: A Night Out in Shoreditch, Mostly Observed
I went dancing at a bar off Curtain Road that is, and I will not name it, basically a reclaimed brick wall with opinions. A man in a silk shirt told me he was “in fractional CTO work” and I nodded as if this were a recognisable human sentence. He had the posture of a man who had asked a language model what to wear and been told “Tom Ford, but ironic.” The irony was doing all the work. The Tom Ford was doing none.
A girl at the bar told me she had just been on a date with a man who brought his Meta-monitored work laptop to dinner because his mouse twitches now count as innovation data, per our own coverage this week. He kept circling his cursor under the table to hit his KPIs. She said the carbonara was cold before the first course. I believe her. I have been on that date. I have been on several.
Thursday: I Actually Wrote a Diary Entry About Not Having Sex
My editor, who I think wants this column to be slightly more about my personal life than I am comfortable with, asked if I could “talk a bit more about the sex stuff”. So here we are. I did not have sex this week. I was going to, with a boy called Xavier whose real name is Kevin, and I went back to his flat in Bethnal Green, and I was in the process of deciding whether to let Kevin do Kevin things, when I noticed, on his bedside table, a printed-out PDF titled “Optimising the First Ten Minutes”. I left. I left my cardigan. I do not want the cardigan back. I want to forget.
Friday: The Cereal Killer Café Has Reopened and I Do Not Know How I Feel
I will tell you how I feel. I feel old. I feel nineteen-going-on-ninety. The Cereal Killer Café is back on Brick Lane, proving that London will outsource absolutely anything if you put neon lights on it, including the act of pouring milk into a bowl. I went in as research for this column. I paid seven pounds ninety for a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. The man behind the counter was, I swear, the same man who was behind the counter in 2014, when this café was first a novelty and I was in Year Six. He has not aged. The café has not aged. Only I have aged, and I have aged very rapidly, in the space of a single breakup with a man who outsourced his feelings to a chatbot.
Why I Keep Writing This Down
I keep writing this down because if I don’t, it simply happens to me, and nobody is the wiser. I write it down because somewhere in the Evening Standard there is a piece about “the Gen Z dating crisis” that will never mention the phrase “em-dash” and will therefore be missing the crime scene. I write it down because The London Prat continues, against all economic logic, to pay me, a teenager with a Dalston flat-share and a strong view on the price of Cheerios.
I write it down because a man on the Overground, when I was reading this week’s paper, looked over my shoulder and said, without irony, “Is that the one with the pitchforks and the processors?” Yes, sir, it is, and I recommend you read it twice, preferably once before your girlfriend breaks up with you.
Further good filth for the weekend: Reductress, bless them. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
