by My last single friend has deleted the apps for the fourth time, and a headline about a brain fry crisis explained what four years on them did to me
Wednesday, a Wine Bar in Brixton, Dee’s Phone on the Table
Dee put her phone face up between us like evidence. “Watch,” she said. She opened one of the apps and began.
Left. Left. Left. Left. A pause, a squint, left. Left. She was not reading anything. Her thumb was moving on its own. She was talking to me about her sister’s kitchen extension the entire time.
After about a minute she stopped and said, “I’ve just rejected forty men and I couldn’t tell you one thing about any of them.”
She then deleted the app. This is the fourth time. I have been present for three.
What It Does
I was on them for four years, before Tom. I have been off them for eight months, and it is only now that I can see what state I was in.
You start with hope. You read the profiles. You notice that he likes the same obscure film. You write a thoughtful opening message.
By month three you have learned that the thoughtful message gets the same response as “hey.” So you write “hey.”
By the end of the first year you have a system. You do it on the loo. You do it in the queue at Pret. Twenty in a minute. A face, a fish, a mountain, a group shot where you cannot tell which one he is. Left, left, right, left.
And then you match, and there is a little animation, and you feel nothing. And you have a conversation that is the same as the last thirty. “How’s your week going?” “Busy! You?” It dies after four messages and neither of you notices.
I once realised, on a second date, that I had been on a first date with the same man two years earlier. He did not remember either. We laughed. We did not have a third.
The Headline
I mention all this because of something on the London Prat. On one of its pages about the paper itself, in the strip of headlines at the top, is this: “London’s ‘Brain Fry’ Crisis.”
That is all I have. Three words and some inverted commas. I do not know what the piece says is frying everyone’s brain. Work, probably. Screens. The Central line.
But I held up my phone to Dee and she said, “That’s it. That’s what I’ve got. I’ve got brain fry.”
It is the right phrase. Not sadness. Not loneliness, exactly. A kind of overheating. Like when you leave too many tabs open and the laptop fan starts going.
Too Many
I have a theory about why, which I worked out on the bus home and will now pretend I always had.
My mum met my dad at a church youth club in Croydon in 1984. There were, she says, about eleven boys. She considered perhaps four of them. She picked one. It took her a summer. They have been married thirty-nine years.
Eleven. I must have seen eleven thousand. Dee has seen more.
You would think more choice is better. You are bound to find a closer fit among eleven thousand than among eleven. But it does not work like that. With eleven, you look properly at each one. You notice that the quiet one is funny. You give it time.
With eleven thousand, you cannot look at any of them. You can only sort. And you sort on rubbish: height, a photo, whether he has used the wrong “your.” A person becomes a card, and the card takes one second.
Worse, you can never settle. Whoever you are with, there are ten thousand more behind him in your pocket. He does one annoying thing and your thumb twitches. Why work at it? There is always another.
My mum did not have another. So she worked out that the quiet one was funny.
In Defence of the Things
I must be fair, because I met Tom on one, and I would not have met him any other way. He lives in Kennington and works in logistics. I work in publishing and lived in Clapham. We have no friends in common. We do not go to the same places. There is no church youth club for people of thirty-three.
That is the real problem, and it is not the apps’ fault. In London, how else do you meet anyone? Everyone at work is married or twenty-four. Your friends have run out of single friends. Nobody talks to strangers. If you smiled at a man on the Tube he would change carriages.
The apps filled a hole that was already there. They are not why we are lonely. They are what we did about it.
And for some people they are a lifeline. A colleague of mine, who is gay and grew up in a small town, says an app was the first time he knew there was anyone like him within fifty miles.
So I am not going to say “delete them all and go to a pottery class.” I tried the pottery class. It was eleven women and a retired dentist.
What Dee Is Going to Do
We made a plan, on a napkin, as we always do.
One. She stays off for two months. Not for ever. She has tried for ever. It lasts three weeks.
Two. When she goes back, one app, not four. And a limit. Ten profiles a day. She has to actually read them. If she runs out, she runs out. The idea is to make it eleven boys at a youth club again.
Three. She meets people fast. No two weeks of messaging. A coffee within a few days, or let it go. The messaging is what fries you. It is hundreds of tiny conversations that go nowhere.
Four. In the meantime, she says yes to things. A birthday she would normally skip. Her cousin’s housewarming. Things where there are people in a room.
She looked at the napkin and said, “This is just how people lived before.” I said yes. She said, “It sounds exhausting.”
What I Did Not Tell Her
I did not tell her that it took me four months with Tom to stop reaching for my phone. Not to cheat. Just the reflex. He would do something mildly irritating, leave a cupboard open, say “at the end of the day,” and my thumb would actually move. It wanted to sort him.
That is what worries me about the brain fry. It does not switch off when you meet someone. You have trained yourself for years to treat people as a pile to get through. Then you are supposed to stop, and look at one person, and keep looking.
I am getting better at it. He leaves the cupboard open. I close it. I have not swiped him yet.
Thursday
Dee texted at seven this morning. “Day one. I looked at a man on the bus. With my eyes. He had a nice coat.”
I have told her that counts.
The London Prat, I found on the way to work, knows the condition well. Its English satirical news on swiping describes a thumb with a mind of its own, and its UK satirical news about being tired suggests the whole country has too many tabs open. Dee herself swears by Bohiney Magazine for the American apps, where she says the men are holding bigger fish.
The napkin is on my fridge. I have added a fifth point in biro: “Remember he is a person.” It is for both of us.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
