Beyond Baddies

Many aeons have passed since I last wrote about a shenanigan. I solemnly swear I have not been able to be up to any good in the past few months (actually doing my job and paying bills like an adult). It’s been a rather busy few months, and I do not suppose the busywork shall ever let up.

But I come to you, fair readers, with a recycled plot—Bumble bot 3 - a new saga of my dating journey. I’ve had a fun trip to Kolkata recently for my cousin's wedding, and I decided to reboot the bit of code lying around to see what the algorithm would drag in.

Without further ado, let’s start with the dates!

Date 1. She’s pretty. Stunning actually. There is something oddly even and synergistic between her eyebrows and hairline (it seems I have a forehead fetish (which I assure you I do not )). It's a perfectly offset appearance, I think. It was almost as if someone drew her face in Autocad. Apart from my terrible rizz at describing this person - the date was uneventful; she was extraordinarily busy with work and just wanted to hang out. I was concerned that this was a chore for her, so I paid for everything to compensate for lost time.

Date 2. Interesting individual; from a conversational point of view, I got along the best with this individual the most. No new perspectives, but hey cannot win them all.

Date 3+ 4. This date was bizarre - or, in retrospect, was very ordinary. I swiped on two different women who swiped back on me (of course, that’s how Bumble works), but it turns out the two of them are the best of friends. Quick math lesson: this phenomenon is called triadic closure. I set a date with the three of us and went out with them to see how the group hangout went. It went rather uneventfully - they were pretty okay.

Date 4. This was during my little excursion to Darjeeling. A city girl who ran away to live her life in the mountains is who she was. I never did meet her, but I did trade details and such. Also, she was a lovely guide when recommending places to eat - it made the trip better.

Date 5. She’s a trans person. Pardon me if that’s not the right way to identify her. Also, I use the pronouns she/her, but they told me they don’t like the idea of pronouns. I’m not very sure what to do. The individual seemed extraordinary, though - they recommended an excellent climbing spot, which I loved.

Date 6 + 7. It was a similar experience as the double date before - it could have been more eventful. There's a loss of honesty in terms of going out with the intent of data collection and not being invested (I thought I would have realised after the last bot experiment). I’ve chosen to call off all my other dates and delete all my accounts. I’ve finally realised what I want from romance, so let's move on to the reflections.

Now, for the high and mighty introspective bits, have I learned anything from this shenanigan?

As this chapter of technological-assisted romantic explorations draws to a close, I pause to reflect on the philosophical musings we've entertained about the nature of love. It began with a straightforward premise: love as a transaction. This notion, though pragmatic, is admittedly as romantic as a corporate merger, yet it served as our baseline, a starting point for deeper inquiry.

I then ascended (or just read and then regurgitated to you) to the heights of Erich Fromm's ideal—love as a skill, a noble yet daunting aspiration. Here, love is not stumbled upon but cultivated with the precision and dedication of a master craftsman. Yet, despite its allure, this model remains a lofty peak too steep for most of us to scale in daily practice. I am a mere mortal.

I modified the idea of the rituals of friendship from the last post. I got into this round of dates with a new idea: love as a shared bank account—a repository of mutual care where each deposit and withdrawal shapes the relationship. In this case, the deposits are the rituals of friendship I spoke about in the first post. This metaphor, while more communal, is quite dull. It is lacking because it teaches us little about how or what to love. It’s very effective in keeping a relationship, but also extraordinarily dull and has the same appeal as doing taxes.

Thus, I propose a final analogy: love (all sorts, think relationships) as a garden. Imagine a lush garden where the plants are people, the soil and climate are the circumstances of our lives, and I, perhaps ambitiously, am the gardener tasked with its care. A well-balanced garden requires diversity—the steadfastness of trees, the supportive nature of shrubs, and the occasional orchid, whose fleeting blooms bring ephemeral beauty.

And about orchids, these are the showpieces of the garden (this is sexist, but I am bisexual and have thus absolved myself of sexism): reckless and stunning in their transience. They are not the trees whose sturdy branches I might climb or shelter under; friends and family firmly fill those roles. Nor are they the shrubs that form the dependable understory of daily life. Orchids are the baddies of the botanical world, the seasonal spectacles that capture the heart with their beauty and the imagination with their transient presence. In pondering the nature of these orchids, I've realised they represent something vital about my approach to relationships—not the deep-rooted commitments but the breathtaking, often fleeting interactions that invigorate and inspire. They are not objects of sexualisation (I have no defence for realising and admitting how profoundly shallow I am) but icons of a particular blithe spirit, embodying the reckless beauty that one yearns to witness seasonally. And it must be seasonal since, if treated differently, the magic in that sense utterly vanishes, like an orchid being moved to be potted at home (Also, once you get to know them, the illusion of happiness vanishes (This perhaps cements my shallowness)). My garden possibly lacks more orchids than trees or sturdier shrubs. In acknowledging this, I appreciate the seasonal nature of particular loves—how they come into our lives brightly and intensely yet may not be meant for long-term sustenance. Still, a steady supply is necessary for the garden's health, of course (I only work in service of the garden). And maybe that’s okay.

Hopefully, this reaches the audience who complain about the lack of meaningful romantic relationships to embracing the full spectrum of relationships that life offers (including the shallow, meaningless ones; they don’t last after all, so it’s all for nought anyway). May your garden be ever diverse and your heart open to the seasonal joys of baddies.

But this seems like a cop-out to me. I disagree with the meaninglessness of the whole experience of “baddies” (and I’m simply not going to address the hand-wavy explanation of why the above wasn’t sexist, since it really was deeply sexist). But going back to a more plausible and acceptable explanation of what I think dating and love can be, and what should meet the standard of being ethical (extraordinarily high standards only on this blog, folks—and to think that I deeply believe in anarchy and individual freedom, and might still draw the above conclusions and leave you with that). Right—so what are some of the pieces that I think are generally acceptable from all posts I have made so far? Transactional relationships have the same charm as doing taxes. It’s not necessarily that looks are more important than personality, or vice versa. Each of those dimensions, as it were, has its own meaning; it’s not necessarily a balance sheet of x vs. y valuation. Another view I appreciate is Erich Fromm’s ideals, which, although high-bar, have a certain romanticism (please laugh) that I appreciate when it comes to committing to an ideal. Then there is the other stuff. I agree with the ritual of friendship—deep down, I do think it’s certainly necessary compared to other things. And lastly, the garden analogy, which I think is great in its thought but lacks a certain, well, ethical dimension. I suppose one of the bits I haven’t touched upon, and perhaps why this lends itself well to a blog investigation, is how I feel about love. And I do think my disposition toward it is rather on the skeptical side. I dislike the current status quo of what love is, and it’s perhaps what prompted me to start this whole series of blog posts. The general exalted status of love as a maxim in contemporary culture, quite honestly, sickens me. It’s bizarre that, in the face of blatant tribalism, divisional politics, and inter-cultural hate, our answer is to appeal to “love” and then call it a day. (It’s really not that hard to mind your own business and be polite to others around you; that isn’t love.) It feels like the commercialization of love, or what it could be, now has the charm of recycling. So, I suppose we could say love, in that sense, is dead and that we have killed it. (I sometimes wonder how many recycled bits I need to repeat before I call it a day.) But maybe it never even existed to begin with. Somehow, love seems to have the same arguments and elements as those of God. It’s omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent—and we just have to believe it to see it. Again, I think it’s a giant cop-out. I am (if you hadn’t gathered already) an atheist—not because I can prove that God doesn’t exist, but rather because I don’t want a god to exist who would take away the wonder of all the intricacies in the world (and the joy of discovering them), ascribing them to some invisible being who lives in the sky or up some mountain (river, forest, tree—IDK, take your pick). It’s endlessly reductionist and, to me, has the same charm as recycling. (Recycling the analogy is also recycling.) And I sense a bit of the same happening with love as this universal maxim of endless giving, an unexamined thing to strive toward. It’s strange, because I do think that, to a certain extent, we as a society are unwilling to examine what love really means. Is it dead? Did it ever really exist? Were all human connections and social relationships solved because we can repeat “Man is a social animal”? Perhaps we were social animals because that was the only way to survive. And then we invented money, a universal “thing” to trade among ourselves for goods and utilities, instead of building social ties over a sack of wheat or marrying the cow herder’s daughter.

I think where we are with love as a cultural (and I'm not talking about the neuroscientists who are actually researching the brain chemistry of loving a person, or philosophers working to model it, or game theorists stretching and sketching math to help us every now and then) obsession with this nebulous, indescribable ether is rather, well, easy and unexamined.

We’re in the same place we were tens of thousands of years ago, when we explained weather by praying to gods. Look how far we’ve come since it mattered to us due to agriculture. We’ve invented satellites and have an oracle in a magic box powered by lightning to tell us what the weather will be today. And I sincerely think we did this because it mattered to us enough to reject nebulous ideas like the spirits in the sky, or at least put those ideas on hold to come up with better predictions. Even after a year of half-baked experiments in dating, I have learned more about what a relationship can mean to me. I like aspects of the garden analogy; it does work with relationships. It’s fun to maintain them and tend to them and have a variety around you. But trying to jam the ham-handed “baddie orchids” into the whole thing is a giant cop-out and an explanation that leaves me deeply dissatisfied. I think a similar idea applies to love, at least for me; I think building effective relationships and finding a partner to be with cannot be about a nebulous concept like love—or reducing it to a tree (or an orchid). I suppose it’s not love I chase, but rather finding someone who is as deeply skeptical about what love even is—seeing dating more as an experiment to get closer to a satellite view of things and contemplation rather than hand-holding and sunset-staring, praying for the gods of love to shine.

In the end, I’ve run this by a few friends, and it turns out this is an insane ask. “So what are you looking for in a partner?” “To find each other attractive, likeable, and mutually respectful, but above all, we must be committed to not falling in love and spend more time contemplating what relationships are, treating this as a mutual laboratory for what human relationships can be.” Rolls right off the tongue, right? Although, as I type this, I think having it as an experiment ensures clear communication and a commitment to success. A fellow gardener from the gardening analogy, discussing fertilizers and hedge-trimming tools, I guess. Another realization—as pointed out by a friend—is that I have tended to go on dates (historically, a few years ago) more as an escape rather than genuinely seeing it mature into anything. But having this rather unattainable maxim is nice as a starting point.

A less insane cope is that I have decided to crush on random folks at my climbing gym (and I have it down to a science of only crushing during the climbing session and going home happy, ready to crush on someone else next time). There’s something exquisite about watching someone climb, which, perhaps, warrants a later investigation. Embracing this impermanence, in that sense, has made me very happy. But finding a social scientist (even a really bad one) in my friends and family, and being open to finding more in everyone around me, is what has truly liberated me.

As always, keep shenanigan!