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 this meaninglessness of the whole experience of “baddies” (I’m simply not going to address the hand-wavy explanation of why the above explanation 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 which should make the cut of being ethical (Extraordinarily high standards only on this blog folks (Also to think that I deeply believe in anarchy and individual freedom and to then possibly make the above conclusion and leave you with that)). Right - so what are some of the pieces that I think are generally acceptable from all posts that I have made so far? Transactional relationship have the same charm as doing taxes. But there is the idea that its not necessarily that looks are better than personality or otherwise each one of those dimensions as it were have their own meaning and its not necessarily a balance sheet of x vs y valuation. The other would be Erich Fromm's ideals, which although is a high bar, there is a certain romanticism (pls laugh) that I have when it comes to committing to a certain ideal. Then there is the other stuff. I agree with the ritual of friendship deep down I do think that its certainly necessary as compared to the other things. And lastly the garden which I think is great in its thought but lacks a certain, well, ethical dimension. I suppose one of the bits that I haven’t touched upon, and perhaps what lent itself well to a blog like investigation is how I feel about love. And I do think that my disposition towards it it rather on the negative side of things, or rather the skeptical side of things. I dislike the current status-quo of what love is and is perhaps what prompted me to start this whole ordeal of a series of blog posts. A general exalted status of love as a maxim in contemporary culture, quite honestly sickens me. Its bizarre that in the face of blatant tribalism and divisional politics and inter-cultural hate, our answer is to appeal to “love” and then call it a day (It’s not really that hard to mind your own business, and be polite to others around you. That really isn’t love). It feels like the commercialisation of love or what it could be has now the charm of recycling. So I suppose we could say, love in that sense I guess is dead and we have killed it (I sometimes wonder how many recycled bits I need to do to call it a day). But maybe it never even existed to begin with, somehow love seems to have the same arguments and elements in it as that of god. Its somehow omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent and we just have to believe it to see it. Again I think its a giant cop-out. I am (if you had not gathered already), an atheist. Not because I can prove that god doesn’t exist, but rather be cause I do not want a god to exist and take away the wonder of all the intricacies that exist in the world (and the joy of discovering them), and ascribe it to some invisible being(s) who lives in the sky or up some mountain (river, forest, tree, IDK take your pick(s)). Its endlessly reductionist and again 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 sorts of endless giving, and this blank, unexamined thing to strive towards. Its 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 really exist? Were all human connections and social relationships solved because we can repeat “Man is a social animal” - maybe we were social animals because that was the only way to survive. And then we invented money and we had a universal “Thing” to trade amongst ourselves for goods and utilities instead of building social ties for a sack of wheat or marrying the cow herder’s daughter.

I think where we are with love as a cultural (not talking about the neuroscientists who are actually researching the brain chemistry of what it means to love a person, and the philosophers who are continuously working on coming up with models about it, game theorists coming up with stretchy and sketchy math to help us every now and then) obsession with is, as, this nebulous indescribable ether is rather, well, easy and unexamined.

I think we are in the same spot we were tens of thousands of years ago, when it came to explaining weather by praying to gods. Look how far we got since it mattered to us as because of agriculture. We’ve invented satellites and have an oracle in a magic box powered by lightning to tell us what the weather will be like today. And I sincerely think we did it because it mattered to us enough to reject nebulous ideas like the spirits in the sky, or to at least put those ideas on hold to come up with better predictions. Even a year of half baked experiments in dating later, I have learned more about what a relationship can mean to me. I like aspects of the garden analogy - it does work with relationships. Its fun to maintain them and tend to them and have like a variety of them to keep around you but then to jam the ham-handed baddie orchids into the whole thing is a giant cop-out and an explanation that leaves me deeply dissatisfied. And I think a similar idea applies to love, at least for me, where I think to build effective relationships and in order to find a partner and be with someone, it cannot be about some nebulous concept like love - or well reduce them to a tree (or an orchid). I suppose its not love that I chase but rather finding another person who is as deeply sceptical of what love even is and dating being more of an experiment to get closer to the satellites and GPS view of things and contemplation more than holding hands and staring into the sunset praying for the gods of love to shine.

This end, I’ve run it by a few friends and it turns out is an insane ask. “So what are you looking for in a partner?” “To find each other attractive, likeable and mutually respect each other, but above all we must be committed to not falling in love and spend more time contemplating what relationships even are, and treating this as a mutual laboratory for what human relationships can be”- rolls right off the tongue. Although, as I type that I think having it as an experiment ensures clear communication and a commitment to success. A fellow gardener from the gardening analogy, as we discuss fertilisers and hedge trimming tools I guess. Another realisation - as pointed out by one of my friends was that I tend to go on dates (Historically, say a few years ago) more as an escape as opposed to really 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 for the climbing session and going home happy, only to crush on someone else the next time). There’s something exquisite about watching someone climb, which, perhaps, warrants a later investigation. But embracing the impermanence in that sense has made me very happy. But finding a social scientist (even the really bad ones) 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!