Premature pronouncement. In the realm of romance, technological progress is an illusion. Every flashy step forward conceals a secret step back. The internet was born, but then intimacy died. Our gains in quantity and convenience of connection were offset by losses in closeness:

[In the dating marketplace], disposability is a feature, not a bug. If… your Tinder match fails to deliver, you can swipe the other way… all of this has been an attempt… to contain the complexities of love and sex and intimacy in a set of neat little checkboxes. If it didn’t exactly make us happy, then at least (we thought) it would keep us safe. And it did, sort of — insofar as there’s a certain sort of protection in the avoidance of intimacy… if you never truly allow yourself to be vulnerable and naked, literally or figuratively, with another person, then nobody will ever get close enough to hurt you.

To call this a zero-sum game might be a bit too generous — our steps backward seem to cover more ground. But if we still have the option of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with another person, then maybe we’ve prematurely declared intimacy dead. And in that case, perhaps we can still resuscitate it. First, we’ll have to take a closer look at how dating apps and social media are undermining it.

Prior to “the app-ification of love,” initiating a romantic interaction was risky. Unless you and your crush had a mutual friend who could play the role of messenger, all you had to go on was body language, eye contact, flirty conversation. You had to rely on your intuition. You felt the tension, but did she? Ultimately, you had to take a shot in the dark and risk rejection.

But there’s hardly any risk involved with swiping right on a Tinder profile. Worst case, they don’t swipe back and you soon forget you ever swiped right in the first place. Best case, you match with them. And once you match, much of the mystery goes up in smoke. You’ve never even been in the same room as this person, but you already know the tension is mutual. You enter your first face-to-face interaction under the pretext of reciprocal romantic interest.

And that’s not all you enter the first interaction with. From your date’s profile alone, you’ve come away with a complex of words, images, shared interests, videos, voice prompts, and music — a preformed conception of who this person is. This conception is a strange creature, because many of its components are intimate details: maybe you know a bit about this person’s passions, their favorite songs and artists, how many tattoos they have and where they have them, how the corners of their eyes wrinkle when they smile. But the portrait in your mind, while filled out with intimate details, is a distorted image; you’re seeing only what your date has chosen to show you.

When you’re at a bar, and someone is covertly checking you out from across the room, you can’t control how you look from that angle, or what words they overhear you saying, or what gestures they see you making, or what song they catch you singing along to. Sure, you have control over your hairstyle and attire — appearing in public always has and always will carry with it some sense of performance — but when you date online, your degree of control skyrockets. When you’re creating a Tinder profile, you can control what you’re doing in your pictures and what angle you’re photographed from, you can control the words you put into your bio and the music you display on your profile. Every aspect of your date’s profile, then, is the product of a decision they made, their intention being to portray themselves as flatteringly as possible to some ideal conception of the partner they hope to attract.

Now, that conception is also not entirely unique to our post-internet world. We’ve always formed romantic ideals from our own experiences — workplace crushes, past relationships — as well as from the characters we’ve read about in books or seen in movies. What is unique to our post-internet world is the volume of those conceptions and their level of detail, as well as the volume of potential partners and the ease with which we can connect to them. We base our romantic ideals on TV characters (“looking for my Nick Miller”), Tik Tok influencers (watch out for West Elm Calebs), celebrity couples (“you could be the Pete Davidson to my Kim K”), our friends’ Instagram posts, Youtubers, and, yes, porn stars. (This bio, which I once saw verbatim, takes the cake: “I want a guy with Tommy Shelby energy to rail me.”) We end up becoming ever more particular about who we want to date, and each individual date seems ever more disposable. We’re then tempted to keep on searching until we find someone who conforms perfectly to our ideal, instead of learning to love the one we’re with.

When you sit down with your Tinder date for the first time, then, you’re sitting down with all of the following in mind: (1) the pretext of mutual romantic/sexual interest, (2) a detailed conception of who your date is based on a profile that they curated to appear as flattering as possible to potential partners, and (3) a host of other romantic/sexual ideals that you’ve gathered from every corner of the internet. And your date is sitting down with the same in mind. You’re both crushed by the weight of these expectations, and you’re both haunted by the thought of how disposable you are should you not live up to them. Small wonder that intimacy is on its deathbed.

To some, all hope for resuscitation seems to hinge upon whether young people grow tired of having “the contraceptive barrier of a screen between them,” resentful of the “hidden manipulations of the algorithm in messy human affairs,” and bored of being control freaks. Ditch dating apps or intimacy dies — take your pick. But in all likelihood the screens aren’t going anywhere, the algorithms will go on manipulating, and few will relinquish the internet’s gift (curse?) of increased control altogether. So the would-be resuscitators will have to concede defeat or find some other means of bring intimacy back to life.

Percy. Writing in the pre-internet world of 1975, Walker Percy gave us some tips on how to recover experience in an essay titled “The Loss of the Creature.” Experience, he argues, needs to be recovered because it “has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind.” He plays around with the difference in experience between the first explorer to discover the Grand Canyon — before it even had the name “Grand Canyon” — and a modern man in Boston who “visits his travel bureau, looks at the folder, [and] signs up for a two-week tour” of it:

Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the [explorer]; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.

Now, this should sound familiar. The sightseer is prevented from experiencing the thing as it is because he approaches it with a preformed complex in mind, and he compares the canyon before him to that complex, and he even suffers from a crushing anxiety as to whether the canyon is living up to his expectations — expectations that he formed based on words and images curated for the purpose of making the canyon seem as grand to him as possible. His predicament sounds rather like ours when we go out on a Tinder date.

Is the canyon grander seen through the glass panes of the skywalk?

Of course, going on a date is distinct in one crucial way from seeing the Grand Canyon: on a date, you’re experiencing someone who is also experiencing you. And that complicates things. In his essay, Percy plays around with a host of other experiences — dissecting a dogfish, reading a sonnet, listening to Beethoven — but he frames these all as subject-object relationships, and he never extends his analysis to subject-subject relationships. Nevertheless, intimacy is a type of experience. So perhaps Percy’s advice about recovery will still prove useful.

At its core, his advice is centered around this question and answer:

What is the best way to hear Beethoven: sitting in a proper silence around the [record player] or eavesdropping from an azalea bush?

Whereas the “unhappy souls inside” — those who know they are listening to Beethoven and “worry about whether they are getting it” — have their experience of the music tainted by their preconceived ideas about what “it” is, the passerby who hears the melody through an open window and pauses to eavesdrop from an azalea bush is encountering the music freshly, is hearing it authentically, is free of the baggage of preconceived ideas. Percy sees in this passerby someone who has recovered experience, and about their authentic experience he points out the following:

However it may come about, we notice two traits of the second situation: (1) an openness of the thing before one—instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower—instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.

Recovering first-date intimacy, then, however we manage to do it, will require a mutual openness and a mutual sovereignty — both you and your date must be vulnerable before the other, and each of you must see the other with eyes clear of the corrupting influence of preformed complexes. But if that’s our destination, it’s far from clear how we’ll chart a pathway through the treacherous territory of online dating to reach it.

Portrait. Let’s begin by modifying Percy’s Grand Canyon scenario to suit our needs. For the sightseer we’ll substitute a painter, and for the canyon we’ll substitute an aristocrat of the late 18th century. (Spoiler alert: the new scenario is the plot of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”) The aristocrat, Héloïse, was until recently living in a convent, free to do so only because her older sister was bearing the burden of betrothal. Her sister committed suicide, leaving Héloïse to shoulder the burden. Resentful of her newfound obligation to marry, she refuses to pose for the portrait that her mother must send to a Milanese nobleman before he’ll agree to the marriage. Her mother, unphased, commissions a new painter, Marianne, who is to paint the portrait in secret while posing as a companion to accompany Héloïse on walks. Marianne has only a few days to finish the portrait.

Both Marianne and Héloïse enter into their first interaction with preconceived notions of who the other person is, albeit simple ones — to Marianne, Héloïse is an eligible aristocrat; to Héloïse, Marianne is a companion. Their interactions are structured by an external force, not by their own authentic interest in each other. And their interactions are poisoned by deception: Héloïse is unaware that Marianne is in fact a commission painter.

Not long after Marianne arrives and begins covertly studying Héloïse’s features, an authentic romantic tension blossoms. Marianne finishes the portrait in secret but, by the time she does so, her feelings for Héloïse impart her with guilt for the deception. She reveals to Héloïse the true nature of their relationship, and she shows her the portrait. It’s a mediocre portrait, a poor attempt at capturing her true nature. Héloïse criticizes it and storms away to fetch her mother, who will pay Marianne and send her on her way. Marianne can’t bear the thought of leaving Héloïse, so she ruins the portrait:

The countess is furious and about to banish Marianne from the estate, but Héloïse also can’t bear the thought of Marianne leaving, so she agrees to pose for a new portrait. Her mother relents, and suddenly she and Marianne have a second chance. They’re back where they started, but this time, they’re both on the same page about the terms of their relationship and they’ve formed more detailed conceptions of who the other is. They’re still interacting within the context of a formal structure imposed from the outside, but now they’re doing so with full awareness of that structure, and their place within it, and the obstacles it places in between them and authentic intimacy.

In doing so, Héloïse and Marianne have given themselves the chance to recover intimacy through what Walker Percy calls “a dialectical movement which brings one back to the beaten track but at a level above it.” Knowing full well that Marianne’s purpose in Héloïse’s life is to help give secure for her an unwanted marriage, and that, a few days from now, Marianne will have fulfilled that purpose and disappeared from Héloïse’s life, the two women choose nonetheless to fill what little time they have together with love. By having the courage to pursue intimacy against the odds, and the creativity to cultivate it given the inevitable constraints, they ultimately succeed at recovering it.

It’s only after Héloïse and Marianne cultivate an authentic intimacy that Marianne is able to paint a good portrait. Inherent in the act of portrait-painting is a loss of nuance; some distance between person and portrait always remains. But as intimacy grows, that distance shrinks.

Polacheck. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” provides us, then, with a viable model of how to recover intimacy as opposed to mere experience. But the model is situated within a pre-internet world, so we’re left on our own to extract lessons for the post-internet era.

The portrait, of course, is analogous to a Tinder profile. When you use a dating app, the first task you’re faced with is painting a self-portrait. If you want a shot at authentic intimacy, you’ll need to create your profile with (1) the full awareness of the inevitable distance between person and profile, (2) deep self-knowledge, (3) the courage to translate that self-knowledge into an accurate self-representation, and (4) the creativity to express yourself given the app’s inherent constraints.

But that’s only half the battle — all you’ve done is make yourself as vulnerable as possible given the inherent limitations of the format. Intimacy requires mutual vulnerability. You’ll need to hope you encounter someone who’s done the same. And even if you do, there’s still another battle before you. Recovering intimacy requires mutual openness between two sovereign knowers — which is to say, you both need to maintain an awareness of the distance between person and profile, not just when you’re creating your profiles, but when you’re viewing the other person’s. You need to be aware of that distance and intimidated by it — if you start feeling like you know the other person before you’ve even met them, you’ve lost the plot.

Consider the vast chasm between seeing a musician displayed on someone’s dating profile, and sitting in a room listening to that musician with them. Many a time I’ve sat down with close friends, put on a record, and listened to the whole thing with them start to finish. Knowing that someone likes so and so’s music barely scratches the surface. Sitting with someone and listening to so and so’s music, you see their facial expression change with the music, you hear them vocalize delight in response to specific sounds, you sense them becoming lost in thought after a certain lyric, you notice when your reactions to the music are in sync, and when they aren’t.

Or consider even the distance between a set of words in someone’s bio, and the mind that put them there. In a 1972 essay titled “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Gregory Bateson wrote that we can communicate more sophisticatedly when we:

[cease] to respond quite "automatically" to the mood-signs of another and [become] able to recognize the sign as a signal: that is, to recognize that [other people’s] and [our] own signals are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, and so forth… We all too often respond automatically to newspaper headlines as though these stimuli were direct object-indications of events in our environment instead of signals concocted and transmitted by creatures as complexly motivated as ourselves.

Words in a Tinder bio, like newspaper headlines, are signals concocted by creatures as complexly motivated as ourselves. Someone’s bio might read “here for a good time not a long time,” or “emotionally unavailable,” or “just here cause I’m bored,” and that person might well mean what they wrote. But such phrases might just as well be defense mechanisms constructed by a person who, not wanting to get hurt, tries to eliminate beforehand the possibility of true intimacy, even though deep down, they crave it.

And so a profile is to be understood as an iceberg: a small portion of someone visible above the surface that, no matter how enticing, should leave you wary of what’s hidden from sight. Be cautious as you navigate closer, because if the visible portion is a deception, you might crash into the structure below, and sink. But be brave enough to trust that your date has exposed herself authentically.

Recovering intimacy on dating apps, then, requires courage twice over: once in creating an authentic profile, and again in trusting the authenticity of your date’s. This courage is won by virtue of Percy’s “dialectical movement…back to the beaten track but at a level above it.” We’ll name this movement after a Caroline Polachek song in which she describes trusting her parachute as she jumps from an airplane — as vulnerable a position as one could be in — only to have the wind carry her out over the ocean:

Go on, take me, I’m not afraid to drown

She trusts her parachute and then comes to terms with the very real possibility that it will fail her. In the end she’s rewarded for her trust when the wind reverses direction and she lands safely on soft ground. For the purposes of online dating, trusting one’s parachute is trusting that your authenticity will be reciprocated, and that in the end, you’ll both be rewarded for your courage with the prize of intimacy. But probably learn how to swim, too, because sometimes the wind won’t reverse direction, and you’ll splash into the sea.

The likelihood of your landing safely on soft ground, however, hinges partly upon how effectively you express yourself through the restrictive medium of the dating app, and effective expression requires creativity. This creativity is its own dialectical movement back to the beaten path, and we’ll name this one after a different Caroline Polachek song:

Sexting sonnets
Under the tables
Tangled in cables, oh, oh

Sexting is considered among the most debased forms of modern sexual expression. Sonnets are considered among the most sublime forms of romantic expression in human history. What does it mean, then, to sext a sonnet? I take it to mean finding a way to express authentic romantic feelings using the tools we have available to us in the post-internet era. To give oneself a chance at cultivating intimacy from the foundation of a dating app, then, one must be brave enough to parachute and creative enough to sext a sonnet.

The requisite bravery and creativity can come only from a deep self-knowledge and an understanding of profiles-as-icebergs. Once you’ve been brave enough and creative enough to secure a date that has a genuine chance to blossom into an intimate relationship, you’ve got to maintain your awareness of the distance between profile and person. Don’t let your preformed complexes confine your interactions. Allow the hidden parts of yourself to rise to the surface, and maintain a curiosity — and a healthy wariness — about what lies beneath the surface of the other.

Then, with luck and loyalty, you’ll be able to spend the rest of your lives perfecting your portraits of each other — an impossible task, but one which, done properly, never grows old.

Philly Clearing

Recovering Intimacy