How to Be Hot and Date

At the beginning of Hot Girl Summer 2022, we saw the dawn of a Dominique more intentional about dating. I had been single for about two years (four if you count the pandemic), and though I had long been "on the apps", every date I went on felt haphazard. Frankly, I was terrible at dating. I was gullible, lazy, closed-off, and mostly confused. I was dating because I thought I had to date, and not because I had any clarity about what I was looking for, from whom, and why.

By June 2022, I had certainly made a fool of myself on multiple occasions. I was a master at getting my hopes up about people who had red flags plastered all over their faces. I had been out of the dating game for too long; my last relationship began in 2015 when I was a sophomore in a gated liberal arts university buried in the middle of a desert, and before that, I was a blustery teenager who thought she knew everything about the world. I had no idea how the dating game could or should be played, so I approached each date with a naive yet well-intentioned earnestness: I thought it was enough to show up "fully and wholly myself" (as if I knew what that was). If my date didn't like that, they weren't right for me. It was disastrous.

For a long time, I couldn't get past a second date. I would give most people, if they were tolerable enough, a second date if they asked—I believed that the setting of a first date was awkward and inorganic, so a second encounter was necessary to see a less performative side of the person on the other side of the table. I wasn't asking myself whether I liked the person who sat before me or how they made me feel. I was focused, instead, on whether I had made the right impression, whether the person seemed sufficiently interested, and whether they might text me again. When I found myself excited about someone, my lack of training in dating would surface, I think, and the piquant banter exchanged over a glass of wine or an old fashioned would soon become a dead end. For months, I was in a spiral of a date, maybe two, and then silence, either on their end or mine. Sometimes there would be a thoughtful text exchange letting me or them down gently (the best text received in this genre is saved in my notes ready to pull out for my own use when the situation merits it), but mostly it was a lot of false starts.

One day, after spending a week pining over someone I saw twice, who, on paper, seemed exactly right for me, but who clearly was both not interested and not actually interesting, I finally acknowledged something needed to change. This realization coincided with the beginning of Hot Girl Summer last year, and not only was I going out with my friends more, jumping lines at clubs, swapping my flowy long-sleeve, button-down Uniqlo blouses for my first-ever (still Uniqlo) crop tops, and becoming a spinning enthusiast, I felt ready to date. More importantly, I was clear that I wasn't dating to find a relationship, but to gather and test stories—where else, I thought to myself, do I have the opportunity to tell the story of who I am and who I want to be to a captive audience of one? This marked the beginning of what I like to call my "One-Week Boyfriend Era."

Technically, I think I only had two "formal" one-week-long boyfriends, but there was still a clear overarching theme to this period: I graduated from the "max 2 date" encounters to a string of week-long engagements (something like 3-5 dates over a compressed period of time). Things often moved FAST—one day, I was having a drink with a witty, wiry stranger at a dive bar on the Upper East, and the next we were holding hands watching an outdoor movie screening overlooking the Hudson River talking about our hopes and dreams. I would get so swept up in activities that I would, once again, forget to pay attention to how I felt. Did I like them? Or was I simply flattered that they liked me? Unsurprisingly, like unstable compounds, these affairs disintegrated as quickly as they formed.

By now, I was starting to learn some things. I learned that most people tell you exactly who they are the first time you meet, you just have to learn to listen. For example, when, during our first date, I asked the first of the one-week-boyfriends how he spent his time, after listing a series of professional and academic activities and accomplishments, he jokingly told me that he felt like he was a house of cards: seemingly in order but at risk of collapsing with a breeze. Three and a half days later, he was in tears before me, crumbling under the pressure of trying to reconcile what he was looking for in a relationship with how he and I had been interacting (which had been more fitting to a protracted courtship than a fiery affair).

More mundanely, I learned that to increase your chances of establishing chemistry, you should always try to pick bar seating so that your bodies can interact, and I identified a couple of preferred date outfits. I also developed an image of an "ideal" profile for the apps—a list of professions, degrees, and interests—that, based on my experiences thus far, promised greater compatibility than others. Dentists? Absolutely not. Journalists? Self-proclaimed novelists? Actors? Hard pass. Long answers to Hinge prompts filled with emojis? Pictures at a sports stadium? Wearing Oakley sunglasses? Nope, nope, nope. Finding Hinge's algorithm insufficient, I became my own.

Around October of last year, I decided that the apps were not really doing it for me. My algorithms had become far too rigorous, and I was disappointed with everyone I met. I fell into a prescribed routine in dates that made each encounter feel more like a job interview than it did the beginning of an adventure. I was also feeling increasingly tired of the transparency of a dating app: it seemed to me that people were on there to either get married or have sex, neither of which easily applied to me. It was like we were trying to write the end of our story before it began, and therefore we were less interested in who we each really were, and more in who we thought we might be. I was missing the surprise, chaos, and chase of organic encounters. I couldn't figure out how to spark (find? feel? see? create?) the electricity of sexual tension in what felt like the highly constructed genre of conversation called the first date.

So, naturally, I deleted all the apps and went out some more. IRL dating was surprisingly productive: I found myself involved in more protracted flirtations, and even more "will they won't they" situations, but I also landed in another week-long boyfriend situation with an anxious French man who lived on the other side of the world (and who, I later learned, unfortunately, was just french). The wilderness of off-screen dating felt like the opposite of the apps. A surprising amount of time passed between my meeting someone and learning what that human did for a living. I felt more in control of myself through the encounter, turning charm on and off as needed. And, more importantly, I was much more aware of my body in space (and theirs, too) than I did learning about another human in purple and grey speech bubbles. Unsurprisingly, I also realized I was interested in people I would never have swiped on in the apps—longer hair, crooked smiles, mountain men, rather than the tweedy intellectual that Hinge (and I) thought I liked best.

When winter arrived, I returned to the apps because I simply wasn’t going out enough to meet people organically. My return to the apps, however, has been on the whole more positive. While I haven’t yet met anyone I find interesting, I've been more open-minded about whom I swipe as I've been relieved of my expectations. I can't pretend to understand all the nuances of the world of seduction, but I'm making steady progress.

About a month ago, I was recounting this long, sorry, and yet entirely banal tale to a dear friend of mine whom I've known since university, and she asked me what I've learned about what I'm looking for, now, when dating. We went back and forth listing some traits, until we got stuck on the question of whether or not we were looking for someone with international experience. I've generally found it easier to explain my comings and goings to someone who has lived abroad, or who sees themselves as between or around borders in the same way I do. But, I said, it's also not been a sure marker of success—I've met many a "third culture kid" whom I find rather dull and flat. After a pause, Sofia said to me, yes, I hear you, that's definitely something I look for, too. But I think it's less about them sharing that experience, and more about how they think about it. When I step into a conversation with a possible romantic partner, she explained, I'm looking to understand whether they think expansively or narrowly. Do I find myself intrigued and excited by how they see the world? Or do I quickly run into the limits of their imagination? I want someone who expands my worldview, not contracts it, she concluded.

Some weeks ago, I stepped into a first date asking the person across the table that we avoid posing biographical questions to each other; anything was fair game, as long as I wasn't asked to share, for the millionth time, what it was like to go to university in Abu Dhabi, what music I listened to in high school, or how many siblings I have, since none of those facts say a lot about who I am. Thanks to Sofia, I realized that I don't really care about what a person does, but rather how they think. The date didn't lead to anything, but it felt like new territory. I learned a lot about my date’s biography through the answers they gave to the more abstract questions exchanged, and, more importantly, I learned that their way of thinking was simply not scintillating or even intriguing to me. They were perfectly decent, kind, and thoughtful, but their way of being was simply dissonant to my own.

I woke up this morning thinking about wave resonance theory and the parallels that exist across the interactions between waves and objects and those between humans. Resonance is at work all around me: the way my computer speakers emit the soft notes of a random Dark Academia playlist on Spotify, the way the light is failing to cross the threshold of the thunder-filled clouds in the sky, and, lol, at work where, when someone agrees with something that you're saying, we'll often say, "yes, that resonates". All particles around us (unless they're at 0 degrees Kelvin) vibrate at different frequencies. When a light or a sound wave strikes an object with vibrating particles, and the wave's frequency happens to match the resonant frequency of the object it’s hitting, you’ll get resonance, where the matching vibrations of both wave and object increase the amplitude of a wave’s oscillations.

Resonance is about a particular moment in time—all that matters is whether there are complementary frequencies at the instant when wave and object meet. There's no resonance between an object and a wave if the object may, at a later date, resonate at the right frequency but doesn’t presently, or if it once did, but no longer does. There's no resonance if there’s an obstacle between the object and the wave, nor if these are too far away from each other. There are many examples of resonance—mechanical resonance, orbital resonance, acoustic resonance, electromagnetic resonance, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), electron spin resonance (ESR), and resonance of quantum wave functions—some of which might be constructive or destructive, long or short-lived, stable or explosive.

More relevant to the inquiry of this newsletter, the amplification of a particle’s vibrations can lead to the increase of temperature in an object (to be clear, I don’t have any scientific logic for this, but Umberto Eco claimed that untruths spooled logically and ornately are just as interesting as truths, so I won’t be bothered to look for it). I also don't have objective proof, beyond the anecdotal, that resonance in human relationships is Hot, but, I promise you, I’ve felt it, and the experience is rather lovely. I’ve recently found myself in a resonance that has made me feel colorful, bright, excited, and new, and I wouldn’t change it for a thing.

However, it's not as easy as middle school physics made it out to be—every day that I live in resonance is a struggle to allow myself to experience amplification without obstructing that connection with words, fears, doubts, or anxieties. I'm working mindfully (though perhaps clumsily) to continue to vibrate at the same resonant frequency as this someone else (which, for some reason, translates in my mind as being able to stand my ground, despite the contradictory action) for as long as it makes sense. I am better at it some days than others—I haven’t felt particularly good at it recently, but I am trying. I recognize that there will likely come a time when our frequencies will no longer resonant with each other. When that moment arrives, we'll need to make a choice about whether we try to find each other's resonant frequency again, or pack up our vibrating particles, feel thankful for what we learned, and move on. For the first time in a while, though, I feel at peace with either outcome.

So anyway, dearest Hotties, new age parallelisms aside, I’ve come to the view that dating around “to marry” and intentionally searching for a life partner is likely an ill-fated adventure (Not Hot! Sorry!), but neither do I want a superficial, dissonant connection (also Not Hot). Instead, I want to see the waves of my being amplify and grow, probably time and time again. And I want to learn something the process. (Hot)

‘Til next time