Nothing to Get

I. The Profile

When I moved to New York, I did what a single person is now expected to do: I made myself searchable. I built a profile on the apps, uploaded the photographs, answered the prompts, and went looking. You know the motion even if you have never done it — the thumb, the grid of faces, the small sorting of a human being into interesting or not, compatible or not, beautiful or not. I filtered for the ones who seemed like they might be for me. I sent messages. Very few came back.

I can account for some of that plainly, and I would rather do it now than pretend later. My profile was too honest. Not raw, not confessional — honest in a way the medium is not built to reward. A profile that means to cast a wide net says the things that a wide net catches, and I had stopped being able to say them. I know how I read to a stranger scrolling past: like a person who has come loose from something everyone else is still holding on to. And it is also possible — I want to leave this on the table and not spiritualize it away — that I am simply not what most people are looking for. Both of those can be true. Neither one is the interesting part.

The interesting part is what a dating app actually is, and what it asks you to become in order to use it well.

II. The Machine

A dating app is a market, and a market runs on a single unquestioned premise: that you are a self, alone, with a lack in your hands, and that the way to answer the lack is to go out and get. Swipe, match, message, acquire. The verbs are the verbs of shopping because the thing is a kind of shopping — a storefront of people, arranged for comparison, and you the buyer with a finite budget of attention, trying to spend it well. Every feature teaches the same lesson. The grid teaches that people are interchangeable enough to line up in a row. The filter teaches that love is a set of criteria met. The reply rate teaches that you are competing, that supply is scarce, that others are reaching for the same faces and you had better reach faster.

I do not think any of that is evil. I think it is acquisition, rendered in its purest and most literal form — and acquisition is the exact thing I have spent the last year learning I am not made of. The market can only work if I arrive as a buyer. It presumes the lack. It presumes the separation: that I am one thing and the person on the other side of the screen is another, and that between us there is a distance to be closed by strategy. That presumption is not a small technical setting. It is a whole account of what a person is — a self sealed off inside its own skin, sent out to secure its portion before the portions run out — and it is the account I no longer believe. In [Them] we live, and move, and have our being;¹ I cannot hold that on Sunday and then, on Monday, open an app that only functions if I forget it.

III. Playing a Game You've Stopped Believing In

Here is the honest mechanics of why the net came back empty. It was not only the photographs, and not only that I may not be what most women are looking for. It was that I was casting a net inside a game I had quietly stopped believing in, and it shows. To a person still fully inside the story of separation — and that is nearly everyone, and was me not long ago — a profile written by someone who has stepped half out of it does not read as deep. It reads as insane. I would not swipe on me either, if I were shopping. The whole grammar of the place is sell yourself, and I had lost the ability to believe I was for sale, which is a terrible qualification for a salesman.

So in my last week on the platforms, I stopped trying. I mean I genuinely stopped — and what came out when the trying stopped was not despair but comedy. I sent absurd things. Jokes with no angle. Audacious, unsolicited calls to self-empowerment fired off to women I found interesting, as if I were a motivational poster that had gained the power of speech. I was not doing it to win; I had given up winning, which is precisely why I could do it. And I want to be careful not to dress that up as strategy in retrospect — it worked no better than the earnest version. But it was the first honest thing I had done on there, because it came from a man who was no longer trying to get anyone. A person who has stopped reaching can, at last, simply play. That the playing produced nothing the market recognizes is not a failure of the playing. It is the whole point I had not yet said out loud.

IV. "Maybe They're for Me"

Something has changed in how I meet a person now, and it is easiest to see in the exact moment the old machinery used to switch on. I meet someone, and she is lovely, and there is a question in my mind — but it is not the question the app trained. It is not how do I get her. It is quieter and stranger than that: maybe she is for me. Maybe. I do not know. And because I do not know, I do not move.

That not-moving is the whole essay in a single reflex, so let me be precise about what it is and what it is not. It is not fear, and it is not a technique for seeming mysterious. It is that I have come to believe there is a line between two entirely different postures toward another person, and I can feel exactly where it runs. On one side is wanting to get — the reach, the close, the securing of a thing before it slips. On the other side is waiting to be given — the open hand, the question left genuinely open, the willingness to be told no or told nothing. The line between them is not a rule I imposed on myself. It is more like a border I finally learned to see, and once you can see it you can also see that almost everything the culture calls pursuit is just the crossing of it, dressed as romance.

I have a name for the posture on the far side, though it did not begin with dating. When something good appears now and I am unsure, the question I have learned to ask is not can I take this but is this for me — asked upward, and then left there, the way you leave a letter you have decided not to answer until morning. It hands the ledger over. It says: the deciding of this was never mine to do by grasping. I can want, and still not reach; I can notice a person is lovely, and let that be a thing I have seen rather than a thing I must now seize.

I would like to tell you I have held that line cleanly. I have not.

V. Crossing It

Twice in the last few weeks I crossed the line — both times with a woman who was already my friend, and both times it was a mistake. I will not say anything that would let you find either of them, because the fault is not theirs to carry and the story is not theirs; it is mine. What I did was reach. In each case there was a real friendship, an easy and good thing, and in each case I let the question maybe she is for me harden into a move before I had any business believing the answer was yes. I crossed from wondering into wanting-to-get, and I acted on the wanting, and it was wrong.

I want to be careful here in the other direction, too — not to flog myself for it as though the reaching were monstrous. It was not monstrous. It was ordinary. It is the most ordinary thing a person does. But ordinary is exactly the point: the pull to secure the good thing before it can get away is so native to us that we do not even register it as a decision. We call it following our heart. I have learned to call it crossing a line, because I can now feel the specific quality of the ground on the other side — the faint wrongness, the way the friendship stiffens, the way I have converted a person into an outcome I am now managing toward.

Here is what the two mistakes actually taught me, and it is not try harder to behave. It is that the line in the previous section is real — I know it is real because I felt exactly what it costs to step over it. And it taught me that I can wait. Not wait as a clenched discipline, a man white-knuckling his own restraint. Wait the way you wait for something you genuinely trust is coming: without lunging, because lunging is what you do when you are not sure it will arrive.

VI. The Introduction

So here is the claim the whole essay has been walking toward. Love is not acquired. You cannot get, by casting a wide net and filtering the catch, the person you are actually meant to be given. It is not that strategy is inefficient. It is that strategy is aimed at the wrong kind of object — it treats a gift as a prize, and a prize is a thing you win by reaching, while a gift is a thing that only exists in the giving. What I believe now, and did not believe two years ago, is that the introduction is not mine to engineer. The LORD will make it, and — this is the part I keep having to relearn — the LORD will make it obvious. My job is not to comb the field. My job is to be ready when the obvious thing arrives, and to not marry the field in the meantime out of a failure of nerve.

The oldest picture I know of this is the one nobody in the parable notices, because we are all watching the son who left. There is an older brother, and he has done everything right, and he is furious, and when his father comes out to him he lets it out: all these years I have served you, and you never gave me so much as a young goat to make merry with my friends.² It is the purest cry of the acquisitive self in scripture. He has been on the estate the entire time. He has had legal claim to every acre the whole while he was out in the field resenting that no one had handed him a goat. And his father's answer is not a bigger allowance. It is a sentence that quietly dismantles the entire economy the son was living in: Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.³ There was never anything to get. It was already his. The tragedy of the older brother is not that he sinned. It is that he lived as a hired hand in a house he owned, asking for one goat, standing in his inheritance.

I do not think this means the loved person is already secretly mine, waiting to be claimed — that would just be acquisition with a halo on it, and I want to be careful not to swap one grasping for another. It means something stranger and less flattering to me. It means that what is for me is not scarce in the way the market insisted, and cannot be secured by speed, and will not be missed by patience. The manna in the wilderness fell fresh every morning and could not be hoarded; the portions kept overnight against tomorrow's fear bred worms and stank.⁴ The lesson was never there is not enough. The lesson was stop trying to store what only comes as it is given. And if the thing has not yet arrived — if I am, at this writing, still without her — then the most honest reading is not that I have been forgotten. It is that one of us is not ready. Maybe her. Maybe, and more likely, me. The waiting is not an empty stretch of road before the real thing starts. The waiting is the readying, of us both, and it is already the real thing.

I can hear the obvious objection, because I have made it myself in a harder season: this is a very serene thing to say from the comfortable side of loneliness. Wait on the LORD is exactly what a person tells themselves when nothing is happening and they need the nothing to mean something. I concede the danger completely. There is a passivity that hides inside spiritual language and calls its own fear surrender. So let me draw the distinction sharply enough that it can be checked. Patience is not the absence of action; it is the refusal to grab what has not been given. It is not doing nothing. It is doing everything except the one thing — the reach — that would prove I never trusted the introduction was coming at all.

VII. What's Left

Take the getting away and see what is actually left, because it is not less. Someone who has stopped casting the net is not lonelier than someone still casting it; they are only unclenched. Their hands are free. They can meet a person as a person instead of as a candidate, which — I can tell you from both sides of it — is the difference between being seen and being interviewed. I still notice when someone is lovely. I notice more, not less, now that noticing does not obligate me to a campaign. The wanting did not have to die. It only had to stop being a plan.

I deleted the apps months ago. Not as a rule for anyone else — a person could keep everything I have said here and keep the apps too; that is not where the line runs, and I am not handing out a verdict on anyone's phone. I deleted them because for me they had quietly become the field itself, the place I went to rehearse the old self that goes out and gets, and I could not keep rehearsing a story I no longer believed. The too-honest, half-insane profile is gone. I did not replace it with a better one.

And so I am still waiting, and I have stopped experiencing the waiting as a wound. I am waiting for her, whoever she is, and I have come to suspect I am mostly waiting for myself — for the version of me who will be ready for the obvious thing when it is set in front of him and will not have needed to arrange it. What is left, with the net down and nothing to sell, is not a man with nothing. It is a man with his hands finally free — waiting in the open for what he was never going to be able to take, and could only ever be given: handed over, unmistakable, and not yet here.

Acts 17:28, KJV: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being." ↩
Luke 15:29, KJV: "Lo, these many years do I serve thee… and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends." ↩
Luke 15:31, KJV: "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." ↩
Exodus 16:19–20, KJV: the manna kept overnight against instruction "bred worms, and stank." ↩