“There where desire is frustrated, drive is gratified.”

— S.E.P. entry on Jacques Lacan

‍

When it’s warm, you have more chances at human contact, ambling through parks and outdoor markets, lingering on cafe patios. Even if you don’t take those chances, the heartbeat of possibility is a consoling rhythm. Winter is different. You enclose yourself in coats and stuffy 5^th floor efficiencies. You brood and knit, knit and brood.

Here in quarantine, confined to a single stuffy 5^th floor efficiency, the lazy thumping in your chest has become the soundtrack to your budding madness. Your thoughts echo across the valleys of interminable days, turning you round and dropping you, bewildered by the setting sun, right where you started. Which is to say, you re-download Tinder.

Tinder is, essentially, the same terrible dream that begat The Facebook, but gamified. The game is exactly as your friend Lauren described it: a bunch of fake people trying to catfish each other. As with resumés and tax write-offs, there are few factual Tinder profiles. No sense playing by the rules when the first rule is cheat. Thus, like a writer of fiction or an influencer of Instagram, you set out to build your illusion.

On a bootleg download of Photoshop, you crop out too-hot friends and magic-wand the blemishes from your face. After two unfeeling hours, your image takes shape: a prism of 2-D you’s that aren’t you—four cute, one funny, one sexy. These non-you yous diffract the light of perception into a single, striated image that’s also not you, though more compellingly. What the real you is like, is a subject to explore some other time, over wine on a second, or better yet, third date.

For now, there’s your bio. You wrestle it like a too-tight sweater, getting first a hobby through, then an interest, until your whole personality pops out backwards, and you have to start over. This repeats until your thumbs tire and it becomes clear that this oscillating motion, this rehashing of inaccuracies, is the only real you.

Finally, you write, “I want Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks to slap me in the face.” You press, no—You delete ‘Dixie’ and press Save.

Now, you touch the curvaceous red flame and pray for warmth. A face appears. JACK, 28 (same as you), Cincinnati (same as you), Entrepreneur (ehh, sort of like you). In his Lulu Lemon workout fit, he looks oddly brutish, hulking, and insensate, but his mute smile says, “I care about things…”As does his bio. It’s oddly unspecific for a bio. Still, your nucleus accumbens purrs at the sight of Jack’s earnest-looking grin. You smile back. You pull your finger across the screen, first caressing his cheeks, then dragging him by the head, your prized caveman, to the right of the screen where you drop him off a cliff. “LIKE!”

Enter ZACH, 24, Cincinnati, Personal Trainer, bent over a barbell with his back flat as sheet metal. “I’ll work harder than anyone you’ve ever dated.” The bio’s words seem to come from his quads. You imagine a stately family with seven children, all of them hanging from Zach’s biceps. Then you imagine getting in a fight with Zach. You sling him to the left and the screen blares “NOPE.”

You sort the liked and noped into neat, invisible piles. The minutes drag on. Your task drags on. You feel both exhausted and energized, as the bright, pretty faces blaze in your vision like slot reels. Your heart rate quickens. Your skin heats. Your pupils dilate. Your thumb moves in a trance, hypnotized by cortisol.

Gambling is only tragic if you rely on it. But you play in this casino for fun. This is not work. This is recreation. You could stop at any moment, open The Arabian Nights, and lose yourself in the story of a woman who really knew how to handle a lockdown. You don’t need Tinder. You just came here to “mess around.”

Yet when the screen freezes and the electrochemical power goes out in your brain, you become uncomfortably aware of your thumb and the lonely, sluggish, matchless state in which you find your body. And it feels tragic.

You also become aware of the app’s shitty design. A naked appeal to your inner animal, full of stressful reds and bumbling popups for Tinder Plus. In fact, that’s why it froze.

Tinder’s owners, Match Group, desperately want you to pay. It seems like all they want. But you’re not that easy. Never one to give up at a paywall, you download Hinge.

Hinge’s neat, bookish layout relaxes you at once. Times New Roman sprinkled over a bed of whitespace. The Dating App Designed to Be Deleted™. Your nervous heart swoons for the alliteration and casual, anti-marketing marketing. This feels like the antidote to Tinder’s toxicity. The perfect app-next-door. Who cares that it too is owned by Match Group? There’s room in this world for Coke and Diet Coke.

On Hinge, you’re an intellectual. While Tinder yanks on your primal urges to fuck, win, flaunt, buy, and fuck, Hinge appeals to your creativity, your humor, and your insatiable desire to seem interesting. Or, as you like to call it, your “sense of self.” At last, you think, a dating app with interiority.

Brimming with hope, you curate an exhibit of your wit and wisdom in response to three handpicked, generic prompts. You supplement it with six photos displaying your refined taste in tattoos and wide-framed glasses. You cannot rush this. You are your own designer, and design makes intelligence visible. The men of Hinge must see your brilliance.

When you finish, Hinge really wants to record your voice. You press Dismiss.

Before you even start swiping, men have liked you. You press the heart button to see them. You can only gaze upon one at a time, unless you pay. But you will not pay. In a long, blurry line, these Men-of-Hinge await your approval. Like the Men-of-Tinder, they flex muscles and hold fish. Not one looks as bookish as the app’s design. You decline to message them.

Out of the blue, the app’s mascot Hingie appears. Hingie is some kind of sentient, googly-eyed pillow with a big H sewn on. It lounges by an unlit campfire, batting its silly eyes at you with an adorable, lovestruck expression. Then, it knocks over a can of lighter fluid. It jumps in the puddle, rolling back and forth to coat its fluffy body in the fluid. Oh god is it..? Yes, Hingie’s gesturing toward the box of matches nearby. It wants to be Deleted. And it… It needs your help. Because it doesn’t have hands.

“Oh Hingie,” you say. “If only I were as bold as you. But I’m shy.”

Hingie eyes the box of matches longingly and reminds you it’s “Your Turn.”

There is only one thing to do. Connect.

You write to one man, then another. Then others. Frustrated with their responses, you change your gender preferences and write to women as well.

No one wants to meet. Only chat. You know, of course, about ghosting, but what do you call the actions of the one in three dating app users who will never go on a date? Lurking?

Although, you too are a lurker, you realize, running out of free swipes. And lurking is all you set out to do. You came here for, for fun. But now the apps’ logic has wormed its way into your brain, making you want what they want. Just yesterday, you were fine with your relationship status. You didn’t care if Hingie lived or died. You didn’t even know who Hingie was. Tomorrow, you’ll split yourself in two and max out your free daily swipes on both Tinder and Hinge. Next, you’ll be on Bumble, the app of tawdry Third Wave feminism. And then what? Free accounts on OkCupid? eHarmony? Match.com? There’s an endless buffet of beautiful faces you can practically touch, and Match Group is handing you a plate.

You put the phone down.

In a moment of sudden clarity, you understand why people risk their lives to cruise in parks. To feel, for a brief moment, the electricity of a stranger’s flesh in the night, to accept that what you desire is the flesh itself, regardless of who possesses it, and to give in—it’s a release you could die for.

‍