online dating – Memphis Flyer

My last three relationships and my last approximately 74 star-crossed situationships all began on the World Wide Web. This might shake the sensibilities of readers who have ever said, “I’m glad I met old so-and-so before online dating. I couldn’t possibly imagine doing it now. Perish the thought!”

After the last year of homebound communication, I don’t need to explain the uncomfortable value of internet connectedness. We all happen to be at the same 24-hour party of social media, and it’s strange. It makes love matches appear more possible as a by-product of numbers. We can “meet” people we haven’t seen in our daily lives. We can connect with people in niche fandoms all over the globe. The plenty of fish in the sea are multiplied.

And while social media platforms do their best to mimic the organic meeting of souls in a gigantic cacophony — rife with mutual ties and deceptively complete with life lived in words and images — dating apps take it a step further. The first time I ever created a dating profile was a few years ago at the onset of Facebook dating. This seemed to make sense given that data on my preferences had been mined for a decade. Why not let Cupid Zuck use it for good! I was wrong. I encountered the typical experience in all its superficiality and power. I rejected interested parties en masse with my iron swipe. I talked to a few people and eventually felt overwhelmed maintaining conversations with lots of men with whom I shared the delicate desire for romance.

Both details are problematic:

1. The truth is that someone in real life who doesn’t catch my heart-eye might with time. People can become exponentially more attractive through building rapport. I’ve developed crushes on probably 326 coworkers in this way — unlikely candidates whose familiar quirks grew appealing. The dating app invites you to treat humans as bad résumés — a slush pile to screen as quickly as possible. The ethics are debatable, but it just doesn’t accurately represent the complexity of attraction in the real world.

2. Okay, so you matched. You made it past the split-second gateway. You are joined in the revelation of your common intent to grow that precious flower of love. In the everyday emotional availability desert, simply wanting a relationship is an oasis. It’s intoxicating. So much so that it’s easy to overlook other metrics for compatibility.

Compatibility: that naturally occurring thing we taste when we meet someone at a concert and can assume we share interest in the band or setting. Meeting someone entirely new on a dating app can seem suspicious. Where has the beloved been? Is this person cool in a way that means something to me? If I’ve never seen this person at events I attend because they’re important to me, do we have enough in common to make it last?

This is absolutely unfair. You can be new to town. (Ah, I remember the days of being the coveted transplant fondly.) Or maybe you’re freshly single. Maybe you’re overcoming paralyzing social anxiety. Maybe you just haven’t yet found your love of the thing at the center of the scene in question. There are reasons.

My last relationship began on a dating app and proved incompatible. We shared some relationship preferences, some priorities, and a few personality traits. It wasn’t enough. Even so, I still have hope it’s possible to meet some undiscovered Romeo on the likes of Hinge or Bumble. In vibrant Midtown, where we same 50 people attend every art show, concert, and film screening, where we inevitably date all of the same few singles left, it is important to see reminders of a world beyond the bubble and into the realm of single, available people open to partnership.

Besides, dating isn’t appreciated enough as a leisure habit. Life is short. Drive to Clarksdale on a full moon to meet that match and have the best one-night stand of your life; then gather your tattered little ghosted heart for the next adventure. Just hypothetically, I mean. Live a little.

Memphians turn to internet friends for recommendations on doctors and moisturizers. So, why not someone to date?

That’s the basic rationale behind an Instagram account launching next month from a pair of Memphis singles hoping to crowdsource dating connections for other area singles. The “Meet My Person Project” account is slated to go live March 1st. Nominations for slots on the account are open now.

Meet My Person is not a company. It’s not an app. It’s not even a formal effort. It’s more of an experiment, according to co-founders Meredith Regan and Melissa Whitby.

It works in two ways, Whitby said. It’s for people looking to meet “their person.” It’s also for people looking for possible matches for their single friends.

For now, the account will run only for the month of March but will run longer if it’s successful. A new single will be featured each Monday and Thursday.

Nominations run through a Google Form. They can be done by the person seeking to meet someone or by someone who knows a worthwhile, eligible single person. The nomination form asks for the person’s name, sexual identity, social accounts, photos, and a bit on why the person would be a fit for the project.

There are also a couple of voucher statements. Before filling out the form, one has to agree that “Black lives matter. Women’s rights are human rights. No human is illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is everything.” A safety statement also has one vouch that the nominated person is “a good, kind, and law-abiding human.” To which, one can answer “absolutely” or “I can’t say for sure.” Lily Beasley

The idea for Find My Person came as Whitby and Regan commiserated over the downfalls of online dating. Whitby said she got married young, didn’t learn to date until she was in her 40s, and that has involved a lot of online dating, which she called a “pretty terrible experience.”

“Women put a lot of thought into our profiles,” Whitby said, for example. “We try to say something funny but not too funny. We take time to take some really good photos and edit them.

“Men, on the other hand, get in their car, decide to start a Bumble profile, and take a picture with their seatbelts on. They put nothing in their bio, except for their height. Then, they joke that they’re over six feet tall and we really don’t care.”

Regan calls dating apps “catalogs of humans” that come with the “burden of limitless options.” Think Netflix but with people.

Tinder/Match/Bumble/Facebook

“It’s just so easy to keep swiping and swiping and swiping, looking for better versions of the last person you saw,” said Regan. “In a lot of ways that keeps people from committing to the real things that can be right in front of them, like going on a good date and then second-guessing whether a second date is worth it because there’s a hundred more people you can swipe through tonight when you get home.”

Whitby and Regan also saw social-media Memphis mobilize in the real world on the Midtown/Downtown Facebook group “Buy Nothing.” In it, members offer up items they no longer use (like furniture, electronics, or clothes). Or, members post for what they need. Either way, members are connected with each other, items are promised, and, most times, picked up from porches. This community, too, had the Meet My Person co-founders believing that “there’s got to be a better way” to meet someone online.

“So, our hypothesis is, basically, that people will activate in that way if we bring dating out from behind the curtain or from behind the apps and make it a little bit more forward-facing,” Regan said.

To get you in the love-connection-making mood, check out this Spotify playlist from the Meet My Person Project.