If you are on dating apps, you should know what you are looking for. You do have to create a profile where your gender (or non gender), as well as your tastes, love & sex relationships preferences, aspirations in life are specified. Therefore you should precisely know who you are and what you want. But do you really? In a digitalised world where everything including ourselves becomes an app or a product, we have an infinite horizon of choices, and if we choose something we renounce to something else.
And what do I wish for my idealised self, my digital avatar? Another idealised self? The best ? The better ? The most ? Everything ? Nothing…
And Solenn, what does she really want?
Online dating apps are a starting point to meet people in unknown cities
There are also strong mirrors of cultural specificities and Solenn can relate to it. Indeed she lived in Berlin, in Hamburg. She now lives in Amsterdam. She wandered in the cities, danced in their clubs, worked in their companies, ate their foods and met their inhabitants offline or online.
The more we connect, the better?
…or the worst? What did she learn from meeting so many people in such different ways? Did she got more experienced, richer from all these get-to-know? Do they behave differently from a city to another? Is a 30 years old guy from Amsterdam going to react differently towards her profile, her pics, than the Berliner type? What is their relationship to love, commitment, sex, friendship? At 27 she says she has her whole life in front of her. Dating apps are fun until they are not anymore, until she doesn’t know why she’s still using them. Because, yes, she’s still missing this little connexion.
(Online-dating) apps are addictive and reflect our vanity
So why does she keep going back to them? Is it like social media in general, an addiction? A way for us to feel less lonely when we in fact got more lonely the more time we spent with our screens? Do we really get richer from all these possibilities or are we in fact getting emptier as we fail to really connect, really meet?
In this episode we will talk about our expectations, our disillusions, our desires that, despite of everything, remain, sexuality and cultural clives from a European capital to another.
I could take whoever, a dog. Maybe I should take a dog.
Solenn @homoswipiens
Listen to Solenn on SoundCloud:
In this episode we won’t answer those questions because it is difficult to know what we really want in our attempt to connect. But we will open the discussion and identify some symptomatic issues that our contemporaries selves encounter online as well as in life.
Body is not a tool, it’s an enveloppe and when your aura is good this enveloppe becomes amazing.
Solenn @homoswipiens
Listen to Solenn on any other platforms
Bibliography
- « Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype », Clarissa Pinkola Esté, Ballantine Books, 1997
- « Simulacra and Simulation », Jean Baudrillard, Galilée, 1981
- « The reddest rose unfolds », Liv Strömquist, 2019