Club Friday Q&A: Shani Silver on Why Dating Culture is Broken

 
 

By Stacy Lee Kong

Image: Martika Gregory

 
 

I came across Shani Silver's work when someone else retweeted an old essay of hers onto my timeline. Originally published in 2021, it was compellingly titled "Enough Already. Where The F*ck Do I Meet My Husband?" and while I don't know that I am actually in the market for a husband at this exact moment, in many other ways, it was exactly what I needed to read. I'm 38 and single and the dating apps in Toronto are... well, the dating apps in Toronto, and sometimes I feel a bit sad about that. But also, I feel like (bad) relationship advice is everywhere right now, from weird dating coaches on TikTok to endless IG posts about how single women just need to [insert task here] in order to find a partner, whether that's changing our Hinge photos or dating like it's your job or learning to love ourselves. And importantly, lots of this messaging is coming from people with a financial interest in keeping people single, whether that's the apps themselves, or (unlicensed, amateur) coaches/matchmakers/experts, a dynamic I also touched on in last week's newsletter. From a cultural critique perspective, I find this fascinating, and Silver, who has been writing about singleness for publications including xoJane, Refinery29 and StyleCaster since 2013, seemed like the perfect person to unpack it with. Read on for our conversation about dating culture, app algorithms and why finding love isn't actually about effort—it's really just luck.

How did you started writing about dating?

By 2013, I had been single and dating for five years and at that point, I hadn't had even one relationship result from any of that effort. That's a long time to have zero return on investment. I'm a writer; I love writing, it's what I have been doing since I was six years old and anytime I tend to get angry about something, I tend to write really well on it. So, I used my anger in a productive way. That early-phase writing was just bitching into the void. I did a lot of bitching for xoJane.

It did very well for them. But by 2018, I was losing my mind, because at that point, it had been 10 years that I had been trying to find someone and I hadn't even found even one relationship. I'm talking nothing past a third date in 10 years' time—and I could probably count the third dates on one hand. It was just false start after false start, over and over and over until you genuinely think that you are losing your sanity. So, something had to change. I was just like, 'I have to do something different. There has to be more to life than searching for someone else. There has to be more to this.' There was just this notion that I've always held onto, which was: it has to be for something. I am in a darker hole than I've ever been. I'm more unhappy than I've ever been in, and there has to be a purpose for this. I was not born to just be unhappy.

We will talk about the dating industry and how it was designed to keep people in this addicted hell forever, but in 2018 I just started challenging my own behaviour and my own motivations for it. Why am I doing this? Why am I clawing my way through these dates, day in and day out? Why am I going on what I called 'wet toast dates'? Like, you were about as enticing to me as a wet piece of toast. Within two seconds of sitting down, you know you're not going to be with them, because what's presented online is very different from what's presented in person. And that's totally fine! We don't have to translate well online and I'm always open to being surprised by people in person. But all those surprises were negative.

I was gonna say, it would be one thing if I was surprised in a positive way.

I deleted my dating apps on January 26, 2019. And it was the first time in a decade that I didn't want to redownload them, ever. Still don't. So starting in 2019, I launched the podcast, and started really fighting the societal narrative around singlehood that the dating industry, the dating coaches, the matchmakers, dating culture all contributed to building. And that single people ourselves have contributed to. I mean, we're not like completely victims. We are participating. 

Yes, we're participating. But I feel like it's the most human thing to want connection and to want to be loved. And there's something very sad about all these messages essentially saying, the thing single people have to do is just work harder.

Bullshit! That is bullshit.

Thank you for saying that. I have literally had people say, 'Well, Stacy, you worked so hard to build your journalism career, so if you put that amount of effort into finding a relationship, of course you'd be successful.' And listen, as a person I do tend to default to hard work, but even I'm like, bro, I don't think that's how that works! A, I don't think that I can 'hard work' my way into finding the right person for me. And B, I have so many jobs! I'm so tired! The idea of adding another task to my plate just sounds exhausting.

I'm really tired of people making exorbitant amounts of money off of single people telling them that they're just not working hard enough or my favourite, they're just not working the right way. (And that it’s going to cost them five grand to learn the right way.) Here's the thing about it: It doesn't matter if you look at the spectrum of 'work,' from not working at this at all to working until you literally drop dead. People find love on the whole thing. The whole thing.

I feel a little dramatic saying this, but the part of your essay where you said it was all just luck was truly an epiphany. Like, even finding someone on a dating app is still luck. Recently, I saw some girl on TikTok being like, 'Here's how to hack the algorithm' and honestly, the most shocking part of that video was that it made me realize that Tinder or Hinge or whatever has an algorithm in the same way that Twitter has an algorithm or Instagram has an algorithm. Somehow, stupidly, that had never occurred to me?

It's an accident. It's an algorithmic accident. And Tinder doesn't want to match you with your spouse, ever. Because it stops making your money when it does.

And the 'dating industry' is larger than just dating apps, right?

The dating coaching industry is something they're going to make a documentary about, and I hope they interview my ass because I have a rage within me. It's hard enough to pay your rent as a single person, then you hear someone say, 'You're dating wrong. I have a five step process that will help you date right, and It's only $1,200 over six months.' And then a year later, you're still single. So, now you're $1200 lighter, and you feel ashamed that you fell for her shit. Or you feel internalized shame that you didn't do it right, because she said it would work and if it didn't work, you must have not done it right.

But none of it works. That's the thing. Dating advice does not work. There is no dating advice on this blue planet that actually works, right? Because if it does work, the coach gets credit and if it doesn't work, the client gets blamed. How convenient is that? So, the only real dating advice is that there is no dating advice. It's always luck, every time. It's luck, fate, chance timing, the universe, God—whatever you believe. But it is not the little tip or trick that your dating coach gave you. Are you kidding me? The way that some people will be made to feel like they are the wrong profile picture away from the love of their life breaks me. That breaks me.

I feel like the conversation around dating has become more intense over the past few years. But is that just me paying more attention to this content, or has something actually shifted?

It's definitely booming. And I think it's because more people are finding more ways to make money off of single people. They're finding more ways to make money off of the dating industry. And most importantly, they're finding more ways to make money off of dating culture, because the more complicated we make it, the more room there is for people to monetize it.

It should be the simple thing. It should be, just live your life, exist, go about your day, go to work, go to the park, go to dinner with friends, go to the movies, go get your hair done, go do whatever you would normally do. And at some point, in the course of that life you're going to connect with people you're meant to be romantically, just as you connect with people you're meant to be with in a friendship capacity, and in a professional capacity. That should be what dating is. Nora Ephron should be writing our dating lives. But she's not; Stephen King is.

I don't know how to say this the right way—and I'm speaking super heterosexually, by the way—but it seems like there's a growing divide between the boatloads of amazing single women that everybody knows and these extremely online dudes. Because we all have friends in the dozens, and we just don't know why the fuck they're single. And the thing about these men is that my heart hurts for them because they're so alone, and they're so sad, and they are so angry, and they're so confused. But we are so sad. We are so angry. We are so alone. And we are so confused. And there is this over-complicated dating culture in the middle that is dividing us.

When you talk about dating culture, what does that mean? What are the characteristics of that culture?

Imagine it like a treadmill that you can't ever get off—around and around and around and around she goes, and this wouldn't be so bad if it stopped eventually. But mine's been going for 15 years. And if our culture teaches us that the correct way to be is partnered and the incorrect way to be is single, it'll never dawn on us that we can stop dating. It will never dawn on us that dating isn't supposed to be this hard or this bad. Horror stories aren't supposed to exist, much less be the norm. They aren't supposed to be something that our coupled friends find entertaining. But that's what's happening.

So, the culture is, we're disposable. Single women are disposable, and single men are catches. And when those two dynamics come together all the time, it's going to make a lot of single women feel like shit, and it's gonna make a lot of single men feel like gods.

I hope that I'm able to show people that you get to get off the hamster wheel whenever you want, not just when a man gives you a ring. And getting off of that hamster wheel does not 'ruin your chances'! I don't know why we put so much faith and stock in people that are hunting down a spouse like they're on safari, when I don't actually know anybody that met that way. But I do know a shitload of people they met by accident, through friends or work. Even the people that met on apps, it's not those people that are 'hacking' algorithms. It's people that went on the app to delete it—like, how many times have you heard that?

I do wonder if there are single men who don't feel good, either, though. Certainly if you are the type of person who buys into these heteronormative and patriarchal ideas about men being gods if they can attract lots of women, you might find some validation there. But I'm not sure that single men are less lonely.

I think they're less ashamed.

Going back to the idea of how dating culture is booming, I agree that some of it is driven by capitalism, but do you think some of it is driven by people being lonelier now? Because we're (kind of, sort of) coming out of the pandemic, we've had this short-lived 'racial reckoning,' our relationship to work has changed... I'm curious if these social changes could be impacting our desire for partnership.

I don’t think we’re lonelier, but I think we are uniquely lonely because we are consuming so much information all the time. We are drinking from a firehose, and I don't think that human brains and human nervous systems are meant to do such a thing. You've got everything that happens in the world, and everyone's responses and thoughts to what happens in the world. Prior generations didn't know all of that; they didn't know how somebody in Des Moines felt about the current political climate when they lived in L.A. They didn't know the day that every single one of their exes got engaged. Unless somebody called somebody's auntie and the auntie had a big mouth, they would just be blissfully ignorant forever. But now we have to know and process everything and our poor little nervous systems are being ripped apart by this. But prior generations had their nervous systems ripped apart by war and by God knows what else. So it's no better, worse, harder, easier. It's just uniquely our burden to bear because we have to be alive right now.

So, if dating hasn't been working for you, how do you remember that it's not because of you?

Instead of viewing it as, 'why is it me? What's wrong with me? Why doesn't anyone love me? Why doesn't anyone choose me?' my choice is to view my life as under protection.I have been protected from the wrong relationships, I have been protected from having the three divorces and four marriages my mother has had, I have been protected from the wrong shit for 40 years. And that makes me feel pretty goddamn lucky.

Particularly if you want children, it is very hard to swallow that some of our timelines are going to look different from the timeline that society praises, and I have no solace or balm for you there. But that does not decrease the value of our timeline. It just means society needs to pull its head out of its ass. Like, I don't know when I’m getting married. But I do know that I'm getting married, because it's something I want. And it's something that happens every day. It is not rare. By and large, if you are an adult human being and you want to partner, odds say that you will. I think it's probably an algorithmic impossibility for you and I to live out the duration of our lives and die at 85 having never found a partner. I don't think that's possible. I really don't. That's a lot of time.

It's not going to look like they told us it should look, it's not going to look like we want it to look, we're going to have years alone we did not want to have. But it's our choice how we spend them. We do not have to spend them miserable, and it's my strong suggestion that we don't.

I think that can be hard to remember, though, because there are often these weirdly gleeful news stories about marriage rates and singleness that seem to imply that women who haven't found a partner are doing something wrong, especially if they're racialized. They're not strictly accurate—there was a great 2021 article that debunked news stories about the so-called 'Black marriage crisis,' including the idea that Black women don't marry. But it has also been well-established that dating apps are rife with racism. So, sometimes it's scary to even think about the statistics, because it's like, well, what if the statistics actually aren't in my favour?

Racism will always be a proof point. Ask Asian men, ask Black women—ask Asian women, who have been over-sexualized to the same degree that Asian men have been under-sexualized. The racism point is not mine to speak to; I'm Jewish, but I have been benefiting from white privilege since day one, so it is a space where I feel ill-equipped. But I know it's real.

I want to wrap up by going back to the idea of luck. I don't know if you saw that Twitter thread from Vanessa Kisuule? She's a U.K. writer and performer who talked about the flip side of finding a partner being luck on Twitter last month, and it was really honest and vulnerable. She basically said, 'I've been single for a long time. I know it's just luck and that can change in a moment, but right now, this is my luck.' What do you say to people, but especially women, who are feeling like that?

Just live. Stop looking for a magic pill or magic button or magic solution—live your life, fulfill your responsibilities and if you are privileged enough, fulfill your hobbies and desires and your friendships and your family relationships. Do the things that make you happy, do the things that light you up, do the things that make you feel good. And do not do them with the intention to find a partner. Do not make finding a partner the centre of you; you are the centre of you. No one wants to hear that because there's a lack of control there. There's a lack of speed there. And there's a lack of certainty there. But that doesn't mean that the situation is any different. There's no money in that, so that's why no one's saying it, but I don't give a shit: there is nothing you need to do to find your future partner.

Want to hear more from Shani? Pick up a copy of her book, A Single Revolution, check out her podcast and subscribe to her Substacks: 1982 is a "healing newsletter for 80s babies" and Hey Shani is her toxic positivity-free advice column.

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Club Friday Q&AStacy Lee KongShani Silver