Keeping in touch
Social media is a fascinating tool for dating – It offers another filter alongside normal dating apps, and I think a lot of apps know this too – it’s why they’ll ask you to attach an Instagram account to enrich your profile. Raya is even built on this where in order to join the app you sign up with an Instagram handle.
Dating apps actually can deplatform people to other apps like Instagram or Twitter to make you that more convinced to swipe on someone. Once you exit a dating app to a social app to do a bit of sleuthing, you make a judgement call to try to start a conversation back on the dating app. If the person is really attractive, you may just start following them just to see what they’re up to and take in the eye candy because hey why not?
The concept of keeping in touch manifests in so many ways both before, during, and after you start any kind of new relationship with someone (not like a “we’re dating” relationship but a “hello new human being” relationship). I use social media a lot in how I try to date, and I thought it would be useful to unpack it as a tool to see if I could be better about using it.
Let’s start by mapping out how social media plays along with new relationships by bulleting the social media possibilities at each stage. All of this assumes starting with seeing someone for the first time on a dating app and having an engaged enough discussion to get to the “socials” stage.
Leading up to an in-person meeting
No socials. You have a normal conversation on the app, perhaps some pleasantries, and then you find a time to meet up with no exchange or discovery of social media.
You exchange Snapchat or Instagram to continue the conversation or because you’re comfortable with the idea that this person could be more than a one night stand or because you’re looking to further vet the person with more photos and samples of their communication style.
Swap Snapchats. You might verify their photos on their profile lineup with who you expect them to be today. It’s quite normalized to block someone on Snapchat if things aren’t going well so the stakes are pretty low for exchanging information. There is a bit of an expectation that you share photo messages on this app in the spirit of further validating yourself.
Swap Instagrams. You might want to understand a bigger picture of who they are as a person, as well as see who else you may know that knows this person. The gay community is small enough that depending on how people participate in hookup culture you actually get a lens into someones potential history of partners. Because Instagram advertises mutual connections it really puts someones dating history front-and-center.
Does everyone hook up with everyone? No, but you can make a judgement call knowing the individual people, and when I’ve done the math for my mutual connections I find a pretty reliable pattern. That’s a post for another time though.
You exchange phone numbers. I can’t decide if this is more intimate than Instagram because on one hand it really truly is the direct line to someone but on the other Instagram gives someone more context understand you and your life as well as what you’re doing in the moment. People often post stories and photos of what they’re doing frequently so it’s easier to say “oh hey I love that restaurant!” than texting someone out of the blue with nothing to say. Swapping phone numbers seems to be what confident long-term communicators like to do or people who are really really interested.
Meeting in-person (for a date, a hook-up, or just to explore a friendship)
Exchanging contact information or socials. Towards the end of the meeting if I feel like I’ve had an enjoyable time I’ll ask if I could have their contact information or phone number. I don’t really ask for someone’s information if the date doesn’t go well.
Mutually decided lack of connection. There may be a mutual understanding that the match isn’t quite there – the meetup wasn’t what either of us expected and thus we decide to go our separate ways.
You get rejected. I’ve never been rejected a request to share contact information or exchange social media, probably because it would be excruciatingly awkward to deny the request.
After meeting in-person
You get ghosted. You try reaching out a couple of times on the main way you kept in touch and you get nothing.
You get blocked. Contact is completely severed. The funny thing is for dense urban cities like Los Angeles or New York you are almost guaranteed to run into someone in-person over the next 12 months or so. I don’t like blocking people for this reason – I’d rather a conversation has died than be subjected to the awkward run-in.
You get slow faded.
Slow Fade
lacking in readiness, or willingness to accept a budding relationship therefore, institutes this passive aggressive method of disappearing from a relationship all together over an extended period of time.
Ghost in your phone. You just don’t catch up again. Nothing bad happened, things just don’t keep going. There may be a moment in the future where you run into each other in another city and have the chance to connect, but the connection is pretty weak besides the date you had.
You lurk. Because you have the other person’s socials you have a portal into their life, and while you may be open for reconnection, you think to yourself: “eh if they really wanted to they would make a move.”
You continue chatting off-and-on over text every now and then and form a longer term friendship. And, as with many friendships, you might only connect once every couple of months with one another, but it largely transitions to something platonic.
You become distant digital friends. You send each other memes or other mementos or relevant bits of information over social apps, but not really over text. Your relationship turns into a “we had a good time together and we share interest in mutual topics” meme fest.
The long game of social media
As I read over the after-meeting category I notice that most of those bullets are negative. They resemble aversion, indifference, and boredom. They are the end of the line or the beginning of a long, slow, painful exposure to someone else’s life.
That is really what social media is though.
When you connect with someone’s social profile you’re opting-in to receiving their lives as digital real estate on your phone and in your attention span. Even if you had a great time with someone you’re put into a gray space of being on the sidelines of their life. This opt-in happens before meeting people and even if you don’t ever get to meet someone.
Because social media is a tool in getting to know people, I noticed that I use it up front before truly meeting someone in person without really understanding that I’m opting-in to their lives no matter what I think of that person. The initial contact on a dating app is the onramp to this stranger’s life.
Now that I go through the people I follow on both Snapchat and Instagram I see a huge list of people that I had the dating app for context for, but it’s been so long since I connected with a lot of these people that I feel like I now don’t remember most of them. I feel like I have to keep a log of these people and their interests if I were to really keep in touch with them. With Snapchat specifically, because you are meant to communicate quite regularly with your connections, I am lacking context to remember who a lot of these people are. Yes, we may have covered the basics during our time together but it’s hard to remember who someone is behind a Bitmoji on Snapchat.
On the other side, I see people watching my stories who I haven’t interacted with for years, and the algorithms know which friends I am most interested in, so it feeds me their posts and stories first.
Empty connections
I haven’t really thought about how many digital relationships I’ve accumulated by trying to use social media to better vet someone through a dating app. Is the lesson that it’s better to chat with someone where you met them online (in the dating app) and leave a deeper connection to when you’re in-person? That you should not share social media until after you connect with them in person and have formed a second, real-life opinion of who this person is?
One approach would be to cut out the stale connections, but that feels cold when you either 1) really were attracted to them and / or 2) never really had a negative reason for removing them as a connection.
The real tradeoff seems to be time and potentially envy or jealousy. Social media can provoke jealousy when you see a connection out and about doing things that you may want to do (with or without them) so are we just subscribing to more curated examples of how people want to be perceived living their best lives?
When the clock runs out
It’s hard to look through a list of contacts and followers and say that there was never any meaning of connection there, but sometimes time expires on relationships.
The difference between dating relationships and normal friendships is that there’s a romantic magnetism that brought the relationship together in the first place. So to break that line of connection is to decide not to pursue the magnetism any more. Our loss-aversion prevents us from looking at these connections and doing what probably is healthiest and cutting them off, but maybe we need to be better about enriching these relationships in the first place.
Don’t think of them as missed connections that have become so distant that they’re hard to re-kindle, but rather as an ember that just needs a bit of spark.
It’s still tough though – a lot of connections on dating apps are short-lived. Proximity is so important for keeping in touch with someone, especially a romantic interest which is where social media can help step-in by providing an update on whether someone is nearby and able to meet for a drink or catch-up. Grindr lets you see the distance someone is from you which on more than one occasion has leant itself to be useful for reconnecting with someone, but that’s not a reliable strategy for building meaningful relationships in the long run.
Maybe the real challenge is answering the question of how long is your time horizon for dating? Anyone you determine to be less than your upper limit of patience for reconnecting or for keeping that magnetism should be worth considering removing from your social media to free yourself the space to let better candidates in.
Dating relationships in that sense aren’t much different than real friendships in general – go open up Facebook right now and ask yourself how many of these people you probably were “friends” with back in the day are worth your attention now, 10 years later.
The key takeaway from this breakdown for me is to be more critical of the people I decide to opt-into while I’m just beginning to get to know them. The people I meet on dating apps and subsequently in-person that I have a natural connection with are worth keeping around. The ones I don’t have a natural connection with or that I thirst over? Probably better to remove from my life. It’s hard not to ogle over some people – 100% – but it rationally is probably better for my well being.
I hope to write a bit more succinctly, but I enjoyed getting this down on paper.
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