Featured Prose | January 24, 2025

Shannon Cain’s “How to Date a Feminist” is a reconnaissance transmission from the world of online dating for women over fifty living in Paris. First featured in TMR 47.3, Cain’s essay bears witness to the difficulty of finding feminist love while holding out for its eventual fruition.

How to Date a Feminist

Shannon Cain

 

Are you a feminist, René?

Uh I dunno, I respect women.

I don’t know what that means. Equal treatment?

Anyway you have great legs.

 

When my last love affair ended, I was living on the Côte d’Azur in a medieval tourist village just north of Nice. The region was home to the Front National and its Le Pen political dynasty. After my breakup I went back to Tinder, where I found a battalion of leathery white men smoking cigars on sailboats, and I realized that as a feminist looking for love, I’d made a grave error in leaving Paris.

Just as I was beginning to resign myself to celibacy, the pandemic arrived, sealing the deal. Thank god I was no longer with my ex-lover. Had we decided to ride it out as a couple, we would have been a disaster. Still, I missed him fiercely. Prior to the pandemic, I’d rented an eighteenth-century stone house facing the church to launch a little nonprofit arts program. I lived upstairs and welcomed the public downstairs. The work was satisfying and difficult, distracting me from my loneliness. Then COVID struck and there was no more public: the pretty little village emptied of tourists. I left the house only to take 2 am walks, trudging like the undead around the edges of the ramparts. I had my groceries delivered. I cooked food, then I ate it. My sloppy housework got sloppier. I sobbed through the nights. One morning six months into the pandemic, I woke up to find my neighbor watering the dying plants in front of my house.

I closed the doors of the arts association and moved back to Paris. I began dating, enthusiastically at first, then mechanically. I wasn’t finding love and I was still lonely as hell. This, too, shall pass, I told myself. Buck up, you’re alive, quit with the self-pity.

That was three years ago.

My current internet dating profile—not just on Tinder but also Hinge, Bumble, OKCupid, and Feeld—was born in the months leading up to the US Supreme Court shenanigans of June 2022. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, women on my Facebook online dating support groups began adding “vasectomy only” to their profiles. My strategy resembles more a reverse Lysistrata:

I have a kink for feminist men. Make me wet with your respect and kindness. Let me wrap my lips around your positive masculinity. Watch me orgasm in public from the sheer joy of having been asked my opinion. Beat a path through the crowd of dudebros: your enlightened confidence and egalitarian charm will bring me to my knees.

The text is accompanied by a handful of photos of me in various degrees of wholesomeness. The most risqué is a Basic Instinct homage I took one afternoon in a summer dress: a body selfie of pale thighs and silky florals, at its center a triangle of shadow. There’s the crossed-legs-in-front-of-the-bedroom-window pic, the vast apartment complexes of the 19th arrondissement hulking in the background and the Parc du Buttes Chaumont on the horizon, morning light doing a lovely job on my calves. This one attracts a fair amount of attention from the foot fetishists. My profile photo is the night-out shot: short sequined dress, high heels, big hair. I also include the photo-booth ID picture I took for my visa renewal application that came out improbably well, another of me standing on a cliff in a national park with snowy peaks in the background, and a playful shot of me in happier days, posing in a retro dress and grinning at the cat as I tend to the flowers in front of my house with a rubber-duckie watering can.

To find my most recent ex-boyfriend took about fifty dates. Fifty dates require roughly 46,500 profile swipes. I know this because in 2022 I did a statistical analysis. To find twenty-five profiles that made me want to swipe right, I swiped left through 905 others. Of those twenty-five, fourteen were matches: they liked my profile, too. Of those fourteen, eleven messaged me to chat. Of those eleven, two replied correctly to my one and only screening question: Are you a feminist? I set dates with the two feminists. One of them stood me up. The other bored me to pieces. The whole experiment—swiping and matching and messaging and filtering and scheduling—took two weeks and landed me exactly one date. Presuming I’ll again need 46,500 swipes, give or take, to find my next partner, I figure I should have him bagged in roughly two and a half years.

Today I’ve slept late and there’s nothing for breakfast in the kitchen. My shopping bag and shoes wait by the front door. Vintage Britney Spears loops in my head: My loneliness. Is killing me.

Most mornings I pace my apartment in a weird agony. Don’t look to others to make you happy, says the internet. Also: Too much solitude is harmful.

I need orange juice and a baguette. My stomach growls, and yet I don’t want to leave. It’s a beautiful morning. The apartment is drenched in sunlight. I swept the floors yesterday. More than anything, I just want to stay home.

Being outside is fine, just fine: the world is beautiful out here. Children in the streets, lovers, people reading novels by the canal. There’s no traffic, and I realize today’s Sunday. The greengrocer unclogs the oranges in the juice machine, the boulangerie smells divine, I am handed a loaf straight from the oven. It’s late summertime, the plague is lifting, I’m strolling home in the city of light with the warm staff of life tucked under my arm, and I’ve never felt quite so alone.

I believe in that which we can’t yet explain—the stuff that befuddles quantum physicists, the energy we represent that never dissipates, moving from one living vessel to the next in a grand, crazy, immeasurable pattern of spacelessness and timelessness. I believe wholeheartedly in the concept of soulmates, but I refuse to believe the universe doles them out like a cheapskate: only one per lifetime, sorry. My next soulmate is out there, somewhere. Where the fuck are you, already?

Using Tinder is like sitting at a sidewalk café in a city populated entirely by people who meet your attraction settings. For introverts this system is a delight, since we can participate from the privacy of our dark little caves. In front of my onscreen terrasse there passes a stream of straight men aged forty-seven to sixty-two who live within a twenty-kilometer radius of my apartment: a demographic of mind-bending scope and diversity.

I scan the faces of the digital passersby, watch their body language, search for a certain confidence in their stride. I strain to make eye contact with someone interesting in the parade of pedestrian pedestrians trailing basic-boy thought bubbles: Sapiosexual! Carpe diem! No drama! Surely these men are not as boring as they make themselves out to be. Certainly there is more to their lives than car-commute selfies and vacation shots of Machu Picchu?

I sit in my couch-café for an hour and watch a hundred men trudge past, and at last here he comes: I don’t know, maybe a tattooed, countercultural kinda fellow, a human with a certain something in his walk. His profile is giving artist. It’s giving empath. If I’m lucky, it’s giving sex god.

Home tonight from a date with a white-bearded gentilhomme named Henri who made me want to stand up and walk away as he was blabbing.

What if I actually did this? The next time some blowhard in a nice suit starts the date admitting he’s never visited the US and then begins informing me all about American culture, or the next time I’m treated to a droning lecture on the quality of butter produced in lower Normandy versus the butter from upper Normandy, what if I just reach for my purse and leave the restaurant without comment, without looking back?

Tonight I found myself gazing wistfully at the door, wishing I were walking through it. Instead I let Henri wind down his lecture on US economics and then I said, It seems to me as though you were just explaining my own country to me.

So he pivoted toward explaining fundamentals about life in France as though I hadn’t just told him I’ve lived here nearly a decade. Someone in this man’s life had taught him how to dominate a conversation, undoubtedly by example. To shift the mood and to model for him what interesting dialogue looks like, I told him an outrageous anecdote about a client of mine. He found it hilarious and insisted I needed to write it as a novel. Deploying with great gusto his average intellect, limited imagination, and oversized ego, he began dictating the plot of my next book to me. Kept plowing right through, ignoring the insistent shake of my head and the frown on my brow.

No, no! Hang on! he said, as though I had a problem with his book idea and not his personality. Hear me out!

I touched his sleeve. Usually this calms down the talkers, but not this one. Are you a writer? I finally asked him.

Oh no, of course not, I can’t—

The thing about writers—, I said.

I mean, I work in IT, I’m not an artist or anything—

The thing about writers—, I said.

It’s a great idea, though, he informed me. You should write it.

If you have an idea for a book, I blurted, you should learn how to write one yourself.

Here we were: the moment in a date when a man realizes he’s in the company of a woman who is smarter than he is. (I can also identify the moment in a date when a man becomes aroused that he’s found his intellectual match. Guess which is more fun.)

Henri spoke with his finger raised between us as if anticipating interruption. I accommodated him by interrupting as frequently as I could manage. Principally to let him know that his lectures were neither educational nor interesting. This frustrated him. I was not listening quietly. I was not nodding. He complained I wasn’t letting him get a word in edgewise.

He said, What you don’t understand is—

I said, Listen, don’t presume what I don’t understand. You aren’t in my head.

It’s just an expression, he informed me.

I’m trying to tell you something, I said.

One of the men with whom I had a first date wanted to know whether I was concerned that guys would claim to be feminist when they aren’t, just to get laid. Au contraire, Monsieur, I replied. Not only is faux feminism easy to sniff out, the reality is that very few men even attempt it, as though cockblocked by their own egos.

When I shifted to my feminist kink profile, I also changed my screening question from What do you think of feminism to Are you a feminist, and the difference in responses was striking. While I’d presumed the open-endedness of the former would help me screen for allies, in fact it allowed wiggle room for pretenders. Demanding a binary response was like stumbling upon a secret code, the Open Sesame I’d been looking for. Those who respond Of course or How could I not be or even simply Yes are a distinct minority.

When I ask if they’re a feminist, a certain number of men do me the favor of self-selecting and just disappear. Another percentage reply, Um, no. Most of those who remain are either performing the can-I-preserve-my-dignity-and-still-get-sex mating dance or, worse, hoping to play out some incel fuck-a-feminist-into-submission fantasy. While they will not claim feminism, they will send a defense, generally lengthy, outlining their commitment to the well-being of women. My boss is a woman; I have an innate femininity; I have huge respect for women; I want the best for my daughters; I’m a modern gentleman; I marched on Women’s Day; I admire women for their beauty and their delicacy; I’m for feminism as long as it’s intelligent; I have more women friends than men; I was raised by women.

Me:

Okay! But not a feminist?

Them:

Define feminism!

Me:

www.wikipedia.fr/feminisme

Them:

Labels don’t matter! They constrain the spirit! I’m open minded! The term is reductive and limiting! My respect for women goes far beyond politics!

Me:

Okay thanks good luck to you bye now

Them, usually:

Whatever. Bye.

Them, sometimes:

So you won’t explain yourself? Nothing to say? A little condescending, you who seem to understand everything. You’re pathetic.

Let’s talk about that relative who’s been married since before the birth of the internet but nevertheless has a firm opinion about Tinder. She will lap up your hilarious dating stories like it’s Netflix on a Friday night and then conclude you aren’t finding love because what do you expect? It’s Tinder! Tinder’s a cesspool, a street corner for the dregs of society! Letting the irony escape her that you’re out there on that street corner, too.

No question that online dating is a minefield of misogyny, but welcome to the air we breathe. Tinder is no more a sexist environment than a singles’ bar. No more misogynistic than a sports match, a shopping center, a senior prom. If you’re looking to avoid patriarchal dating standards, finding a date online is no less feminist than shaving your legs, squeezing into something uncomfortable, and spending an hour or two in front of the mirror and a bundle of money on drinks, just to sit at a table with your girlfriends and yell small talk over the music at each other as you wait for the pack of dudes circling your periphery to finally feel drunk enough to say hello.

As for the question of safety: Have you ever met a beautiful stranger on the street? In the supermarket? In a bar? Felt a little thrill when they handed you their card and said, Call me? Back at home, their card burning in your hand, Google tells you nothing. You wish you could see their dating profile. Why isn’t it a red flag when a single person isn’t on a dating app?

Most apps allow you to filter profiles by political affiliation, a potentially life-saving measure. Affirming the broad 2017 study published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences that linked political conservatism with increased responses to negative stimuli, results of a 2020 poll of 250 adults conducted by researchers Malcolm and Simone Collins found that compared to liberals, conservative men reported disturbingly higher rates of sexual arousal regarding both rape role play (38 vs. 8 percent) as well as the idea of actual rape (25 vs. 2 percent).

If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, it becomes clear that the best personal defense strategy for any female-identifying human—our most reliable way to minimize the chances of sexual violence—is to filter our settings for liberals only (and not to be fooled by the legions of conservatives hiding behind “apolitical” as an affiliation). This obviously doesn’t guarantee your date will turn out to be progressive, but honey, if he can’t even check the box, don’t take him home.

Once upon a time I met a man in a supermarket. Throwing caution to the wind, I said yes to a date. He showed up at my door that night in a pickup truck with a What About Benghazi bumper sticker. Another time I met a man on the metro. Throwing caution to the wind, I allowed him to walk me home, where he tried to forcibly kiss me at my front door. Another time I threw caution to the wind by giving my phone number to a man I met in the park, and he used it to stalk me online. Yet in more than a hundred internet dates, never once has a man imposed a nonconsensual kiss or touch, and it’s not because my swiping judgment is better than any other woman’s. It’s simply that by swiping left on right-wing men, the odds have been in my favor all along.

In French there is no word for solitude. La solitude is a false friend. It does not mean, as it does in English, the neutral state of being alone. Attached to la solitude is the connotation of sadness. To express the positive aspects of solitude requires a modifier in order to reassure your audience all is well: Non, mais c’est une bonne solitude!

The introvert’s dilemma: we set up a life of solitude and then look around and wonder why we’re lonely. Just because I want solitude doesn’t mean I don’t want romantic love. There is no reason I can’t have a healthy measure of both. This, in part, is why I’m a defender of online dating: my precious solitude should not be compromised by methods that basically boil down to going out into public as often as possible in the hope of meeting the right person by accident. Which method is more efficient? When I put in the swiping time, the apps get me one or two dates per week. Over the last year alone, they’ve connected me to dozens of attractive feminist strangers.

But I write stories. Stories need a narrative arc. There is no narrative arc to dating. It’s a linear experience with either an abrupt stop or no end whatsoever. Either way, the outcome rarely relates to the beginning or the middle of the tale. You find your partner and the dating story ends, or you keep looking and the search goes on into perpetuity like a rope of despair you’re supposed to follow until you somehow convince yourself you can live without love. How the hell am I supposed to end a narrative that consists of loosely connected romantic episodes featuring a character who remains as lonely in the end as she was in the beginning?

I search picaresque and confirm to my chagrin the formal tradition in which I’m working. I want nothing to do with the mid-century American picaros shoved down our throats by Kerouac, Kesey, and Updike and much less with their equally rape-y Spanish forebears. I find solace in a research paper arguing that picaresque literature underwent a late-twentieth-century renaissance that brought a feminist wave to the form: Atwood, Allende, Zimmer-Bradley.

Last week I found a sex-god profile and met him for an afternoon matinee. Normally I arrange to meet my first dates in a bar three minutes from my apartment, but Paris was suffering a heat wave, and when I mentioned in our chat I was planning to spend the afternoon at the movies, he said he’d join me. I was already well inclined to spend a couple of hours in the dark next to this man, Marco, given that he’d aced the feminist test, replying, I try to be. Quickly thereafter our conversation turned thrillingly naughty.

There wasn’t much playing at either theater on the canal: the best choices were an obscure indie art film about a household android or an American comic-book blockbuster. I sent Marco a link to the former, and we met in the lobby. He looked like his pictures: how refreshing.

On Marco’s profile—which I found on Feeld, a site for the more sexually motivated—he described himself as a cultivated businessman with a dirty mind. His photos managed to be both wholesome and erotic. When he responded to my feminist kink profile with appreciation, adding, my stiff positive masculinity is eager to meet you, I headed straight to the bedroom and masturbated furiously to his picture, imagining the moment in the theater (which I figured, rightly, I could manifest simply by showing up in my shortest dress) when, after interminable waiting, he leans over and whispers, This film is a little boring, non? And the back of his hand grazes my thigh, lifts my skirt, and I feel his palm resting heavily within a finger’s reach of its destination, waiting confidently for my legs to part.

Later I took Marco home and found his skills and talents began and ended with movie-theater groping. Nonetheless he was worth the price of the ticket, not only for his timing but also for his touch, his aim, his accuracy, and his attention to detail. Had I not stopped him, my throaty exclamations of pleasure would have turned heads, to say the least, in the deathly quiet theater. Instead, panting in frustration and clutching his wrist, I stilled his fingers.

Perhaps we should have gone to see Thor, he said.

What do I look for in a dating profile? Which are the pages that stop my swipe finger?

I stop for a direct, frank gaze into the lens. I stop for the creative use of language. I stop for an artistic sensibility—a sense of design, an interest in self-presentation. I stop for an indication he’s a sexual being: a beach pic, a pillow shot. I stop for confidence. I stop for a man unafraid to be desirable.

Once I’ve stopped, what are my red flags? Here I risk violating the online dating Girl Code, which holds that one mustn’t correct bad male behavior, because it only helps them hide it from the next sister in the struggle. For the sake of science, I guess, here goes: I swipe left on men with more than one shot in sunglasses. For that matter I swipe left on anyone trying to escape the camera, whether via blurriness or ski helmet or diving goggles or eyeball close-ups or bad lighting or the refusal to smile.

I swipe left on men posing with tigers, golf clubs, cigars, fish, and impoverished children. I swipe left on pretty boys with no text, especially when there’s a gym shot involved. I swipe left on profiles without photos, of course: the cheaters, a crowd best left to their own manipulations. I swipe left on cliché: Carpe diem / I’m no Prince Charming / life is short / The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.

I swipe left on the men who have apparently convinced themselves they’re some fictional age (the cat no longer twitches when, into the silence of the room, I yell, Fifty-five my ass, Jean-Paul). I swipe left on the ones who dangle their younger self as bait and reveal their current face only in the last photo.

I swipe left on the twenty-year-olds who have changed their age to fifty in a quest to fulfill their MILF fantasies. I swipe left on selfies taken from dick level, as though to preview his face as you’re doing the deed. I swipe left on the weirdly high number of men sticking out their tongues, although I still can’t determine whether this is about cunnilingus or Miley Cyrus. I swipe left on tall men who inform you they’re tall, because apparently it matters.

I swipe left on transparent attempts to attract the female sensibility: wearing an apron; cuddling a puppy; playing tea party with someone’s five-year-old. I swipe left on the legions of men who inform me I don’t see likes! Send me a message! because they don’t understand how the apps work: you need a mutual match before a message exchange, dimwit.

I swipe left on evidence of seduction by cash: men posing with cocktails, knee-deep in turquoise water, yacht in the background, expensive plates of food, some sort of fast vehicle. I am however equally judgy of the mainstream middle class, swiping decidedly left on car-commute selfies, corporate sports team logos, and cornflower-blue dress shirts in LinkedIn profile pics. I swipe left on those who waste their precious first impression giving me their rap sheet: 6′1″, 210 lbs, green eyes, divorced, two kids in shared custody.

I swipe left on men who feel the need to scold strangers: Recent photos only! Stop with the sunglasses! Stop with the photos of your feet! Stop with the bad grammar!

I swipe left on the overuse of emojis. By which I mean more than one. I swipe left on goofball profiles with nothing but exaggerated grins, clown noses, and dudes leaping off of things, their arms spread in glee. I’m looking for a lover, not a play date.

I swipe left on evidence of shame for being on a dating site. We’ll tell people we met at the library. Here to not be here. I swipe left on the Eeyores: After an experience I’d rather forget I’m back here trying again. I doubt I’ll have much luck on this site but here goes.

I swipe left on the vast masses of sad souls living unexamined lives: It’s hard to describe yourself. Not much into the virtual. Let’s meet in person, I’ll let you discover the rest.

I swipe left on ill-chosen theme songs. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” “Every Breath You Take.” Anything by Kanye West.

But what about profiles that make me stop? Direct gaze: check; creative language: check; hot shirtless pic: check? Once I’ve stopped, why do I swipe right?

A stance, a haircut, the eyeglasses, the eyes. A look, a nose, a confident grin. Health. An unconventional face. The arm of a grown child draped comfortably over his shoulder. Photos that reveal a life, a community, an originality. A sense of self.

A passion. For what, it hardly matters. Give me deep-sea diving, give me hip-hop dancing, give me chess tournaments, medieval poetry, vintage wristwatches, Japanese tea ceremonies, the tango: whatever. I am seduced by the courage to be passionate.

I arrange a date with a former Israeli military pilot named Uri. Tall, attentive, romantic, declares his profile. His head is turned away from the camera, eyes downcast to show off a long straight nose and square jawline under a trim beard. His other photos are distance shots giving me a lean body and sexy forearms, but no eyes.

Are you a feminist, Uri?

Yes, and also respectful of the ancient traditions. When women were leaders.

The old matriarchal societies?

If only they existed as clearly in history as they do in our imaginations.

Exactly.

We set a date. He sent me his number, and my thumbs were typing back my own before I gave them much time to think about it. On WhatsApp I told him, Normally I wait until after the date to share my number. No idea why I just broke my rule.

Because you must be feeling what I’m feeling. There’s mutual desire here.

But why are you hiding from the camera? I replied.

Immediately he sent a photo of himself looking dead-on into the lens, a frank and direct gaze out of intense brown eyes. Why, I wondered, isn’t this shot part of his profile? How out-of-date is it? But his hand resting lightly on his crossed arm looked as though it wanted to be against my skin.

Ohlalalaa, I texted.

His response came attached as an audio file in a deep and accented voice. See you Wednesday.

Sometimes I tell Tinder I’m looking for women, to discover what men are seeing when they swipe. Most recently I went back into the land of middle-aged straight women to determine how strange my feminist kink profile really was. Were there other women on Tinder as blunt and bizarre as me?

Not really. A few used the word “feminist,” many referenced respect, but after an hour of swiping I found no profiles quite as experimental as mine.

But lordy, the quality of our pages! Hardly surprising given that women have been swimming in the waters of appearance all our lives; we know how to present ourselves. What I wasn’t prepared for, when I took a closer look, is what a different world the women’s side of Tinder really is.

Among my age group, forty-seven to sixty-two years old, in the greater Paris metro region, I found profile after profile of attractive, interesting women with clear photographs and even clearer text. Photos in sunglasses and goggles were a rarity compared to the men’s side, where profiles without a single shot revealing their eyes is more common than you’d think. Women don’t hide our faces in shadow. We post very few car-commute selfies. Women never, ever post photos with the ex cropped out, standard practice for the boys. Profiles without text are the exception, whereas more often than not, men write exactly nothing.

There is no end to this picaresque. There will be only a recounting of the next date, then the next, including whatever everyday disaster befalls me tonight with the sexy Israeli. The weariness one feels in the absence of love! So heavy and so tired. Existentialist fears kick around in my chest. What does being alone really mean? Are we ever truly alone? Aren’t we always? Are some of us destined to be more alone than others? Is it better to be lonely with a companion than lonely alone?

Can we be happy and unloved?

No, really, can we?

What did I expect? I knew France was a misogynist country long before I chose to exile here. In many ways entering the dating pool in France has been like reverting to high school. I look around at the testosterone monsters running the hallways of Tinder and wonder, as I did in my sophomore year, how in the hell I’ll manage to find one of them to love.

My family lived in the suburbs of Paris for a year when I was thirteen. France was the first place I was ever sexually harassed: a carload of men yelled at me on my way to the school bus stop, jerking me rudely into womanhood. I will never forget the incline of that hill, the cracked sidewalk, the high stone wall to my left. Soon after that, a man my grandfather’s age wandered into the bus shelter where I waited alone, a pink blob of penis in his hand. Also, there was the time I was on the commuter RER train on my way home from the orthodontist when I looked up to see the man sitting across from me, a leer on his face and his dick hanging outside his pants. And the afternoon on the Champs-Élysées with my mother, when I had to translate as she smiled politely at a stranger who had approached her to ask, standing close, if he could lick her ice-cream cone.

It’s 9 pm. No word from the fighter pilot. I texted him this afternoon at 3 pm to confirm a time for our date tonight and as of yet have had no response. It’s been only three days since I sent him the address of the restaurant and he replied, See you Wednesday!

Just as I am texting a friend looks like the sexy Israeli is ghosting me, my WhatsApp pings and it’s him.

Sorry but no news from you until today … , it says, to my incredulous eyes. Too bad, I really wanted to honor your body.

I forward screenshots to my friend. What in the Royal Kingdom of Gaslight is this bullshit, she replies.

“Gentlemen, if you are not having sex,” says the stand-up comic Iliza Shlesinger, “and the narrative of your life is that you are not having sex because women are bitches, women are whores, that you’re a nice guy and you deserve better … , that is nature’s way of saying you should not be having sex, for you failed to adapt and evolve, and there should be no more of your kind.”

Historians will reflect on Tinder as a runaway engine for social change, a sledgehammer for feminist sexual liberation, and the information superhighway to Choice City. Used properly, online dating can work as a long-distance prophylactic, keeping penises most likely to carry unwanted sperm from coming anywhere near your vagina. Tinder Premium memberships should be available for free at Planned Parenthood.

Women have greater control over natural selection than ever before, causing an entire, massive demographic of emotionally inept men to flip decidedly out. Online dating may well become responsible for the advancement our human species needs in order to survive an overcrowded and hot planet on which good social skills will certainly mean life or death.

My occasional negging by strangers is nothing compared to what’s happening in the inboxes of younger women. I am a member of a variety of Facebook groups about dating, which keep me informed about the avalanche of abuse Millennials and Gen Zers are facing on a daily basis. The wisdom and insight I gain from these online communities has helped me identify and prevent male nonsense of every kind.

In today’s feed I find a typical example from my favorite such group (I Am a Rando on Tinder and Here Are My Demands), the reaction of a guy who propositioned OP with a first date at his place. I don’t do first dates at either home, she replied. Necessary caution and all that. We can smoke in a park or grab a coffee maybe.

His response (sic):

LMAO absolutely no worries at all and I’m sorry I have to say this but it’s always girls of your caliber who are like 3s or 4s that think they are more then what they really are and unfortunately you are not and you know where you stand in life especially compared to me and when you have a guy who is so much more successful then you I would definitely change your approach because I doubt there are many guys like me who would ever be interested in meeting you let alone talking with you unless you were giving them a BJ … not to mention the effort you put in which screams that you think you are like more which is hilarious. Girls like you legit make online dating pathetic. I guess people really are nuts. Take care.

Another gem from today’s feed, from the group Men Talking to Themselves Online:

Hey R—, you may not remember me but two years ago on this day you were going through some stuff. You called me a sexist which probably doesn’t narrow it down much for you since you were completely psycho in our interaction. That said, I worry. I’m an empath. Did you get on a mood stabilizer? Were you able to google “sexist?”

Finally a message posted in Stop Calling Us Females, You Fucking Ferengi:

Honestly, D—. You seem like a amazin woman but I don’t think we’re compatible, you ate the whole damn salad which isn’t ladylike. Makes me feel like you’re greedy for food and I need a woman who knows when to stop eating. I just feel like you’d be overweight in the near future. I still want to hang out but that just bothered me. I almost exploded. I love your vibe and your energy, though. You’re perfect it’s just that one thing plus it was our first date. You was pose to have butterflies n shit how could you eat that much.

Another beautiful Sunday morning, another baguette, another bottle of orange juice. The machine at the greengrocer is clogged again. At this point I could unblock the mechanism myself, but that would be rude, so I wait for the clerk to open the machine and yank out the spent peel jamming up the works. I feel my loneliness aging me. My skin, my muscles, my gut, my mind. Lately the studies about the impact of loneliness on the body are showing up in my feed. I read the headlines and skip the articles, given the news only gets worse from there.

Once upon a time I delivered a lecture about auto-fiction to an audience of writers. Under the conviction that a craft lecture is incomplete without the vulnerability of a personal story, I used my own romantic life and dating profile as an entry into the subject. The connection was tenuous at best and found me pursuing the bizarre question of whether I was loveable. It wasn’t until much later that I saw the falsity of my concept. Of course I was loveable, and of course I knew it! My god, I’ve been married three times and had as many significant love affairs. This life has loved me good and hard. If anything the problem is quite the opposite: I’ve had romantic love that is sincere, vulnerable, honest, terrifying, and joyous. After fifty-nine years on this planet and all that good loving, I guess I’m just unwilling to dick around with Mister Almost Right.

The weather is perfect. I meander the sidewalk as though it’s my living room. I slept well last night. Another episode of sadness is coming on, another miniature meltdown, and I decide to have it alongside the canal instead of in the apartment. I sit on the quai with my bare feet dangling over the water and cry quietly under my sunglasses. I’m just aging! Of course! It was bound to happen! But so rapidly? The water runs swift and brilliant, fall leaves already eddying at the stone embankments. Since the pandemic and this extended forced solitude, my skin has begun to show its age.

Mornings remain the worst. This weird agony still clings like a worried toddler. A married friend once told me she sometimes felt this agony too, that being with someone isn’t necessarily a ticket out of loneliness, and of course she’s right; I’ve known the desperate emptiness of feeling alone inside a partnership. Still: I’m weeping at the kitchen counter over a cup of black coffee because there’s nobody to ask if they’d mind running out for some milk.

As for my narrative arc? Because I’m a feminist storyteller, you won’t catch this protagonist riding off into the sunset with her prince charmant. But as a human animal hungry for companionship, more than anything that’s precisely the ride I want. In literature, a happy ending is a marvel, and hard to achieve. For such an ending to succeed, the story must be complex and bittersweet, but it must also exist in a world in which bliss is possible, where earnest happiness has existed before. Helped by this logic, I recall the good, robust loving I’ve known, finding precedent for joy. I’m angling for an end to my story that you, dear reader, would find terribly unsatisfying. I intend it simply to fade into a boring mist of everyday satisfaction.

I insist on a feminist man because I have little respect for those who aren’t, and to love someone we must also hold them in esteem. Perhaps in the end this is simply about patience. Perhaps my next soulmate is working through some shit, examining some baggage, before he’s ready to meet me again. In the meantime I pursue my Tinder picaresque. I fly my feminist flag to signal my tribe and I stay the course, learning to accept that there’s a reason the cosmic energy we’re all made of is taking its time to reassemble itself into the love I’m swiping for.

***

Shannon Cain’s short stories have been recognized with the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the NEA. Her collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2011. This is her first published nonfiction.