Taking the Backroad

An Ode to Crushes & Being Off Dating Apps

I’ve finally pinpointed the reason I find dating apps so unappealing: there’s no mystery. Each profile is a neat bundle of information, delivered to your fingertips for consideration. That’s great for efficiency, and I’m sure it’s one of the draws for folks who are actively seeking a partner, but what about the rest of us? I, for one, don’t want efficiency. I don’t want to know that you’re single and interested in women and took a silly photo with a tree last year, and I certainly don’t want to decide whether or not to talk to you based on your height, your star sign, where you live, or what you do for work. I don’t want to know. What I want, reader, is to build a version of you that doesn’t exist. I want the chance to wonder:

Are we friends? Are we flirting? Is that a wedding band or an Oura ring? Did you look at me for just a little longer than I would have expected, or have I just gotten used to people taking refuge in their phone screens instead of making eye contact? Do I have something in my teeth? Did you mention your ex because you want me to know you’re single? Are you single? Are you attracted to women? Are you attracted to me? Did you follow me on Instagram three days after we met because you were thinking about me and wanted an excuse to make contact, or did I just pop up as a recommended account because Meta knows far too much about all of us?

What I want, clearly, is a crush—or two or three or five; unserious potential futures to fuel my daydreams. Crushes aren’t made of cold, efficient facts. You know as well as I do that they form in an instant: a friend of a friend of a friend laughs at your Lord of the Rings joke in a room full of people who didn’t get the reference; across the cafe, someone whose name you’ll never know flexes their forearms or rakes their fingers through their hair (if you get it you get it, and I know some of you do); the person you’ve just met starts to tell you about their niche interest and you realize you could listen to them for hours. Crushes live somewhere on the curving, winding, twisting back road of the unknown, fed by the push and pull of will they/won’t they, the strategic questions, the heart-pounding excitement when someone you find attractive seeks you out rather than the reverse. Each new spark is a dance whose steps you make up as you go along, not-quite-courtship-but-maybe-it-could-be, Juliet and Dawsey in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

In a world as full of information as ours, though, not knowing is not encouraged. With a first name and few keystrokes, social media and the internet deliver details of a stranger’s life that turn the backroad into a highway just as efficiently as a dating app profile does. Curiosity leads me into this information trap more often than I’d like, especially now that my expanding cycling universe means I meet new people in person more regularly, but I’m working on it. Impatient as I am to know the answers to my questions, I remind myself that asking them in person is much more interesting than asking the internet. In person, your crush might hand you a glass of water. Your fingers might touch. Do they feel the electricity, too?