you don't want to date a concept

you want a person

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There’s a certain kind of engagement post where you put up a picture of a man or a woman and ask, basically “would you date and/or sleep with” the person pictured. These posts were always bad but they’ve become sort of laboratories of new and advanced brainworms as places like Twitter-now-X have wandering packs of people who react this way to the most innocuous stories of “girls having a nice time”:

Anyway, this is not a dating advice newsletter, nor do I have any dating advice, nor if I did should you take it from me, but the thing that always gets me when I’m looking at these things is that they’re framed like “WOMEN: WHAT DO YOU THINK” and the idea is to form the aggregate, statistical Woman.

I’m not really interested in the specifics of the latest variation of this kind of discourse (you can read a write-up of it here, if you want), but I have a blunter and perhaps more obvious point to make: whoever you are, whatever you want, you will never date the aggregate person. You will only date people. You are only ever going to be romantically involved with individuals. The romantic and sexual preferences of individuals vary wildly from person to person and also across one person’s life time. The decision to shift somebody from an individual to a category is a real failure of love (or a deliberate withdrawal of love).

Or, you know, maybe not—maybe feeling like the aggregate member of your gender and being treated as such is somebody’s particular thing. Maybe feeling like a relationship comes with clear expectations, rules for how to think about each other, and roles to perform, maybe all of that is what gives somebody their needed emotional security and safety. I don’t know! Up close, all people are weird. That’s my real point. What they find intolerable, what they like, what they’re willing to forgive—all of this can be incredibly un-intuitive and incomprehensible to another person.¹ When a lady goes on TikTok and says “when men drink Diet Coke that gives me the ick” that is not the oracular voice of Woman. Unless you happen to (1) carry a torch for that woman and (2) have a Diet Coke–based lifestyle, that kind of post means nothing for you.

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Nevertheless, people love making posts like this. Women love posting stuff that’s like “fellas, what do you think” or about their increasingly esoteric dealbreakers, and that is because you always get a reaction. Men love posting stuff like “WOMEN: MEN DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR JOB OR IF YOU CAN READ A MENU.”² Then you procede to the next stage where people make equally wild pronouncements like “women don’t like muscles, women like Harry Styles,” some picture of a guy in a sweater that is labelled The Female Gaze, that guy who is drinking blood or whatever to stay alive forever pops his waxen face in to say “I look five years old ;),” some other brand launches an ill-fitting polyester sundress, and so on and so on.

And even though there really could not be a type of post with fewer implications for somebody personally, suddenly you’re seeing these long responses that are like well, I’m glad my wife didn’t think like you or else we wouldn’t have had thirty long, happy, Diet Coke–filled years together come August.…

Sometimes these things are a form of aimless flirtation, in which case they’re harmless or even generally beneficial. You say “if it’s a hiking date? absolutely not” and somebody flirts back: oh, but you’d go on a hiking date with me. Nothing is at stake, you’re never going to meet, and you’re just shooting the breeze with each other.

But sometimes there’s real rage behind these posts, in which case, if you are prone to this, I think it is worth reminding yourself: you don’t want to date the aggregate person. You don’t want to marry the aggregate person. You don’t want to grow old and witness the rise of super intelligent rats with the aggregate person. You want to do that with a specific person, a person who doesn’t say “rats are not going to take over the world” on your second date but who says “finally, somebody who gets it.”

1. I’ve thought about this often in friendships, where what constitutes (for instance) “loyalty” and “betrayal” are not only quite idiosyncratic but not even shared by the friends themselves, and that is something you only ever find out the hard way because “loyalty” and “betrayal” are not everyday friendship concepts. They only come into play when things are already going south.

2. The “if you can read a menu” thing is a real post I saw once, probably like ten years ago, which has stuck in my mind because I don’t understand what “reading a menu” means beyond like “being able to read.”