How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is my favorite second movie to watch on a plane. The first movie is always something serious - this year I finally watched Lost in Translation and Whiplash for the first time. Second movie is a pick-me-up movie. Something to keep me away from spiraling because I am all alone up in the sky on the hour four of a long international flight.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a great pick - it’s a perfect romcom. Besides being cute, funny and predictable in the most soothing way, it’s also aspirational - who wouldn’t want to be a popular young columnist in New York putting a sleazy marketing guy through the worst time of his life as a work assignment? The only thing I am still hung up on after watching this movie several times inside and outside of planes is that in the end, it seems like Andie dating Ben to write an article for her women’s magazine advice column was made out to be a much bigger offense than Ben dating Andie to win a bet that would land him a project at work. In the end, she is the one who writes a long heart-felt apology in the form of a magazine story and only after that does he attempt to find her and talk. Does he even apologize?
Someone turning their relationship with an ex or a current partner or their encounters with a random fling into books, stories, songs and movies is a big point of contention and conversations in pop culture. There is a reason why Zach Bia is getting his second GQ profile while Olivia Rodrigo’s song that’s allegedly about him is trending, and there is a reason why his quote about the song is the quote that goes viral and gets reposted by pop culture accounts online. There is a reason why seeing that Sofia Coppola hasn’t watched Her because she is not interested in watching Rooney Mara as her in the movie, sent me into a rabbit hole of watching MTV interviews of young Sofia and her ex-husband and the director of Her Spike Jonze. Most of the time, stories like this are grounds for celebrity gossip and scandals but yet, there are a million non-famous people hoping their angry voicemail gets sampled for a song that gets a million streams. Today though, you don’t have to date an up-and-coming rapper, a real life Carrie Bradshaw or an aspiring Bushwick filmmaker for your dating life to become public domain. In fact, you don’t have to even date someone to be put on blast to millions of people on the For You Page because a total stranger you took a chance on on Hinge could be posting screenshots of your dating profile.
Would you rather an ex turn your relationship into a song or a movie or a stranger you met on a dating app post about you online? There are a couple of questions that might be going through your head trying to assess what impact - both positive and negative - each scenario could have on you. For example, if you are a girl whose college boyfriend’s band suddenly goes viral on TikTok, the odds are likely stacked against you. His side of the story packaged in a song gets distributed to a million monthly listeners making him the hot boy of the month and your IG a target for online bullying. Or maybe you are in your West Elm Caleb era - dating your life away on NYC’s Hinge and then one day wake up to a bunch of young women posting about you on TikTok, media headlines and a billboard with your name on it.
As I think through these extreme examples of my own would you rather question, I start to feel like both of these scenarios aren’t that hypothetical. With social media, anyone can be somewhat famous and Hinge screenshots are a regular on everyone’s feed. Even though the general consensus at an average friend gathering seems to be “online dating sucks” and meeting someone in real life remains to be the ultimate dream, we still use the apps - not only looking to meet or talk to someone but also to be entertained and entertain.
Dating apps used to be a couple of pictures of you with some basic stats and a simple bio. Tinder let you put up your top Spotify songs as a treat. The whole thing was quite private and lowkey because there was still some stigma around using the apps to date. These days, it’s all kinds of content: prompts, videos, polls, and voice notes which some people use to act out a whole comedy sketch with sound effects. All of that has been added to help people make their profile more personable but instead it makes the whole experience feel like scrolling through a TikTok fyp. Even though dating profiles are meant to be private and vulnerable, they are essentially copyright-free pieces of content that can be screenshotted and posted by other people and brands just like funny tweets, Reddit confessions, and memes.
I’ve done my fair share of posting dating app screenshots on social media myself, and even when I wasn’t on dating apps anymore, my friends whose social media is private would send me screenshots from Bumble saying “you have my persimmon to post this.” And I did. I never asked what was in it for them - maybe I guess something about second hand virality made them feel better about the grueling experience of having to swipe through hundreds of dating profiles of men whose typical Sunday is a couple of beers and a football game. What was in it for me was obviously attention - there isn’t one dating app screenshot I posted that didn’t do really well.
The internet has the power to make us feel like something digital is extremely real, like the parasocial relationships we form with random people, influencers and celebrities. It makes them feel so reachable that Olivia Rodrigo/Zach Bia headlines read more like your private high school drama than celebrity gossip. But at the same time, the internet has the power to turn complex, emotional things, like someone putting themselves out there again after a breakup into two-dimensional content divorced from the original owners, their feelings and context that can be traded by others for engagement and followers. Perhaps, that’s why the public became so obsessed with the idea of “PR relationships” lately. The idea of leveraging dating for real publicity points isn’t crazy at all given the internet is full of less interesting dating content exchanged for much less.