On Dating

A date.

Colloquially referring to a time, perhaps for a meeting, or a date.

It is also a space.

The thing with online shit is that it fragments space from time.  You do talk in real time, but the distance is a motherfucker. Both of you acknowledge that, either implicitly or explicitly, it is there. Some sort of intensity, or at least constancy, has to be there to make it work. However, there is also a constant danger to constancy, for it makes you hope. That is one step away from the realm of demand. But due to the nature of your communication, can you even make demands? How? Your connection started with an originary chasm which cannot be filled unless the fragmentation becomes erased, as stated, by either intense commitment or moving. This fragmentation of space and time cannot be sustainable unless by fortitude from both ends which makes both of you consciously and deliberately and continually address this fragmentation. It's exhausting, it has to be. Distance is a motherfucker: it makes passion go haywire, or fizzle out so spectacularly.

Eventually, it gets to you or the other until time also becomes a problem. He doesn't reply. He doesn't accept your calls. He's gone. Just like that, which can take weeks. But it is just like that, nonetheless. Because on some level, there is always the danger of him being gone. His spacetime is not shared with yours, after all. You don't even know how he smells like, for fuck's sake. You don't know if he leaves clumps of toothpaste on his sink. You don't know how he ties his shoelaces. You don't know how he is in spacetime. You can't go on dates.

So if it doesn't work, you can always resort to saying that it didn't work because this wasn't ever there in some fundamental ways that matter.  That's why online dating is constant temptation to love an idea, and that's also why when it goes away, you can't grieve properly. How do you hold a funeral for something that wasn't in proper spacetime? It's harder, in so many ways, because it's gone so easily. It is easy to lose sight of how connections in this case matter, because it is hard to see real connections in this context to begin with.

Dates are hard this way. Because eventually, dates are a matter of space.

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