The Man Inside the Painting

There was a time when attraction had a chance to sneak up on you.

You met someone at work, at a party, or standing in line somewhere. Maybe you didn't notice much about them at first. Then they said something funny. They smiled. They asked you a question.

And something changed.

The person who wasn't particularly attractive five minutes earlier suddenly was.

Online dating has turned that process upside down.

Now we're often asked to decide whether we'd like to know someone before we've ever heard the sound of their voice.

Six photographs. A few sentences.

Go.

She Saw a Dead Deer

In the first episode of The Disposable Heart, I spoke with a woman I'll call Heather.

She doesn't consider herself particularly picky. She wants a man she's attracted to, someone who takes care of himself, and someone she can talk to.

Then she opens the app.

No. No. Definitely no. Maybe.

Before she's finished her coffee, twenty men have crossed her screen.

One photograph in particular gets an immediate reaction: a hunter proudly posing with a deer.

Heather doesn't know the man.

She doesn't know that hunting might remind him of his father or that the woods might be where he escapes a stressful career.

She sees Bambi.

Within seconds, she has mentally furnished his house. There's camouflage somewhere in the living room and a dead animal staring down from above the fireplace.

Swipe left.

What's interesting is that Heather works in a hotel and meets strangers every day. A man can approach her desk and barely register.

Then he starts talking.

He's funny. He smiles.

Suddenly, he's attractive.

She knows attraction can develop in real life.

On the app, she doesn't give it the chance.

He Saw a Yacht

Then I spoke with a man on the other side of the screen.

He couldn't understand why women weren't responding to his profile the way he'd expected.

His sister finally gave him some advice about his hunting photographs:

Show women the woods, not the trophies.

Fair enough.

Except he was doing exactly the same thing Heather was doing.

He sees a woman's profile.

She's standing on a yacht. Then she's at a rooftop restaurant. Then she's skiing somewhere in Europe.

And suddenly he's not looking at photographs anymore.

He's calculating a lifestyle.

Can I keep up with this?

Do I even want to?

What if I'd rather order takeout and watch a game?

Nobody told him this woman expects yachts and European vacations.

He created that woman himself.

Just as Heather created the house with the deer over the fireplace.

We Are Dating Our Own Assumptions

That's one of the strangest things about online dating.

We think we're evaluating other people.

A surprising amount of the time, we're evaluating stories we've written about them.

The hunter becomes a lifestyle.

The yacht becomes a lifestyle.

Maybe we're right.

Maybe we're completely wrong.

The problem isn't that people make assumptions. We've always done that.

The difference is how quickly we're now required to make them.

Swipe.

Swipe.

Swipe.

We don't know the person, so our brains complete the picture.

And then we make a decision about the picture we created.

“Don't confuse the frame with the person.”

The Man Inside the Painting

Near the end of our conversation, my male guest told me something a friend once said to him.

“It is one thing to go to an art gallery and look at a painting. But it's another thing to be inside the painting.”

That's what he wanted someone to ask about.

Not just the photographs.

Not the hunting trip.

Not the gym picture.

The man inside the painting.

Maybe that's what most people on dating apps are asking for without knowing how to say it.

Look at my pictures.

Read my profile.

Make your first impression.

But don't confuse the frame with the person.

There is a human being behind those six photographs.

Maybe the answer isn't to stop swiping.

Maybe it's simply to occasionally give someone enough time to step out of the painting.