Edited by: Tejaswini Vondivillu
Ideally I’d be watching this with my girlfriends on a bed that’s too small to fit us all, probably eating cheesy fries and getting crumbs on the laptop. But the ‘Rona has successfully wedged a spanner in that plan. So here I am, on a weeknight, ignoring a paper on linguistics in favour of watching “Dating Around” on Netflix.
Three minutes in, the premise has already stroked my repressed competitive tendencies and I’m hooked. One person goes on five blind dates in the course of a 30 minute episode and picks one person at the end to go on a follow up date with. Kind of like “The Bachelor”, if you ignore the absence of unnaturally white veneered, borderline offensive self-tanned, struggling influencers.
Luke is a real estate agent, how original! He dresses the part too – classic waiter tuxedo, hair stiffly slicked back and a smile tending towards cheesy. He seems… well, pleasant. In the same way sliced bread is pleasant.
Grace-Kelly-looking Victoria walks in and I expect her to be just as bland. My suspicions have been proven to be gravely misplaced. Victoria has snowballed me with her winning personality. She brands herself a Masshole for being from Massachusetts. (For all practical purposes we will only be referring to her as ‘Masshole girl’.) She is just what Luke needs, to add a little bit of vegemite to his untoasted white bread.
But then there’s also Betty, with her immaculately laid weave, which moves in perfect synchrony with her deviously tiny waist. She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’s serving exotic Barbie doll. I’m nervous for Masshole girl in the face of Betty’s sultry Brazillian accent and impromptu moon lit salsa lessons. Maybe she’s the equally dull-witted arm candy Luke needs to accompany him to his fancy real estate networking events.
I’m only the slightest bit embarrassed to admit that Masshole girl’s precarious situation has induced some stress eating on my part.
I have a moment of profound clarity where I wonder whether filming all the dates in the same restaurant and having the protagonist wear the same outfit is a comment on the pointless circularity of dating. Does this mean I will eventually have to go through the pesky 2am “u up?” text phase again? And pretend like my jean button isn’t cutting into my stomach while we watch a movie both of us are too nervous to focus on??! The mere prospect of that is enough to make me want to succumb to a life of congenial domestic placidity.
We now have a wild card entry, Tiffany, and Luke seems taken by her. She takes the lead with ordering for the both of them (very sexy) and she asks for extra peanuts in the Pad Thai. Surely the mark of a cultured person. Unfortunately she’s brought out the shudder inducing lip smacking as she eats, in order to “aerate the food and make it more flavourful”. Eating on the first date is always a big gamble. A promising candidate gone too soon.
It’s now back down to Masshole girl and Betty. Middle school me would be extremely thrilled at having found a televised version of “F, marry, kill”. But this competitive conveyor belt of prospective partners, grates harshly against my conception of love to be a steady reassuring process of cobbling together pieces of a puzzle that fits, as a couple.
Granted, finding that person you’re willing to start piecing a 1000 piece puzzle together with takes a lot of kissing frogs, so to speak. I’d still take my chances with running into someone at the dog park, over taking the express-way with speed dating. Because what this musical chair of dating really does is, present us with a hyper augmented experience of organically meeting a person where everything turns into a game of survival of the fittest.
Who likes their sake the same way Luke does? Who can make Luke laugh the most in their allotted screen time? Who goes to the same park as Luke for their morning run? All these parameters only work to dispel the despondency of being “single and looking” with wafer thin degrees of compatibility.
It definitely doesn’t help that a majority of the current relationship economy depends on dating apps, whose algorithms work on the same principle; wherein you toggle a bunch of buttons (like you’re putting down product preferences on Amazon), and get matched with someone you’re supposed to get along with. But ultimately, you just spend a month and a half talking to each other until one of you fades into obscurity. Or worse still, you give your standards the boot and settle for your “soul mate” brought to you by OkCupid’s coders.
Sort of like making a friend in kindergarten because both of you had the same lunch box. As a testimony to how wonderfully that system works, I haven’t spoken to my best friend from preschool in 8 years now.
Anyway, the episode has reached its crescendo with Victoria walking face first into a door. I’m guessing that triggered Luke’s knight in shining armour to the damsel in distress reflexes because he ended up picking her to go on a follow up date with. Obviously I stalked their social media accounts post episode only to find that Victoria is now married to a friend of 7 years from college. And if their example is anything to go by I’d chalk acing the dating game down to familiarity and the convenience of timing, over the inanities of similarities that don’t matter in the long run.