By Brick City Slut

Dear Brick City Slut,

How do I find someone in this town to date? I have a densely interconnected social circle and it seems complicated and fraught to try (and maybe fail) to date someone that either I am friends with already or that my friends know. 

Help!

Your fear is common. At the core, what you are afraid of is being seen, being complicated, the risk of hurting yourself and others, the risk of people witnessing you make mistakes in the messy endeavor of loving others, the risk that you will hurt those you care most about.

You will be seen, you will make mistakes, you will hurt those you care most about, and you will let yourself and others down. This is not risk; it is reality. This is a preferable reality to the alternative. Reject atomization and compartmentalizing yourself into isolation. We are not meant to figure out what it means to be human in solitude. We owe each other everything, and it is not a debt that can be repaid in full. The balance is not wiped clean, by design. 

Part of the motivation behind dating apps usage is compartmentalization and the resultant sterility. Of course, it seems cleaner to date people who do not know anyone in your life, nor you in theirs. There is no shared context and therefore anyone can bail at any time with minimal disruption and low accountability. See the devastation wrought by ghosting people. If you ghost someone who lives in your community with whom you share a friend group, the endeavor is going to be stilted, comedic, or just plain weird. You will see each other at events and have to deal. People may fear being creepy with their acquaintances, by having and expressing desires. There is a loss here, too. The neatness of quarantining desire from friendship eliminates a lot of playful eroticism and plausible deniability. The best matches from online dating are generally “people you could plausibly meet and have in person social overlap with, for some reason we have not met yet.” An increase in shared context contributes to treating each other more humanely. 

To meet someone to date in a high context social situation, there are a few strategies. You can ask your friends to introduce you to their friends, loosely connected people at the edge of a social graph. You can (gently and boldly) broach pursuing something with a friend. Having clarity on what you want and who you are looking for will be a useful guiding principle. Once you know what sort of person you want to date, you can imagine, where would you be most likely to serendipitously come across such a person. Then, you can position yourself in situations that maximize the possibility of happenstance. For example, if you are looking for a bookish person who cares about municipal institutions, maybe you should get involved in social events at the library. Doing activities you actually care about is going to always make more sense than doing something for the sole purpose of finding dating prospects. A benefit of dating within a social group is that you have friends with your best interests at heart, people who will cheer you on and hold you responsible for your actions. People who will comfort you and scheme. Interdependence, knowing our neighbors, leads to accountability. You cannot rely on being anonymous in a town where the owner of a local coffeeshops knows you and sees everyone you bring in on a date.

One of my deeply, reverently, held beliefs is that we must treat people as if they will continue to exist in our lives, regardless of romantic status. The world is a strange place and you do not know how things will turn out, but acting honorably maximizes the likelihood that you will have a connected and fulfilling life. 

Brick City Slut lives in Newark. Reach out with questions for advice on Instagram or Twitter @brickcityslut