Zoe Strimpel's Blog

Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg (Penguin, 2015)

This was the guy that was needed to create a research-led book about dating that people actually want to read….

When did ‘modern’ heterosexual love in the Anglosphere begin? If it was when people began to place emotional self-fulfilment at the heart romantic relationships, then – in Britain anyway – it was probably in the middle of the 20th century. While American teens were dating more furiously and competitively than ever before, young British men and women were, according to historian of love Claire Langhamer, undergoing ‘a revolution’ in their intimate bonds. This meant that women in particular were beginning to expect more out of love, and on both sides of the Atlantic, desired ingredients in husbands might now include the ability to make one deeply happy, to facilitate personal growth, and to deliver sex that was symptomatic of these things. The seeds for biting marital dissatisfaction were thus sown, especially among women, and when fused with divorce reform in 1969 in both Britain and parts of the US, Anglo-American divorce soared, more than doubling in the 1970s. Meanwhile, post-Pill, sex attained a level of visibility that threatened to push love – of the committed variety anyway – out of the limelight. Long-term and fixed was out, and fluidity and emancipation was in. Thus sociologists like refer to the ‘democratisation’ and ‘liquification’ of post-Pill love bonds in the nebulous ‘west’.

And when the dust had settled on the powerful confluence of the Pill and the Women’s Liberation Movement, the 1980s happened, with their further emphasis on individual needs, pleasures and profit. All of which laid the perfect groundwork for the arrival of US-led Internet dating in the mid-1990s, a platform for mate-searching that invited control, efficiency and an emphasis on tailored tastes, from waist size to income. By 2013, though, the personality tests, wordy profiles and literal box-ticking of internet dating had been eclipsed by the most individualist tool yet for finding love: the internet-enabled, private mobile phone. Now, as in the infamous scene described in a September Vanity Fair piece about Tinder and the ‘dating apocalypse’, singles swig mojitos and champagne cocktails in metropolitan bars after work, together but engrossed in their private screens, consuming the next bit of excitement before it’s even happened. This is the world of Azis Ansari’s Modern Romance, a world full of ‘middle-class people…who have quite intense and intimate relationships with their expensive smartphones.’

Ansari is not a social scientist, he is a comedian, and personal experience is his main fodder. Thus his book – in fact like most dating books, from bestsellers Data, A Love Story: How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet My Match (2013) to He’s Just Not That Into You (2004) – is rooted in personal experience. Ansari’s was the sense of wonder following the intensity of the ‘madness’ he experienced after a woman he’d ‘hooked up with’ went quiet mid text interchange (‘I know she held my words in her hand!!! Did Tanya fall into a river/trash compactor/volcano?’).  However, to validate the ‘an investigation’ sub-clause of the book’s title, he roped in a sociologist, co-author Eric Klinenberg. Also because ‘I, bozo comedian Aziz Ansari, probably couldn’t tackle this topic on my own, and I decided to reach out to some very smart people to guide me’. Klinenberg no doubt made the data bit of the book happen, and perhaps provided its relatively tight structure, but Ansari – who narrates – is clearly the selling point. Known for his roles on the NBC series Parks and Recreation and Netflix’s Master of None, Ansari also does patchily amusing but cultishly followed standup, replete with jokes about nightmare dating scenarios. His audience frequently share their own dating horror stories and ill-omened texts, sometimes handing over their phones to Ansari while he’s on stage. So he knew more than most about the current temperature of contemporary dating in urban America (and thus more or less in urban Britain, which roughly follows its big sister across the pond in courtship mores) before he even set up his evidence base for this book. This centres on a subreddit feed called Modern Romantics, which prompted thousands of comments from around the world, and focus groups of young daters in several American and global cities, including New York, Doha and Tokyo.

The problem with treating contemporary dating as a topic of study is that it can all feel heavy-handed and rather dull fairly quickly. This is because the supporting ‘data’ is either unreliable – often sponsored by dating companies such as Match and EHarmony (including some used by Ansari) – or simply uninteresting. Do we need a study to tell us that people sometimes misrepresent themselves in their profiles, or that men prefer the photos of smaller, larger-breasted women who look upwards at the camera? Dan Slater got around this flatness in his well-researched Love in the Time of Algorithms by delving into the industry as well as the behavioural codes of online dating. And Ansari gets around it by being a short Indian-American funny guy who is obsessed with food – themes which temper the proposed seriousness of the book and imbue its data with essential colour. Numerous droll footnotes, iPhone text bubbles and absurd photos of imagined participants in various dating scenarios are good conveyors of wit, keeping in view the comic potential in all human attempts at intimacy. Ansari is good at making his data and even his methodology (the subreddit and the focus groups) fun. He manages to make a potentially tiresome series of oral histories with elderly folk at a ‘senior center’ in Brooklyn both extremely amusing and, as it turns out, rather revealing too. Armed with doughnuts to seduce the pensioners into sharing their romantic stories with him (‘sure enough, when the seniors caught a whiff of doughnuts, they were quick to pull up chairs and start answering our questions’), he unearths a striking historical change. Most of them married the first person who came along and was a decent sort, which meant someone nearby, in the same street or even same building. To furnish what the ‘seniors’ told him, Ansari digs up a 1932 Philadelphia study of 5,000 marriage licenses, showing that one-third of married couples had lived within five blocks before meeting; one in eight had lived in the same building. ‘Think about where you grew up as a kid, your apartment building or your neighbourhood. Could you imagine being married to one of those clowns?’

Ansari quickly leaves behind ancient history, moves to a potted history of love since the doughnut-munching pensioners were young (‘a growing number of women refused to marry the guy in their neighbourhood or building’) and then opens up the fruits of his subreddit questions. First up is an illustration of the most saccharine, narcissistic aspects of the discourse of romantic aspiration centred on ‘the meaningful relationship’. Respondents volunteer telling details signifying soul mate suitability that are painfully far from the doughnut brigade’s matter-of-fact ‘he’ll do’ attitude. In response to a question from Ansari/Klinenberg about how people knew a partner was ‘the right one for you’, one woman said: ‘The first moment I truly remember falling in love with my boyfriend was when I was singing Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’ under my breath to myself while we were studying near each other and then he started singing it at the top of his lungs’; another said, ‘He is stunning, and I am amazed by him every single day. He’s made me a better person for having known and loved him. Five years going strong and I’m still obsessed with him…’

Ohh, modern love….

The book excels when Ansari drills down into the particularity of the technological media through which people date and dump; this is also the easiest terrain for him as a comedian. Chapter Two is devoted to ‘the initial ask’, which broaches the controversy over whether calling or texting is better. The attachment to text as a messenger of romantic intent is revealing. ‘Phone-calls suck and they give me anxiety’ said one 24-year old, while another pointed out that, ‘since texting started, an actual phone call feels like an emergency.’ These comments resonate with a major 2015 Pew survey suggesting a quarter of American youth are ‘constantly’ on their phones; since more British youngsters own phones than Americans, the figure is assumed to be higher here. Two-thirds of all adults in Britain and the US owning a smart phone too: commuter trains at rush hour are silent, everyone hunched over their device. Even a mundane telephone call breaks the peace and attracts dirty looks. What kind of position would a romantic conversation put the receiver in?

Ansari is right to highlight ‘the insanely fast transformation in the way we communicate’ through the stark difference in age group attitudes towards phone calls (over half of over-30s prefer the phone call for asking someone out while only 23 per cent of the under 30s do – though even that seems surprisingly many). This in turn is interesting because it stresses the evolution of different skills – making a witty phone-call required a courage and nimble thinking that can be completely circumvented through text. And the messages the younger generation might, when they’re older, think suitable for text boggle the mind. ‘Hey its Dr Sampson,’ imagines Ansari, ‘bad news – you got cancer in your testicles L’. But Ansari – who avoids simplistic judgements of any particular technology or style – notes that texting is good for letting daters play a very important, psychologically-verified card, that of making the other person wait. Cutting the text conversation off mid-flow can create such anxiety in the other party that it can turn disinterest into sharp interest.

After texting comes internet dating but Ansari’s heart is not in it – he’s a phone man. The usual potted history is offered, from 1960s computer dating (erroneously called ‘early internet dating’ by Ansari – there was nothing online about those IBM mainframe, punchcard-operated services), to lonely hearts ads with their complicated, expensive voice mail services and video dating in the 1980s, followed by the emergence of Match.com in 1995 and the amazing numbers of people who use internet dating (here he reproduces the stale 2013 figure that a third of American marriages today began online; Pew recently drastically downsized the figure to say that only five per cent of married Americans have met online). Ansari seems more interested in a series of comic pictures of pretend internet daters and even a pretend Aziz Ansari stalker, depicted by a stock photo of an ‘Indian dude’ at a laptop. This section does, however, point out another peculiarly contemporary result of digital life: fatigue from endless arranging and too-little meeting. Focus group interviews revealed some world-weary views: one 27-year old said she’d cancelled her Tinder and OkCupid accounts because ‘it just takes too long to get to the first date’, prompting Ansari to note that something ‘fun and exciting’ had ‘morphed… into a new source of dread’. Meanwhile, one young man called Arpan had taken to sending out mass ‘douchebag’ messages because he was too ‘tired’ to keep writing out individual messages that would often be rejected or ignored. By contrast, Dinesh shunned internet dating and had a much better life, meeting women at his church, for instance: ‘Compared with what Arpan had just said, Dinesh’s “church and a movie” sounded like “motorcycle race and some sport fucking”’.

The book enters an odd phase after the section on internet dating by going global, with Aziz and Klinenburg visiting different cities and interviewing locals. As with every other aspect of this book, though, Aziz manages to do it better than anyone else has done so far, avoiding the triteness of books like the middling successful Around the World in 80 Dates by Jennifer Cox. Again, this is probably because the critical faculties of a successful comedian are more suited to a fresh treatment of love around the world than those of yet another single girl looking for love. Even so, there is a fair bit of painful simplification here: cities are picked based on their reputations for different kinds of love – Paris for its lax attitude to affairs; Tokyo for its crisis about lack of sexual interest; Buenos Aires for its aggressively courting males and Doha for its sexual restrictiveness. Tokyo is the best section not only because Japanese sex culture is the most markedly interesting to Westerners, with its ‘relationship replacement industry’ (including ‘cuddle cafes’) and the social revulsion towards ‘charai’ (sleazy playboy masculinity), but for an amusing riff on Ansari’s love of and pursuit of ramen. Still, whether Tokyo or Paris, interviewees seem like exotic fish observed from the American aquarium floor.

This is a thorough overview of contemporary dating that both (lightly) tackles broad historical change in communication and mating, and psychological research on human mating behaviour in an age of digitized abundance. But this alone would not have made it a best-seller. Its celebrity oarsman, focus groups ventriloquizing middle classes the world over, and bespoke subreddit, whose thousands of respondents were no doubt drawn to Ansari’s fame, makes it the sole comprehensive analysis of dating today that anyone has much cared to buy. Nonetheless, some of its omissions grate. How revealing can a study of dating be with no attention to socio-economic status, ethnicity, or age at all, when we know that all of those things affect approaches to courtship? But Aziz is a comedian for young, mostly middle class Americans and this book serves that demographic. Its perky, well-meaning conclusion is that while modern technology is generally a boon, we need to remember that those Tinder faces we’re swiping represent humans, and that perhaps there is more to life than checking options on our devices. His key insight, then – that sometimes less is more – has wider resonances for most internet-using citizens today. But any nostalgia for the days when you simply set your cap at the guy or girl in your apartment block because they seemed alright is not encouraged: after all, the chances that they would love Whitney Houston too are very low.

David Shumway, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis, (New York: NYU Press 2003)

Do these get louder and more mournful when it’s cold and gloomy outside?

It was sorrowful coming back from America, where it was basically warm or hot, with soft air and a sun that wasn’t ever too far away, even on cloudy days.  As soon as I got back to London, jetlagged and full of plane food, I took the Tube back to Brockley and got into bed. That was pleasant enough. It was less pleasant to look out my window at a changed scene; cold, grey, the sky leaden and heavy with streaks of rain. But the weirdest thing about the pathetic fallacy experience of returning- ie that my mood slumped in accordance with the gloomy weather- was the AURAL effects. So, Brockley appears to be ever more in the flight path for Heathrow, which is superb for me actually because I’m a trainspotter and love to see those giant Airbus A380, albeit usually with the distasteful brand Quatar scrawled across its belly, lumber over my house. Those things go at – SLOWEST 163 k/h – even though they look like they’re crawling at like one mile an hour. Sometimes when I’m walking up Upper Brockley Road and a plane’s dawdling overhead I feel like I’m racing it a bit, and winning. BUT! On this bleak and chill August day I realised that the planes were making a different sound from their hot summers’ day descents. They were mournfully droning; and the streets – chill, dark and inexplicably empty, perhaps in homage to the weather, but clearly lacking homage to that boisterous exciting back-to-school atmosphere of early September – seemed to be full of the drone. No human noise, just depressed and whiny engines. All week I heard it and became mired in pathetic-fallic theorising – were the planes making that noise because I was glum to be away from my ancestral beaches and my long Trollope novel? Or did their drones in some way bounce off the low grey clouds? Was there some correlation between ice-cold Augusts and turbine moans? [Full disclosure: I just googled this and found a thread entitled, ‘Why do jet engines sound different in cold weather?’]

I think it seems very likely that there is.

Want in on the elites-only League matchmaking app? Beware, you might be 100,000th on the waiting list

The League dating app is currently leading the new brace of mating services aimed at people who consider themselves elite – what might, in Britain of the past, have been proudly asserted as upper middle class (Mrs Bennett would have encouraged her daughters to join – if they’d had jobs, that is). Synced with LinkedIn, its USP is not to hide but rather to embrace the professional pedigree of members. It’s got nicer graphics than most dating-related products and thus actually seems a plausible place for the kind of people the homepage addresses thus: “you’re smart, busy & ambitious. You don’t need a dating app to get a date – you’re too popular as it is. But you should join The League”. Evidently a lot of prospective customers agree and really believe they’re “too popular” to get a date; The Guardian reported high membership, entailing a “waiting list” of 100,000 long. But one man that was told he was 11,000 elite singles away from being “drafted” found himself through within a week. Now, this should ring some alarm bells, surely. This man’s sudden acceleration through the ranks of hopefuls smacks rather of an algorithm claiming ideas above its station than a genuine triumph of romantic-professional glory; isn’t it possible that some vague scramble of numbers just spat out this man’s wait-list place, its only brief to make him feel hopeless, then special?

The League insists on an acceptance rate of 20%. But I’d like to see an article interviewing those who never made it. I think it’d be a short article since I’d be very surprised if The League was genuinely so oversubscribed that it authentically had to turn 80% of real, LinkedIn-listed single applicants (or should that be supplicants?) away.

See, matchmakers peddling exclusivity is as old as the stars – or at least the mid-1980s. Decades-old agencies like Drawing Down the Moon, Sara Eden, The County Register and more recently Berkeley International (over $5,000 to join) and Gray & Farrar (a name made-up to sound posh) have all guaranteed the right kind of people- the kind who, in Berkeley’s case, think nothing of boarding a plane for a date (the agency has international offices). Yet the reality for most agencies pre-Internet – from the Ivy Gibson Marriage Bureau to Prestige Partners to Mastermatch video dating – was usually different. In its relentless 1970s London Weekly Advertiser adverts Ivy offered special deals to women under 30 (prime marriage age), while Prestige was accused of distinctly unprestigious behaviour, pinching Dateline’s questionnaire (The Guardian, Oct 16 1983) and ultimately  going bust. Mastermatch, which also claimed to cater for the busy, the popular and the sexy, also failed (The Guardian, May 23 1982) after the founder, a failed businessman called Michael Oram, got his friends to pose as signed up singles. Drawing Down The Moon was short on “eligible” men so offered them discounts, according to its founder, Mary Balfour [private interview].

It’s easy to see how our dating industry-rookie ancestors of the 1970s, 80s and 1990s might have fallen for the promise of exclusivity. It’s less easy to believe that such people as the League seems to have queueing up, such debonaire, suave, knowing, travelled, urban people, people with such beautiful highlights, are so ready to buy it. They are people of the world. Shouldn’t they know better? Perhaps they’re just battle scarred by Tinder.

Still. There are so many opportunities for alarm bells to ring – at least for the historian of dating. In the pre-Internet period of 1970-2000, dating agencies always claimed large numbers of customers but never had to prove it. 6,000 would become 1,000 when pressed, would become zero as agency after agency folded often first abandoning debts and glossy West End offices for the matchmaker in question’s front room (such as in the case of Judy Joseph of Prestige- see Guardian, May 23 1982). Decades later, dating sites have come under fire for bogus data, inflated active member boasts and fake profiles. Yet when League hopefuls are told they’ve got 10,999 people desperate for membership in front of them under consideration, and then get in that same week, I sniff a potential rat. In the past, membership claims were hard to disprove because of anonymity concerns. Today, it’s easy to use the technology, the ubiquitous mystery algorithm, as a smokescreen.

Good luck to the League successfuls. I do hope that in all their popularity and LinkedIn glory they find time to nurture that thing called love. Or at least, the strategic partnership of two like-minded people. Of two successful and above all, guys, two popular people. And as for those with thousands in front of them, I do hope they won’t have to wait too long to get started. If the history of the dating industry has anything to teach us, the exclusive club they covet shouldn’t remain too firmly shut for long.

The latest thing in dating is to get rid of the internet entirely.

According to Airdates, a new offline app for dating in the air, “internet dating is so 20th century!!!”

That’s three exclamation marks.

Others seem to agree. Among recent Twitter followers, I seem to have attracted Sowher (Startingoverwithouther.com) a site for people who are either crushed or psyched to have lost the mother/whore figure in their lives. The site offers offline aides such as “Pimp Your Lingo- Seducing Women With Words – the complete six CD rom set”. (If not words, one wonders with what the site’s customers might seduce women – abs, lats, balls? Brains? Unlikely.) Personally, I’d steer clear of graduates of “Pimp your lingo”; they’d be at risk of messing up the whole semantic dimension.  If you’re not into seducing new women, it’s lucky Sowher sells a “Girl Back System (Get Your Girlfriend Back)” – another product seemingly arrayed in old-fashioned CD Roms.

Then there’s Hitch, which does, to be fair, hinge on at least a 3G connection. You set friends up through Facebook with this one, but at its core is a system as old as the moon: matchmaking. A similar idea is being peddled through another of my Twitter followers, My Mate Your Date: “Meet people through your friends, everyday. No randoms!”. I met the guys behind this site at the UK Dating Awards 2014. They were very nice but came from a business – not a heartsearch – background. Fair play to them, though: they’re on trend in the way their matchmaking business dismisses exactly what early adherents (and not so early) thought was the web’s genius: randomness and playing the numbers. Elect Matchmaker, another of my followers, also purports to dispense with connectivity. Here, a team of BMI-appropriate, modern-looking people who enjoy “getting to know people and finding out what makes them tick” put other (paying) people together. One of the team gives style advice: “as of April 2010, Daniel weighed over 22 stone!” He doesn’t anymore and he’s on hand to make sure any other fatty lonely hearts get the slimline help they need to have a better shot at finding love. And then there’s Pozee, “the ultimate wingman”. Once again, the technology is the “wingman” but the real action lives in the app’s stark opposition to technology – the idea is to force people out from behind their devices into the real world. “Forget poking, forget winking and forget messaging…chemistry is what matters,” says Pozee. “It’s time to put down your phone and go say hello. You don’t have any more excuses.”

So for all of you till trying to find love with boring old online dating, it’s time to get with the programme: internet-mediated romance is so 2014 it hurts. It’s life that now takes centre stage. “Life”, that is, for a generation of people who are as capable of hand-writing with a fountain pen as they are deliver a chat-up line without, at the very least, a digital wingperson.

Electric? No, this is staged lust, with the makeup to prove it.

I always wonder how “reality” tv can possibly be “reality” when the presence of cameras and audience is known, producers have made you up within an inch of your life and you’ve got a mic hanging from your neck. Big Brother is simply bizarre. Aren’t they all doing it because they’re on camera? So it’s not really “reality” TV, but “reality with a camera and massive audience” TV. Which isn’t the same.

In the “reality” setting, I can imagine being filmed perusing wildlife or property. But performing first-date emotion, partaking in the curious power ping pong and evaluative poker-facery that goes hand in hand with sizing up a mate over unwanted food? That’s the mystery behind Channel 4’s First Dates, whose third season premiered last night. It’s billed as though we’re really watching what first dates are like – something that TV critics seem to find “beautiful” and “excruciating”. But they’ve not been out on the dating block for a while. Because then they’d know that first dates without cameras and national audience are quite a lot different from first dates with them. Snippets of overdetermined camera-awareness, like the slow eating of olives by the much-hyped Frankie, are rife. For instance, she does that thing where women bite the olive from the toothpick in a way that it sits right in the centre of her tongue, about halfway up, so her whole mouth is open before she closes her lips around it. It’s like a pre-blow job mouth enclosing that olive. Nobody does that in REAL reality.

Which is why I find it odd to read articles in Radio Times, the Guardian, The Mirror and Metro today following last night’s show that eulogize the authenticity and therefore the fascination of the dates. Frankie and Mouhala, in particular, are widely agreed to have cataclysmic sexual energy. Frankie giggled and sucked olives; made comments about taking off her clothes. She said she liked to eat chocolate and therefore she liked to date chocolate (eg black men).  Mouhala did this terrible grin-fake-bashful thing and went into the bathroom to talk to a female friend on the phone, describing Frankie’s big boobs. Erm – it looked to me like two porn stars limbering up for a paid gig scheduled long ago, not two people with genuine sexual energy…

After the show I googled it and found that an editor I’ve worked with in the past, Rosie Mullender at Cosmo, actually appeared on the show. There was quite a touching account from both her and her date on the Cosmo website that implied it was enjoyable. The cameras was noticed but seemed not to have been the main event. Maybe there is a kind of reality that can take place, then, in the full glare of self-conscious performativity. Some people don’t seem phased by it. For me, though, reality kicks in when the cameras go and nobody’s watching, at all.

“Validated”: this man earns £60k.

Academia does not generally have a laxative effect on writing. Conscious that I have not written anything glibly flowing and (naturally) concise for ages, I am worried that I am becoming constipated by a dawning awareness/fear of the millions of things already written about every thought I have. A chorus of scholars in my head now suggests thousands of different ways to evaluate/contextualise/frame any given topic, sentiment, observation, urge to write. Sentences are now perilous. Thoughts are heretic if they bear close resemblance to unsupported claims.

Still, can’t let that sort of thing slow one down. The GOOD thing about my PhD about history of modern courtship is that it’s putting all sorts of absolute treasures my way. As I slowly work my way through the likes of City Limits, Singles and newspapers of the 1970s, I pay close attention to class and gender. Naturally, when you go back to its newspapers, the past seems hilariously other. On a basic level there’s ratio of print to pictures, the shite quality of the pictures when they did appear, and the utter minuteness of the print. More substantially, terrible gender stereotypes are unabashedly present in all discussions of success, career, sex, marriage, dating, money. For example, a very typical piece in Singles Magazine, the mag put out by Dateline, the computer dating business, runs thus: “This is the sad story of a middle aged divorcee who is desperately lonely: Unwanted women understanding men”. A profile of pop singer Lynsey De Paul is headlined: “Even gorgeous and talented girls can be lonely”. Numerous stories talk of gold digging women; women themselves talk about using male money to get ahead/live well. Classified ads routinely begin with “male company director, owner of Jaguar, educated, seeks similar”. Money, education and class – these things are not considered embarrassing criteria for a mate in 1977. They are spelled out with hilarious clarity.

But here’s the thing. Nothing has changed. If anything it’s got worse. The mediated dating scene still relies on masculinist, classist (although it’s not really class anymore, but rather some ersatz amalgam of branded education and salary – sorry scholars, bit of a wild unsupported claim that I nonetheless stand by) branding. It’s so blatant it’s embarrassing but what is extraordinary is that even though the product is a mobile app responding to Tinder, it feels more 1970s than the 2015.

Behold 40kpd: an app where men have to earn 40k per year minimum but women don’t have any salary required. It may be that women want men to support them or pay their way. I think it’s that men still want to be richer than women. Just like they have to be older, taller, stronger and in front. For instance, in a new Lovestruck ad on the Tube showing a couple laughingly cycling, man firmly in front. I asked Simon if he could imagine the woman being in front in the picture and he said no. Nor could I. The nature of the past, and of past-ness, begs fascinating questions. Change and continuinty and even regression are so co-embedded that despite such seemingly enormous changes in form as provided by the rise of digital and mobile, function appears to have been fossilised. We are different and we are the same. In fact we’re older than we used to be – the wording and tone of a 40kpd type of service ventriloquises the matrimonial ads of the 1870s more than it does the 1970s.

This is the light and ceiling decoration above drinkers at the Gilbert Scott near St Pancras.

London is like a throat – an elegant, devious, old throat – that’s having more and more and MORE shoved down it. London is big and old and clever, so as a throat it expands and contracts basically in accordance to demand with just a few hiccups (persons under trains, commuter rage, soaring prices, alienation of those who would like to live here but can’t afford it, the odd flash mob action). Like a throat, too (or like a vagina, at that), it pushes all sorts of things out. Coughs, undigested food, breath, life-force (NB: I am not saying vaginas expel food). What it pushes out makes more things want to rush down it because enough of it is awesome.

There is a lot of money sloshing down London’s throat, as we all know. In a world constantly throwing up the horrors that are outlined in bolded and gigantic font in the local and national papers (murder, financial ruin, international terrorism) the worlds (which is to say, the lifeworlds, the people) rushing through London’s commercial sub-gullets, its food and drink stations, its retail meccas, seem remarkably HAPPY. They’re all pairs of young women and groups of Gucci shoe-clad men (or expensively-hooded hipsters) bloody downing champagne or expensive local pale ales….they’re all ordering meat plates and tucking into hazelnut mousse and foie gras and coiffing £12 cocktails/nibbling Levantine olives while they wait for a seat in Palomar! The money is flowing into the purses of these people and these people are numerous enough to completely block up, a bit like killer constipation, hundreds of restaurants in London each night. Not all are in their 20s. Some are in their 30s and 40s and even the olds are out in numbers – my parents, by contrast, were pretty far from hitting up scenester restaurants when I was growing up.

Next to me right now are two women, about my age or younger. Maybe four years younger – 28. They aren’t models or anything but they are really pretty – insanely glowing skin and extremely restrained eyeliner bringing out their large blue-green eyes, their long and luscious locks gilding their English (sadly, retreating) jawlines. They’re young and smartly dressed. They’re also on the champagne, which is from £13 a glass here (the Gilbert Scott, with its glorious gilded frescoed ceiling). I am here because I’m in a bit of a fuck-it mood, but am on the free, jar-contained and extremely greasy popcorn and the house white at £6 a glass. It’s a lot, I know.

Ok so they’re young, they’re drinking champagne at 5pm ensuring they aren’t lawyers or bankers, and they have all the money in the world to chin-chin when they want. I can tell they are doing this as a basic nice way to pass the time. This is not a special treat.

I see students – those famed rich students, I guess, who flock to London and whose parents buy them luxury flats in Mayfair- eating sushi in the sunshine at lunch. I don’t think today’s students have heard of bringing your own crap but cheap lunch in the form of brown rice and baked beans. Even my cousin, whose degree at UCL is courtesy of a loan, is living in a flat in King’s Cross I could not afford with my boyfriend.

In front of the girls are a pair who can’t be more than 21. The guy has long greasy hair and is wearing a tie and they’re drinking cocktails (£14 a pop).

Back in Lewisham, where I live (well, Brockley), there’s less glitz, just a lot of traffic.

But house prices are still raging, and people who lived there when it was crap, many of them West Indian, are enjoying the insane prices – many, many BMWs pass our flat on Upper Brockley Road.

I don’t get how you reconcile it – the deprivation, the doomsday headlines, the casual champagne among 20 somethings all over London (just on Weds I was at Brawn with a friend who is now a publishing bigwig – she earned it by a big slog – and there were two 20-something women next to us attired as hipsters but eating and spending like aristocrats). Everyone seems in on some secret big reserve of cash. They flood, they surge, in their millions through London Tube’s turnstiles spending at least £90 a week for the privilege. Rich people have a lot of money, but so – it appears – does everyone else. They’re certainly spending, queuing up to throw their dosh down that big throat, London.

The champagne drinkers have got their bill and the discussion is ensuing about splitting. The dewiest-skinned one is insisting on taking it all. She’s sweet, but something tells me this isn’t the last champagne of the evening.

Party on, London. I feel quite without breath, caught between the avalanches of cash and the surging people everywhere, spending, spending and playing, playing on their phones.

Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Tinder’s founders, currently attributed with “cracking” the mystery of human attraction. This jury, for one, is out

The latest NYT article about a certain dating app that begins with the letter T has gone right ahead and added to the swelling compost heap of male-oriented buzz and money circulating around that app. It’s also gone and added to that merry discourse about what is “the key to online dating” – a set of conversations that has to be one of the world’s most pointless, and yet one of its most popular, at least where weekend newspaper fillers are concerned.

The article, by (the man) Nick Bilton, starts with his rather superfluous – but no doubt pleasurable – observation about models entering the Tinder building in Hollywood. Evidently, a modelling agency shares a building with Tinder offices (a coincidence?), and Bilton is there, waiting for a meeting with Tinder “executives” who, judging from the “boardroom” picture by Kendrick Brinson, are all male. That tallies with what I thought. (The app has employed a female in-house “dating and relationship expert”, Jessica Carbino, with whom I communicated last year when she was finishing a PhD thesis on online dating at UCLA. Her title as “expert”, though, does not suggest executive function. Please let her correct me if I’m wrong.)

Anyway, the models spark the metaphor with which Bilton, our eye on Tinder’s genius, opens and closes the piece. The models, fascinatingly enough, are wearing cut-off jean shorts and flip flops when they enter the building, then transform, like magic!, into models ready for a shoot, complete with “globs of lip gloss”.

So this models-change-clothes insight was used to contextualise new findings – namely, that Tinder has figured it all out. Tinder understands that people base all pick-up decisions on looks. But! Stop press, not looks in the purely attractiveness sense, but looks in terms of visual clues.

Stop press one more time. When singles walk into a bar, they aren’t asked to fill in compatibility forms. They just look around and then pick someone to talk to based on a mishmash of signs about their comportment and appearance. And – how’s this for nuance? – just because a guy or gal is hot doesn’t mean they’ll get picked up – after all, they might be scary and evoke the rejection ding dong.

Where experts, such as Dr Eli Finkel, a regular on the psychology of digital dating comment circuit, say Tinder beats the usual dating sites is that it “acknowledges [like the experts!] that the only thing that matters when matching lovers is someone’s picture”.

I honestly can’t tell you where the models fit into this – something about how you can have two personas; one online and one off. But it doesn’t matter. Because Tinder’s popularity is nothing to do with scientists figuring out that all clues are based on pictures. If that was the case, then normal internet dating sites would work just as well since daters can browse all they like.

Nor does it matter that Tinder’s platform provides something closer to “real life” in this mythical bar that people used to (indeed apparently still do) meet people when they aren’t dating online. Tinder, indeed the whole array of digital interfaces, including virtual reality, are NOT OFFLINE LIFE. They present a different material reality; a different texture; different philosophies, modes of being, and different affordances (ie, things that let you do things like select or click or message).

What people forget is that the point of dating apps, or online dating, is to provide an alternative or an accessory to real life. In real life you can’t flick through someone’s face dismissively even if you want to. There’s no “nope” stamp, in just those words, in real life. You have to pretend to go to the bathroom.

And people like that online-ness. It’s other. It’s fun. It’s when you meet up that things tend to get less fun.

The other big thing it’s to do with that isn’t “cracking the key” to attraction or whatever, is EASE. Tinder is so goddamn easy. And with lives ever-fuller of registration and Pay Pal account set ups that are an arse to complete, Tinder is a piece of cake.

Never mind that once you get on it, the array of human life presenting itself pictorially is something to regard with sobriety as well as humour.

Now, the people that REALLY are understanding what offline life is off are the less-publicised, soon to launch Pozee app, which is as simple as Tinder. It’s business is to alert you to other singles in your proximity – the only info members give is that they’re single and up for meeting someone. You can then look at them and decide whether to say hi. And according to these guys, far more plausibly than all the gumph about pictoral clues, knowing someone else is single and on the market is leads to chat. And with Pozee, as an alert system, you can pursue the person through face-to-face interaction, without which – am I right? – it’s hard to actually get the love, dates and sex that all those Tinderites say they’re after.

(NB: I wanted to end with that flourish, but then I thought, hmm, Pozee could lead to some fairly painful encounters – imagine the types that might come up to you on the train and sit down in the seat next to you…and there’s still 36 minutes to go till London Bridge! No, this definitely wasn’t what you had in mind…)

Getting help from Apple Support often feels like what I imagine birth coaching to be. Especially the two-hour session I had this morning – I mean, some women go from contractions to birth in two hours, right?

I’ll spare you the details of the phone call, but its origins lay in the fact that my phone obstinately and immediately rejects the definitely, now-memorised-it’s-been-entered-correctly-so-many-times password for my home Sky broadband.The agent and I worked together to troubleshoot. Perhaps at this stage the metaphor with birth isn’t quite ripe – though there was the “let’s try everything rather than declare this iPhone faulty” vibe throughout, which could, if one were feeling insensitive, be analogous to the “let’s do everything to avoid an emergency C-Section” thing.

But to my phone call. For two hours this morning, from the moment I answered the phone while still in bed to the moment I showered mid-way through while iTunes was downloading an update to the moment the agent told me in mystified tones that I’d need a brand new iPhone 6, we troubleshot.

And boy did we troubleshoot. There was so much trouble, you see.

I had to download lots of new updates – apparently, a ten-day old iPhone 6 has old software. The agent was sure this would be the ticket.

I hoped along with her, though had my doubts. At two hours for the download and various tinkerings, the stakes were high. I mean, time isn’t just money, time – poorly spent – is sanity-busting.

My emotions went up and down. Sometimes, I felt excited at signs of my technology functioning properly – the “about 20 minutes remaining” bar getting slightly smaller; the iPhone duly shutting down and starting up with its new update installed.

But then something bad would happen, or nothing at all – a box would appear on my computer saying everything had stopped and could not continue because my disk was full (deleting Sense and Sensibility helped relieve this problem but took a long time – it was a major set back). My coach, I mean, agent, tried to keep me calm and my spirits up, saying things like: “Almost there” and “Sometimes it’s like this” and “I’m confident the current update will work”.

And when the two hour session climaxed, and – with the updates installed satisfactorily all round – we tried the internet connection again with baited breath on my side and confident reassurance on hers, it was all smash bang, catastrophe, nothing doing, same same same: “INCORRECT PASSWORD” spat out immediately.

It was time for the unwanted but unavoidable emergency measure: go to an Apple store and get a replacement iPhone.

The thing with a birth is that after all that time and the emergency measure, you have something to show for it. A new person.

The thing with a malfunctioning iPhone 6 is that you have much, much less to show for it. On the plus side you have enough information to merit a swapped phone. As for the rest, you’ve only lost time, you’ve installed an update in a phone you won’t have in five days, and you’re paying for every second of it all.

I think I’d actually prefer to give birth than go through another morning on the phone with an Apple coach – encouraging as mine was.

Green leaf juice is fast replacing nice juice in New York. At least this one has apple in it…

Just back from a few days in New York where, among other things, I drank (or tried to) some of the most horrible-tasting things that have – surely – ever come to market. But they were in the name of health, and – following the metric that if it tastes horrible it’s got to be good for you, I decided to try them. I think I thought that if it’s being sold in cute packaging for $10 a pop they’ll find a way to sneak some sugar or no, agave or local Manhattan bee honey, or Connecticut sap, into it to make it just a little fun. In a world saturated with health-food that’s clearly not healthy (like those protein balls that are really just dates and chocolate rolled together, or Atkins bars made primarily of chemicals and glycerol), I just couldn’t believe that these things too – billed as they were as Booster or Gravity or Solar and so on – wouldn’t also be secretly consumer-friendly. Ie sweet and/or good.

I was wrong. Consumerism in New York – always at the forefront when it comes to things people can shove in their mouths – is now so developed that customers have passed from wanting pleasure, to wanting its opposite. Or, suppliers have anticipated that – sated on what tastes nice – New Yorkers are ready for what hurts. The credo of no pain no gain – usually adopted in exercise regimes and the restriction of food in diets – has now landed on the food itself. Yuck.

My first taste of the new climate of consumer de-sovereignty (after all, would a consumer who was king really buy something this horrible?) took the form of a really sexy bottle with a really sexy – minimalistic – label in a really sexy shop that advertised its wares as raw, gluten, soy and everything else free. I marvelled at the raw coconut pie and the raw granola and the mandatory kale.  Then I moved to the drinks….they all had Himalayan salt, lemon, myrtle and mint in them. Sounds good, I thought – no sugar, or any of its healthier substitutes, either. I bought one at $6 and while I like to feel that I’m being healthy, and will drink down almost anything in a neatly packaged refrigerated bottle, I was stopped in my tracks after two gulps by the strong sense that I was drinking soap. The liquid was simply not of the kind or type that constitutes the edible. It also, weirdly, managed to taste like the colour brown. Minty brown soap. I hastily switched to a Diet Coke, but later – parched as I trooped through lower Manhattan – I had no choice but to give it another go. I downed it, and that experience forced on me the expression of someone who has just drunk something so gross – cod liver oil, for instance – that regurgitation, or at least a gag or two, are real possibilities. My eyes watered, my mouth drew apart at both ends.

Later, curious about just how bad it could be, but also – secretly – on the lookout for a brew that would transform me suddenly into a sparkly paragon of slim health, I strolled into a store advertising “cold-pressed” juice. Its bottles were also in a trendy rectangular shape with a Dr Hauschka-style labelling thing going on: white background, lots of black letters. I found one with no sugar, called Gravity. It was green though somewhat translucent since, as the Lithuanian-born shop girl said, cold press means the bulk of it settles to the bottom. This bulk was something called algae-c, something very very healthy from Oregon. There was also kale (natch), celery, myrtle (again!), lemon, mint and (again!) Himalayan salt.

It cost $11.

Reader, I bought the Gravity.

And, for my money and for the sheer promise of drinking kale and algae, I was motivated to finish it.

At first, it tasted like salad dressed with lemon juice alone.

That was ok. But then you don’t drink salad undressed with anything other than acid.

My mouth soon caught on to this and staged its revolt. The image of lemony kale leaves marching down my throat, heading straight to my system without the trouble of having to be broken down (as the Lithuanian girl promised) produced a strange simultaneity of self-congratulation and utter revulsion. Worried I’d gag or maybe barf in public, I stopped at half way and put the rest of the drink in my friend’s fridge. She’s a New Yorker so maybe she can handle these things. As of yet, I am not evolved enough to do so. Chocolate milk, please.