to swipe or stay
People talk about the differences between Tinder, Hinge and Field over beer while I sip coffee. Apps for dating. Algorithms for fucking. A warehouse filled with computer chips. Someone’s 401K salary, plus benefits, is your date’s dick too close to your clit. And to think, someone got paid for it.
The worst is when a girl says I’m looking for the one. Then I know I’ll disappoint her, so I swipe left. Intimacy, the new boogieman. Hide, hide under your bed. Bed only for money making. I’d rather them be upfront about their kinks, you know what turns them on. Obsessed with kinks more than care. I’m kinky and don’t care for our first conversation to be about how you want someone to pee on your chest. The kinkiest thing anyone could ever do is love someone unconditionally. Pee and all. But that kind of kink takes time.
I don’t want a relationship. Is as casually common of a statement as I’m busy. Flies out like bad breath. The nasally kind, result of a poor diet, disregard for the connected system. Each time a burning boils up. Everything is a relationship! To no one. Denying the physical law of Nature as a new sense that replaces touch; the opposite of seeing, some call it climate change or patriarchy. Swimming with plastics we deny creating, using, disposing.
Inextricably interconnected, we actually are in relationship. No! I’m free market, open relationships all the way! Good vibes only. Progressive. Dare say, a feminist? Divorcing the reality of needing anyone. Fun without depth. Superficially swimming, micro plastic from the city toothbrush bumps into elbow while doing the front crawl. No such place as away.
Along with cigarette butts, being immersed in the image of carelessness and disposability has become part of our commute between point a and b. swipe. swipe. swipe. Let me prove how little I need you. swipe. swipe. swipe.
Four days earlier, something shifted, and the question sat between the invisible phone line. What what was it like being married to Bouy? I listened to my mom’s stories pour out of the speaker as if they’ve been waiting by the phone for two decades. While painting in the corner nook designated as studio, listening to a story unravel with enough space between us, it was calm enough to hear the birds chirp through the window. I felt for her as a woman, as I woman too, bridged by a deep desire to care.
She was the secretary and treasurer running the business he still owns. Think 1950s. Book-keeping, bills, ordering of supplies. A job. Alongside raising two children. His was providing and building. Bringing home fancy raspberry tarts after working on some fancy persons cabinet in Georgetown. Work was always his first born. Will be his death. I still struggle in calling him dad. Bouy is the name we gave him.
Her work wasn’t salaried. Never increased beyond $5 an hour. Though she was the accountant, he owned the account, cleared it after cut. Even now the tone suggests not resentment for the financial debt but hurt that he gave up and left. We mainly talked about his business in our free time. But I didn’t mind. He needed someone to care for him and I liked being a caretaker. I liked raising you all and being with you on snow days when school was closed. It worked, until it didn’t, until I needed help. A woman’s story.
For years while in the thick of it, the dysfunctional divorce fueled by personalities, was simply called “the situation”. Two decades later, my open heart yearns to debunk, demystify the split track.
In between mommy’s I-did-everything-for-a-man-who-didn’t-pay-me-shit (my words, never hers) and the disposable dating apps, my dad had another seizure. Two years since the last, making it the fifth. I thought I beat it. Despondent and angry. Cryptic and existential. You don’t beat epilepsy. You don’t beat stress. What do you tell a man whose worked as defense? An unseen brilliant artist. I don’t like the way the medication makes me feel. Well you don’t have a choice, you can’t have a seizure while operating a circle saw or driving to DC. Yes Kate, he calls me. She’s the doctor. I cover the emotional and spiritual. Together we make a great team.
There will be another text. Bouy had a seizure, he is ok. Hard to describe the kind of impact when the one who never misses a day of work, owns two businesses at 65, built a house with my mom on Nantucket at 25, and can fix anything physical while denying everything emotional, falls onto a metal frame in his woodshop while unconscious. The rock softens. The stubbornly tough becomes vulnerable. I become focused and protective. This is life in need. This is my father.
After all is said and done. After twenty years of trying to understand why my family went from the happy LL Bean catalogue to a dysfunctional mess that was my sister’s and I’s to hold. After all the psychoanalyzing and the unraveling. The years of therapy and therapizing. After breaking up so many times with the man I truly want to be with because I am so afraid of this thing that ruined us and made my parents crazy. After acknowledging the injustice and cruelty. After trying indirectly to claim progressive is the opposite of committing. There’s a peace to the pieces the put us together and pulled us apart.
I think I know why thirty somethings are incessantly swiping. Sure it’s a pandemic. Sure it’s the new bar. Sure it’s a tool like anything else. Everyone’s scared of getting their heart broken. Something to my generation, the children of divorce. The children of the baby boomers who married early and found themselves later. I don’t think I’m alone in the process it took to return to care. To return to a kind of intimacy where you know you can hurt each other and you won’t break apart. The kind of intimacy where you may fuck up.
There’s a bullet point for each dollar my dad withheld, every performance my mom acted out, every scene we were left to clean up. They stung, yet their raw honey oozed a desperate love. They gave everything that they knew how to give in their fuckery. There was enough to run the machine until there wasn’t. It was never because of absence. They loved too much and didn’t know how.
When it’s time to turn off the iPhone and face the boogieman under the bed, I’d rather choose risk over swiping. Too devotional for endless shopping at bed bath and beyond. Someone said more is less. Social psychologists prove it. I’m okay if we fuck it up. At least the effort will be mine and not someone else’s salary.
Photo: Self Portrait, 2012
ALISON SCHUETTINGER
MAY 24, 2022