Private messages on dating apps often do not remain private. It’s common to capture a conversation with a match and show it to your friends – or strangers on social media. This is the case of this Hinge send a message and X (formerly Twitter) user @bjorksunibrow posted this week:
The tweet may have been deleted
“Hey, thanks for coming back, would you mind if we put a pin in those plans for now?” » reads the message. “Full transparency: I kind of met someone yesterday who I didn’t expect to vibe with as much as I did and I would feel a little weird dating someone else right away.”
The “radically” honest, corporate jargon-laced post generated a lot of reactions on X. The user who received it captioned the screenshot: “We are in an era of over-communication” . In a follow-up post, they said: “Normalize white lies! » I have contacted this user and will update the article if I hear back.
Other people agreed, saying it was too direct and the person should have lied. Some, however, loved the message, praising its transparency or simply calling it “normal” and “mature.” Still others called the message “soulless” and “brutal.”
There is no right answer here; your actions will never please everyone, especially on social media. But the message and the resulting response say a lot about the current state of dating and, more broadly, our relationships. On some level, we forget (or have already forgotten) how to talk to ourselves.
We communicate, maybe even overcommunicate as @bjorksunibrow said, but to type a lot of words, we don’t say much.
Crushable after dark
The sender of the message followed a script. They put their intangible feelings through the meat grinder of corporate and therapeutic language and that message oozed out. Instead of telling the unfiltered truth, they dressed it up in the nicest, most sterile way possible.
On some level, this is understandable. In 2024, it’s still possible that someone will capture your words and broadcast them for the world to see. People were harassed and doxxed for less. (Luckily here, @bjorksunibrow removed any identifying information before uploading the screenshot to X.)
Social media has programmed us to think about every possible reaction, and most of them are mean. We are constantly aware of how others perceive us. In our obsession with optics, we protect ourselves, add warnings, and dilute our true thoughts until they are a puddle of nothing.
Beyond this issue, this post also smacks of “optimization”. Searching for meaning under capitalism (or, I don’t know, many TikTok followers), many have turned to optimizing their health and work. This had an impact on dating. Why actually think about and share my real feelings, when the Internet (or your therapist, or ChatGPT) already wrote an answer for me? Why stop swiping on apps when my next match could be ten percent hotter or make ten percent more money? Why keep my plans with this Hinge match when the person I met yesterday seems so much better?
As cultural critic Magdalene J. Taylor recently wrote: optimization won’t save you – and it certainly won’t save relationships. On the contrary, optimization reduces intimacy and trust. Our inner thoughts and feelings are messy, but sharing them actually brings us to know ourselves on this messy, human level.
Maybe this message about “putting a pin” in plans was “optimal,” but as my colleague at Mashable Cécile Mauran said, this looks more like a bad termination email. In an age of increasing technology and optimization, we need more reminders that life is inherently messy – not the kind of weird, weird messiness of a AI-generated photo, but something different. Something human.
