Dating Up North Left Me Burnt Out and Confused

I blew my transmission half-way to Dawson, so I hitchhiked the remaining 300 kilometres. I managed to hobble into Pelly Crossing, a tiny town along the Klondike Highway. There is absolutely sweet-fuck-all between Pelly and Dawson in October except half-frozen poplar trees, scrubby pines and suspiciously fat ravens.

A friend picked me up. I am a ridiculously lucky unlucky person.

“The price of living vicariously through your adventures,” my friend says as we are speeding along, watching for frost heave, “is occasionally having to rescue you from yourself.”

This is extremely true, probably because I have a penchant for just crashing through life, common sense and laws of physics be damned. Two days earlier, while getting ready to take this road trip, I had lost my keys— all my keys, including the my truck key and the spare. The next day, when I was supposed to leave, a massive ice storm closed highways in all directions, so thoroughly sleeting the roads that people were literally skating to work; I merely threw chains in the back of my truck and delayed leaving a day. Now, the blown transmission. Smarter people would cut their loses, but not this little-lesbian-that-could.

One way or another, I was getting to Dawson because I had a date.

As I’ve written about before, this isn’t the first time I have travelled stupid-long distances to meet someone from Tinder I’ve spent a lengthy amount of time (in this case, four months) texting back and forth with. However, I believe in always trying anything once, and then, if it does not literally kill you, several more times. I was determined to see how this played out, despite the now-obvious bad omens from the queer divine.

Unfortunately, this particular date was also destined to be an epic failure.

I tumbled into town, bedraggled and road-worn, having crossed (nearly literal) hell-and-high-water to meet this woman. If our positions had been reversed, I would have thought that terribly romantic. My date, however, did not seem to feel the same way. Before I had even arrived at the bar where we were supposed to meet—at a time, place and day she herself had selected three weeks earlier—she texted me to announce she a “time crunch.”

This meant, apparently, a party she really wanted to go to.

Normally, I would have taken this as a sign that she changed her mind and wasn’t interested in me, but she insisted that wasn’t the case. We had a drink for an hour or so and then she went to the party, promising to meet me the next day for a walk and coffee date.

It rapidly became apparent that this sojourn was about to be a disaster. For those fellow single people out there, let me help you out with some hard-won tips for romance:

Dating tip #1: If you have a date (or friend) coming from out of town and you absolutely cannot resist that super-cool party, invite the person to come with you. Letting them go back to their hotel room at 9:30 PM by themselves causes them to scroll through Tinder looking for a different date for the evening.

Dating tip # 2: If you cannot abide by tip #1, sleeping until 2 PM the next day, briefly waking to tell your out-of-town date/friend you’re blowing off the second date because you are hungover as shit and “will text them when/if you feel like a person again,” before going back to sleep is a major faux pas.

Dating tip # 3: If you cannot follow tips 1 and 2, you definitely should not, when you finally do sober up and meet your date, tell her you are feeling “spacey” because you did a whole bunch of MDMA and ketamine last night. This will cause your date to covertly check your Tinder profile while you are in the bathroom to confirm that you are, in actual fact, in your 30s.

The weekend someone drives 500 kilometres to visit you for any reason at all is not the weekend to get cranked on K.

My date ended up doing shots with friends who were also at the bar, then unilaterally deciding to blow off our dinner plans and take us to a house party. At the end of the night, I invited her back to my hotel room—very specifically, I told her, so we could talk, sex was absolutely not happening—which she declined because she was drunk and had to work in the morning.

I went to bed thinking maybe she just isn’t into me? Nope: morning text message telling me how great a time she had and that she was excited to see me again in the future. Were we even on the same date?

She seemed stunned that I had not appreciated being squeezed in between drinking bouts.

Meanwhile, the roads had closed again. I ended up having to fly home (my flight, too, was nearly cancelled due to the weather). While I was sitting on the plane, looking out at the sleet-covered runway, I thought about why these things keep happening to me. How is it possible to have such a spectacularly bad dating history? Is it me? Are my expectations too high? Do I have some critical character flaw? Is it because I let people treat me badly? Was I asking too much of people? Am I that insufferable asshole that doesn’t realize she’s an asshole and just assumes it’s everyone else?

While all those things might be a little bit true, I realized the thing all my disaster-dates had in common was I met these people online. The only good relationships I had ever had were with people I had met in person before we started dating. Why was that?

Sitting on the plane, what really struck me is how much like a game Tinder is; it’s designed to be easy to use (swipe right, swipe left), to have customizable “characters” (aka, you) and consistently rewards the user for “farming” behaviours, ie, mindlessly going through profiles and entering your own data with potential matches. It distracts you from tedium (I tend to check it while I am, say, waiting in line at the store). It’s emotionally rewarding to know you’re attractive to another person and to imagine a better romantic life for yourself. My theory is that dating, like many aspects of our daily lives, has become “less real” in the internet age, leading people to search for intangible, immediate rewards, like messaging and matches, without really understanding that there is a flesh-and-blood person (probably wearing pajama pants and eating a sandwich) behind the profile; dating online doesn’t feel any more real than playing Angry Birds. Those pigs don’t have feelings when you knock them down and it’s hard to imagine the “character” you’re chatting with on Tinder does either until you actually meet them. This makes shitty social behaviours like ghosting and “orbiting” more seem not only OK, but a non-issue; after all, you often don’t have to see—or be responsible for—any of the impacts of your actions in real-life.

Moreover, in small communities like the north, sexual and romantic partners are limited, both by population size, distances and the migrant nature of the work force, which often sees people coming in and out in “shifts.” This creates a—real or perceived—scarcity of mates. In Dawson City, I once heard it quipped that when you break up with someone, you “don’t lose your partner, you just lose your turn.”

This means, at least for me, that I’ve been willing to put up with more shitty behaviour—and ignore more red flags—than I would when I have more “perceivable options.” When I was living in Montreal and I had a bad date, I simply shrugged and went back on Tinder, because there was a constant stream of potential mates. When I log into Tinder up here, I frequently only get one or two profiles to check out that match my criteria (ie, appropriate age range, not a dude, into women) before I run out of choices and get the dreaded There’s No One Around You screen (thanks Tinder, that’s kind of the point). This means that each potential match is more valuable to a dater in a mate-scarce “dating economy” like mine because your options are so limited to begin with.

Which is why, instead of telling my date that blowing me off because she’s still too drunk from the party she blew off our first date to go to the night before is the very pinnacle of disrespectful, I still said yes when she (finally) texted me. I had my phone in my hand and was literally writing a text to tell her not to bother calling me anymore and I still erased it and went out with her again. She very predictably continued treating me like she was a drunken frat boy who had just picked up a sorority chick for shits, but at that point, it’s kind of unrealistic for me to even be mad about it. Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times is science and baby, you don’t fuck with science. I believed that if I stuck it out I could “turn the date around” which seemed, at the time, important, because not “turning it around” meant trying again in a very thinly-stocked dating pool.

Dating Tip # 4: If you find yourself on a date thinking maybe I can turn this around, you probably can’t. Moreover, you probably don’t want to. Go home, have a beer and cuddle with your dog. Watch a movie. Deadpool 2 is freaking hilarious.

I don’t have a better idea than Tinder or any of the other online dating apps we use to meet people—they have their problems, but if nothing else they are useful tools for assessing the dating choices in any given area. What I do know is that maybe we should be more considerate—and clearer about our own intentions—to people in general, both in person and online. Likewise, I think some of us—especially people like me—need to be more responsible for what we are and are not willing to accept from potential partners.

Follow Lori Fox on Twitter.

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