Hey Rix,
Here’s what’s the deal. When you asked me what’s so wrong about talking of TV shows with a stranger, I have two(only 2) issues with it.
reference twt:
Some contextualization before I elucidate what they are.
A. When you ask me about anything favourite, it puts me in a box. It’s like asking me to sell myself in a little package, fuss free. Like there’s one version of me that you want to get to know, not the multitudes I hope I contain. Going to the point where I have to choose like a 10 year old what show I like, doesn’t really have a good answer to it these days. And asking the question differently can look so much better. Genuinely ask what shows changed my life or left an impact on me. Or if I’m having a good time watching the show I am currently on.
More on this subsequently, and I hope this clears up the pointed question you had, but leaves you with more questions, because then I know I got my basic point across and got you thinking as to what women(*) really want.
B. I’m assuming this tweet is inspired by poor online dating profiles and online dating having become this joke version of reality we find ourselves in. A simulation we all find ourselves stuck in, so we joke about to avert real issues.
The original tweet is also written for the same audience, so you could very well extrapolate that we have no misunderstanding of the type of potential dates she’s talking about. Even if this specific
date was NOT through online matches, there is very much a culture that finds you woke because you follow someone, something (football, for e.g.), read a certain type of book, but worst of all, WATCH A TV SHOW. I’d imagine you wouldn’t at all want to date specifically anime people, because of certain unsavoury characters in the scene, but there’s people whose threshold happens to be whether you get the reference to a show on their profile.
WORSE YET, if I’m a total stranger on a dating site, I probably picked you for NOT advertising your choice of TV shows as your personality. I have no hate for people who do, I probably would’ve been one of those kids myself whose identity was deeply interlinked with any external influences that in a weird way, showed what my own free will looks like to the world- except I am not, owing to privilege of access to resources and spaces to embrace a wider identity in general. I still do not want to engage with someone whose contexts are, how do I put it nicely, paid programmed television. It seems like I’m being a little snobbish, not giving people a chance? Well, everyone has their filters right?
The problem is this: we’d never even connect because his bio was probably “talk to me if” and a list of nested if statements that i would have to make my way into with generic “you should be into music” or “we’d get along if you like to TrAVEl” or “Netflix and chill ” and you know how exhausting these things are even without the added conformity of being asked if I like FRIENDS/HIMYM or, for the hippie types, Breaking Bad or Brooklyn Nine-Nine. While I adore Brooklyn, i wouldn’t want to date all .6 million fans (0.3 because so far i’m straight), you see my point? (CAVEAT: I have never had to make a bio on an app, it’s from a place incredible female privilege on Indian dating apps that you find me explaining what makes a bad bio, but I think I can still critique :P)
If it matters to someone that my taste in TV shows is their criteria for filtration, I wouldn’t want to imagine what they’d do if they saw how nitpicky I can be with even my most favourite pieces of media.
I should just add my hottest take “Avengers is overrated” in my bio to keep them and The Office stans away. BRB updating profile with a bio.
Okay getting to the entire point after setting up my primary concerns. Also, you know this will be rambly, bear w/ me.
CONCERN 1: What’s so great about first dates, and choosing *your* strategy
First dates are essentially job interviews but of a person’s character/ values AND to judge if all the rapport you have established online still exists offline. You get to be anyone you want, and that in itself is brand new for the other people. It’s all new, Rix, there’s nothing you could say about your preferences that matters at all. I mean banal preferences.
(Something like being a fascist-sympathizer or homophobic is something I’d try and weed out incredibly quickly. If that seems like a filter just like tv shows does, I assure you I wouldn’t have to if the app did its job. Some things are deal breakers, you know this.)
So when you think about it, first dates can be awful or really great, because you have no template and there’s no expectation to get to a place where there’s scope for any discomfort. Forgive my colonialist metaphor, but here goes:
In the vast prairies of the Rift Valley, you can choose from 6000km of conversational land. First dates are so uncharted, you have cleared so many nearly life-threatening encounters (the filtering process, early texting and so on) you should be surprised you reached the Rift Valley at all, instead of staying by the coast trading so your queen can tax you. You are an explorer now, what do you choose to do?
One approach is to see where your natural curiosity takes you and if your environment is conducive, you follow your curiosity and here’s something interesting- purely being curious and invested in the path can be super rewarding.
Best case: you are truly lucky and you make it far enough along in the valley to understand it better, to gauge what you did so you can return the next time with greater comfort and ease. You like that your curiosity didn’t kill you and it is overall a great experience of exploration.
Moderate case: You find traps. You encounter suspicion or just basic defense mechanisms in the flora and fauna there. To be quite honest, this would happen even if you had reckless curiosity and explored your safest trail to the very last thorn and rattlesnake. You just might be lucky they didn’t sting or hurt you- but these are the defenses of the Valley, and you have to acknowledge them respectfully (or else you really could die). If you’re like any other weary (OR very green) explorer plodding along the Rift after months of voyaging, you might not have the basic strength or skill to go through with following your curiosity. So you strategise instead. Cover as much ground as you think will give you good insight of the terrain and you can kindle your interest in something in the process- you’ll follow through when you return with more people from your convoy.
Your first trip is merely a canvas. The canvas is has its own problems, obviously. You will hit a bunch of barriers. You obviously retreat if you see tracks of animals you don’t recognize, human bones, any of that. Retreat quickly, even if you think it’s worth exploring. You have no experience in this terrain, you just leave it.
Humans, however familiar, have their own walls and mental blocks. You just have to learn to leave it at that, most definitely on the first date. When you feel you have enough time, patience and consent to scale those walls, you may- until them you make a mental note and move on to a subject less testy.
Worst case: Juts to cover all bases here, would be being limited to your current location, unwilling to explore and just being an all out FAILURE at exploring. Your actions really make all the difference, no matter the purported intention. Any TV/movie question ends up falling in this category. It’s banal to discuss what the storyline was, or what the casting should have been instead. It’s lazy and to me, a good case to make that you’re not really interested in getting to know me. (Of course if there was clear intent that the date was a precursor to something more casual or purely physical, go for it. The analogy of lazy explorer still stands. Best and worst cases are literally my internal compass- you can choose how to rank these types of interactions.)
The real question is still partly unanswered. When I’m on a date, do I want to talk about banalities? Personally, I think most conversation must start with the banal to go anywhere. You have to slowly explore more interesting lines of conversation from there on- and I struggle with this personally- but I genuinely feel like this is a skill you can build up from being attentive and curious, forgetting your own inhibitions a little. I’ll try to expand this specifically better over this week. (I’m glad you asked for this even after I didn’t deliver on this movie explainer for a week nearly.)
What you really need to remember is that in this case, you’re both explorers and the valleys. There’s no rule that you both have to follow the same template for exploration- I believe as long as you’re happy with how much freedom of exploration you have and you have given your date, you’re in a sweet, sweet spot. Don’t hesitate to be wrong, it’s all unknown terrains after all. If you can joke about the process and the awkwardness, there will be none. As I heard recently, there’s nothing called an awkward pause. (unless you DECIDE you want to feel awkward about it).
CONCERN 2: The baggage with television
So most of my explainer is done, but you can see how programmed television has very few avenues to explore if you’re talking about purely about the show. Doing this on an early date is carving up the Great Rift Valley between colonizers without really checking it out. It’s choosing to stick with the alkaline asf lakes in the Kenyan rift valley without realizing there’s a brilliant freshwater lake in (now) Tanzania which teems with life and is orders of magnitude better in terms of interesting.
I think the TV trope is very lazy. It doesn’t show intent nor coolness. I will constantly bring up TV and movie references in my conversation anyway IF I CARE ABOUT THEM. Then you know with reasonable clarity that it’s a good subject to broach. If not, this feels forced and ugly. I will not CANCEL the match based on your asking that question alone, but like the original tweet felt, she’s so pleasantly surprised that it a good date/ conversation happened and the question didn’t feature. No awkward pauses, forced conversation on TV (it doesn’t have to be forced, as I clarified, but makes for a quick escape when you’re feeling lazy or overwhelmed by your own anxiety/ awkwardness).
I feel like in your 20s if you’re still asking and answering that question in order to categorize a person as cool or woke, I’m sorry, that’s almost delusional. If you tell me you enjoyed Seinfeld, I’d be happy to talk to you about it but that’s not a metric by any standards that YES HE’S HELLA DATEABLE (if that were true I could’ve been into a certain nasty, vengeful boy who creeped several girls out in our First Year and is definitely crossing fast into Incel territory. Sorry, but anytime anyone wants to discuss TV show compatibility I remember him. He’s the kind of guy I’m avoiding ever texting in my life, you know?). As teenagers with very few markers of coolness and authentic free will, I remember having “deep conversations” with guys about books we’d like and The Big Bang Theory and music. I realized then that taste was not to be confused with compatibility AND that there was a very clear systematic hierarchy for what was cool. If there was a show everyone was watching, boys would make it clear that they’d watched it. They would change behaviour towards you if you had also partaken in that new, cool, woke thing that was part of the zeitgeist. Through JEE coaching, some very obviously two faced people decided I was “cool” because I’d have watched the AIB Roast before them, or was well versed with Sherlock terminology. If someone changes their behaviour towards me based off this metric, I call bullshit. It’s a hack to get on an arbitrary social scale and anyone who’s still playing that game in their 20s has really got to move on from this social ladder stuff. I now watch things that make me genuinely excited. I don’t have to climb a ladder that values exclusion based off whether you have access to new media, or that you have the privilege of going to concerts and if you understand English, even though for the last one you can argue a case pure convenience.
That’s just me. I still watch shows out of a residual FOMO and sometimes deviate towards the mean of the bell curve in music out of habit, that social ladder stuff really gets to your dumb brain. I will call myself out for it occasionally, too. I read a couple of books last month purely because a lot of Tweeple were, they were great but I didn’t have to.
You know what, Rix, I hate that I needed to hide from all those people in my childhood that I truly enjoyed Glee! or Gossip Girl and Britney Spears and Taylor Swift were my cultural icons. I have spent countless hours watching Pretty Little Liars for the sheer drama of it. I loved it, but there was no inclusion of that sort of media in that deeply biased hierarchy then. I still think twice before I gush about these thing IRL, and you would know. Watching anime comes with its own share of judgement and condescension, and I know how personal it gets to have to defend your choices to people who will not understand. That’s why when you talk to your tomodachi about anime and beatboxing and your faces light up, I make it a point to compliment y’all. I don’t do it tastefully, sure but I’m just playing, you know right?
This sort of cultural homogeneity that people are trying to impose can get tedious and annoying. It’s especially sad if a 20-anything chooses to conform to these standards today. I’d hate for a good date to be sidetracked by all the baggage and narrow- mindedness of all the TV standards. I do not believe you need many things going for a show for me to invest my time in it. I don’t need to justify why I watch something when clearly the plot sucks and that the show is progressively getting worse.
It just seems like we’re going to be stuck in Kenya when we could’ve explored Tanzania in the same time. Lake Malawi is loads better, and with the little time we have to spend together, let’s get a little more creative please? Don’t carve out territories based on limited data, yeah? History doesn’t look favourably on such decisions anyway.
It’s so easy to forget that both parties agreed on exploring because they wanted to take a chance on this. Both agreed to the date, there’s definitely something that intrigues them about you and you about them. Choose how you want to make it interesting in a way you both aren’t tired by the talking alone 🙂
That’s that. I truly hope you understand why this stuff took me so long to write, it’s far from simplistic. A single tweet can be loaded with meaning, and maybe I took it way out of context but this is an articulation of my reality? If you think this was tedious and unclear, I wouldn’t blame you. I didn’t spend time making it a good case, because so much of this is biased and subjective! Text me what specifically you don’t get, because calls, in our case, do not work 😛
Cheers and here’s to better conversations with nuance,
Surda
>> If any of my family reads this, yikes, but I truly have nothing to hide. Also I am 21, you should be okay with my talking of/ thinking about this stuff. If you aren’t on board, sucks for you.
Stormy Skies by Suradha Iyer 