I’m practically begging for people to address the landscape shift in dating online in a post-Covidized world. In the absence of that, here’s an acidic cultural commentary to kick-start this discourse. 

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Bridget Jones is allegedly a British cultural icon. Re-watching the film series this past weekend, I couldn’t help but wonder, how Bridget had it all together while we were fooled into thinking otherwise. At the point of her heightened discomfort, she was accompanied by a motley crew of allies, an overbearing mother, and two ridonkulously gorgeous gentlemen, across the trilogy. I am inching closer to calling her out on her privilege, but bear with me, I have another point to make.

The film series captured the maladies of the time—body image issues, terrible workplace environment, sexism, substance dependence, dating (and the lack thereof)—and yet it is so far away from the grim realities that perforate our lives now. Dating apps hadn’t been invented and people on those apps were yet to use their matches in ways unimaginable.

The worst of this, I can confirm, is being used as a relationship advisor; an agony aunt, if you may, to that someone you are planning to date/bone. At no point do we see the men in Bridget’s dating circumference use her as their personal therapist to unpack and dump their emotions on her. Mark fucking Darcy lived with the knowledge of his wife fuck his best friend, and yet, he was not tacky enough to take an information dump on Bridget. He was graceful and dealt the situation with tact, even when he saw the object of his interest shagging the man with who his wife cheated on him.

That also begets the next question; what is an appropriate gender-neutral term for agony aunt and why is it not in use along with Glucose Guardian (for Sugar Daddy) and Stevia Guardian (for Keto enthusiasts)?

This perhaps stems from a personal spot. In the last few months of trying to recalibrate my life together, I’ve had the pleasure to fraternize with some fantastic men around my age from the pool of dating apps that exist. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t quite imagine prospects with each of them, one better than the other. However, in the end, I found myself mollycoddling and counselling each of these individuals through their respective erstwhile relationship dramas. The stories are the same- their ex-partners move on and leave their grieving men in my solemn company via dating apps.

The real virus mutating faster than COVID is the breed of men and women who are using dating apps to fill a vacuum in their lives. They are able to do that by making their matches turn into their personal relationship advisors, in the guise of going with the flow.

The premise for these apps is to fucking date or bang. The most banging I have gotten out of date this year was to be in correspondence with a man about his two ex-girlfriends and one current girlfriend, after eight months of emotional investment and labour from my side. My invoice for those eight months includes five weeks of letter-writing to each other, nightly banter, and a variety of deprecating memes exchanged among other unmentionables.

Funnily enough, my coping mechanism to deal with the premise of being used by my object of affection was reaching out to my old dating-app match with my bag of rants. He had kind words to offer and a grim reality check at 4 am, “Were you expecting a fairy tale ending where you throw Chelpak ink on his face like a righteous journalist trained at JNU?” 

Perhaps not, but I was also not expecting to become an enabler, a chink in the chain. Unfortunately, loneliness and isolation have ensured that I’m just as much an accomplice in this bullshit concept of treating people as unpaid and unsolicited advisors, much like the man who owes me eight months of fascination and one-sided adoration back.

There has to be, in some way, redressal of these men and women we seem to have accumulated in our lives from these apps, especially since the advent of COVID. This has to mean something more than just adding people to our collection. We can’t possibly relegate all these people to using them at our convenience and bumping them off when we are done grieving about our ghosts past.  

“We had hope when we were in school and college. Now, there is none. We have no place to go and no one to be with. The possibilities of meeting people are totally over and we are only in our 20s.”

- Famous last words from a man who met me on a dating app and spent 40 minutes telling me about his grievances (that I politely asked about). I wanted to respond to him with the “Am I a joke to you” meme template, however, I chose to stay quiet.

If there’s anything that the last two days of re-watching Bridget Jones have taught me, it is that we definitely need a new genre of media programming to extend to accommodate COVID-19 as a plot premise. In this Covidized genre of romance and drama, we will be sure to include people getting on dating apps to use other people as unsolicited therapists, to overcome their loneliness.

I also hope at some point that filmmakers and commentators begin acknowledging the basics of dating in this day and age, wherein, you can’t possibly meet people at pubs and clubs. Not that Indian residents ever had that possibility, but I would imagine this to have significantly eroded the contours of dating culture abroad.

Which brings me to my next point, how and where are we to seek guidance and advice from in the absence of the world order and where do we go from here? I spent a considerable amount of time on the web this morning, looking up my situation and dating advice for free. The recurring solution to improving dating life remains that you ought to step out of your comfort zone physically and meet new people.

Do I step into the COVID ward at Ganga Ram Hospital and meet singles my age or should I try the local mortuary first? I don’t know where to go and meet new people without my empathy being abused to fix the emotions of ungrateful buggers. I’m done with the offerings of these individuals and their maximum contribution of orbitting around to derive entertainment and distraction from the attention, instead of checking into therapy.

Until the internet and showrunners choose to answer these questions and address the changing landscape of dating culture online, I can only hope for a world where cultural icons across countries are cognizant of the present-day maladies within the landscape of dating, romance, and marriages. At the same time, I would also like to alert men and women across age groups to add to the discourse of dating app traumas by continuing to add to the repository of garbage content across Thought Catalog and WikiHow. It’s certainly better than spending the majority of the year writing and exchanging letters daily with a man who doesn’t deserve your toe-nail worth of attention.