The dating app had been updated so many times that nobody remembered what it originally promised, but the newest version came with a feature nobody had asked for and everybody eventually used, a small icon beside each profile that let you preview a person’s entire romantic future with them, generated instantly, three paragraphs long, formatted like the back cover of a paperback. It read like marketing copy for a life. A whirlwind romance complicated by family secrets. A slow-burn love story tested by distance and ambition. Most profiles produced something serviceable, competent, the kind of description that made you swipe right out of mild curiosity rather than any real conviction.
She’d been swiping for months by the time she noticed what was actually happening to her, that she’d stopped being able to enjoy a synopsis that read as merely fine. A nice enough paragraph about companionship and shared hobbies left her cold in a way it wouldn’t have a year earlier. She wanted twists. She wanted a synopsis with weight to it, tragedy and redemption and a sentence near the end that made her chest tighten, and the app, learning her preferences the way these things always learned, began serving her exactly that, more elaborate summaries with every swipe, each one promising a love story too dense and complicated to be lived casually.
What she didn’t notice, not for a long while, was that the actual dates had gotten stranger to match, men and women showing up with the specific gravity of characters rather than people, delivering lines that felt written rather than said, entire evenings structured like chapters building toward something. She told herself this was simply what compatibility felt like now, finally, after years of forgettable small talk. She didn’t ask why the fourth date always seemed to end on a cliffhanger, or why breaking things off with anyone had started to feel less like a decision and more like closing a book that wasn’t finished with her yet.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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