Do I “heart” this? My finger hovers over the outline of a heart beside a photo of a curly-haired woman grinning, her arms wrapped around two tan dogs. It’s a Friday night, a few months after I moved to…
When I first sat down to create a profile on the dating app Hinge, acting on a whim propelled by a combination of boredom, curiosity, and loneliness, I assumed that my experience crafting personas as an essayist would give me an advantage. How different could it be?
In an essay, the goal is usually curating the version of the self that best tells a particular story. What does a reader need to know about me to understand my story as fully as possible? Which of my qualities and quirks are relevant? What can I omit? While a dating app profile is also a persona constructed with specific rhetorical intentions (in this case, presenting the self as a suitable romantic partner), I discovered that the preoccupation with crafting a desirable and attractive persona complicated the task: What does it mean to be desirable? How do I make sure that I am being seen as desirable, while at the same time, that my profile is attracting people who are desirable to me? Since so much of the cultural information we receive about these concepts is wrapped up in gendered and heteronormative expectations, as a queer writer, how do I decide what parts are applicable to my experiences and which are not?
While my Hinge profile didn’t lead me to love, I did find an irresistible form to experiment with in my writing. The allure of dating apps lies in the promise of a shortcut to transforming superficial impressions into intimacy. Essays, which have been historically understood as glimpses of the mind at work on the page, share in that expectation and allure. To translate my dating app experience into an essay, I borrowed the question-and-answer format of the Hinge profile, and added shifts in point of view, parentheticals, and endnotes to evoke the layers of self-objectification, overthinking, second-guessing, and obsessive self-consciousness involved in constructing the profile. Borrowing (and breaking out of) the dating profile form also allows my essay to articulate the tension I experienced between my queerness and my femininity. I decided to alternate between first, second, and third person in an attempt to capture the strangeness of the self-scrutiny involved. Early on, I realized that the common writing advice to keep a consistent point of view felt limiting: I needed to represent the experience of constructing my profile, my attempt to imagine myself from others’ perspectives, and my analysis of the culture I was encountering. I put these three versions of myself (with some cues in the text to help avoid too much confusion) in conversation on the page.
When I shared a draft of this essay in a writing workshop, several readers suggested that I include the actual photos from my profile. After carefully considering the suggestion, I realized that showing the reader the photos would undermine the intimacy I was trying to cultivate. I didn’t want a reader to look at the images and evaluate whether my descriptions of myself were accurate. What I wanted to matter in this essay was not how I am seen from the outside, but how I see and understand myself.
ANNA CHOTLOS’s essays and poems have recently appeared in Pinch, HAD, Split Lip, Hotel Amerika, Sweet Lit, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things. She holds an MA from Ohio University and now teaches and writes in Denton, Texas, where she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas and the editor in chief of American Literary Review. Find her on Twitter @achotlos.
