Broken Algorithms

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Someone asks you out. You’re pretty sure it’s not a match, but "you never know" and you have nothing better to do, so you say sure. The date is uneventful, confirms that you’re not a match, and ends with a nice awkward hug, and one of those vague promises to meet up again soon.

Perhaps there are follow-up texts, that you politely reply to, but are vague and friendly. Perhaps there are then more follow-up texts that you begin to ignore in an attempt to give a hint as to your lack of interest and intention. And, finally, perhaps there’s the passive-aggressive texts you begin to receive that a) reconfirm this wasn’t a match, and b) lead you to hide them from your newsfeed!

What’s wrong with this picture? – as the back of the Highlights magazine asked you to spot.

Well, first and foremost is the fact that you abandoned your own good judgment, values, and integrity by agreeing to go out in the first place. “Pretty sure it’s not a match” is usually good enough. Enough of these situations have proved that your gut is usually correct.

This self-abandonment is the seed of the whole problem. It’s not the dude; it’s not his persistence; it’s not his disappointment masked as passive-aggression. – It’s you.

I’ve finished reading the history of online dating/how-to memoir entitled Data, A Love Story: How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet My Match. In it, the author describes that the problem with online dating is not the sites; it’s us. It’s us answering questions as our aspirational self, instead of as we are. It’s us, chatting with people we only have vague interest in. It’s us, abandoning our integrity in order to have crappy connections with people.

I’ve been thinking about this process in relation to my job search. I’ve realized that I do the same thing in dating that I do in job searching: I lie. I let jobs that hold little to no interest for me get a bulk of my attention, and then when I get the interview, I find that, indeed, I’m not interested, but in order to be “nice” or liked or wanted or hired, I will feign that interest. I will more often than not land that job, and then I will become resentful that I have it. This suitor that I didn’t want, I’m now trying to delete from my Facebook, or in this case, my LinkedIn.

Again, what’s broken here is not these jobs – it’s my willingness to abandon my values. It’s my willingness to say to myself, Something is better than nothing; what else have you got to do? It’s my willingness to waste my time and theirs, so that I can put off and deny what it is I really want.

My willingness to waste my own time … my threshold for the pain that causes is astronomically high.

But because I have a belief that this is easier than the pain of making truer statements, of sticking close to my integrity, my intentions, my values, and my wants, I choose the rockier path every time.

Because the alternative is to stick with myself. To be the friend I want to be to myself. To be my own cheerleader and ally, and to let myself know that I’m here to support myself on the unknown path of self-esteem.

I said on the phone to a friend two weeks ago: "I’m having trouble mustering the low self-esteem required to apply for jobs I don’t want." Ha!

I think we call that progress; insight; growth. (Although, I am still finding myself browsing those job descriptions.)

I have to muster a whole silo filled with negative beliefs in order to go toward jobs I don’t want. These include: I don’t know what I want, so I don’t deserve anything better. I will only abandon myself eventually, so I may as well do it now. There’re no happy endings in this world, so what makes you think you deserve one.

To name a few.

And I have to bombard and drown myself in these beliefs (false beliefs) in order to “muster the low self-esteem” necessary to undersell myself.

The same, I’m sure, is true for me in the dating world.

So, again, what is the solution, here?

I know that it’s to not abandon myself, to continue working on my self-esteem, to wipe away the corroded mirror I use to judge myself so that I can get a clearer view, one that reflects esteem, joy, confidence, and courage. One that reflects someone fun, engaged, lively, warm, and worthy. I know that the work is to trust that if I walk away from that silo of low self-esteem, I will be led toward a healthier source of sustenance.

And that trust... That is the hard part. That tiny sapling of faith that I will have to hold onto as the storm of negativity swirls around me, raging only harder the longer I resist. I will have to hold on to that sapling, until it becomes a redwood, until the storm recedes into memory. I will have to have faith that if I hold on long enough to my self-worth and my self-esteem, the clouds will give way to the sun. 

Here's hoping.