Love Lives - Raven Smith on the problem with dating apps

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

This week, Olivia is joined by writer and author Raven Smith to discuss the difficulties of dating apps.Raven is a Vogue columnist and the bestselling author behind Trivial Pursuits, a memoir-meets-social commentary book that covers everything from the cultural capital of being tall to what you can tell about a person from the contents of their fridge.In the episode, Raven explains why he would never have met his husband in the dating app era.The two discuss how people curate a version of themselves on a dating app that can never possibly reflect who they truly are and how the saturation of users makes us less likely to settle for anyone.Raven also highlights the bizarre - and fundamentally racist - ethnicity filters on Grindr that have only just been abolished on the app in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Hello and welcome to Millennial Love, a podcast from The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more.

This week I am very excited to be joined by best-selling author and writer Raven Smith. Raven is a former columnist for Vogue and the Sunday Times Style. His new book, Trivial Pursuits, covers everything from the cultural capital of being tall to what you can tell about a person from the contents of their fridge. He joined me on the show to discuss the ways in which we present a version of ourselves on dating apps. Enjoy the show. Hi Raven. Hello, how's it going? Good, how are you doing? I like to say I'm always good. It comes true if you keep saying it. Yeah, that's a very good approach. How have you been finding lockdown? Whereabouts are you?

I've just moved back into my house, which has been renovating for eight months. And my cat got sick. It's a long story, but we're back a bit early. So I'm sort of traipsing the echoey halls of my lovely shaped house that had no painted walls oh that sounds lovely and how are you how are you dealing with quarantine how have you found it um all of the things all of my coping strategies at the beginning because we're on in week a gazillion now but all those early things like cooking and yoga really lost their shine at about week nine so I'm now just waiting for my identity to come back in some way I know what you mean when it first happened I was quite enjoying all of the zoom workouts and the group house party chats with friends and drinks and now all of that is just like completely gone to shit.

I just cannot be bothered to talk to anyone on a house party. I can't bother to exercise. It's just, it's just all, I'm really sick of it now. Yeah, I was quite enjoying getting drunk and even that is no use to me anymore. Yeah, there's only so many times you can enjoy getting drunk in your kitchen or in your garden, you know, as you now can with a few friends. So your book, Trivial Pursuits, is a very funny

exploration of the minutiae of modern life. So for those who aren't familiar with your writing, could you start us off by telling us a bit about the book and what made you want to write it? Yeah so I was writing a weekly Vogue column and an editor from Forth Estate got in touch and said do you think you could ever write a book and my immediate answer was absolutely not that's crazy it's not I feel like a lot of writers have this lifelong dream with this book that's living within them waiting to be expressed on the page but that unfortunately or fortunately wasn't my experience um so I met with this editor and she basically all of the worries I had about um writing longer chapters you know very used to writing 600 words and moving on so all of all of the things I was worried about she

sort of dispelled in a in a kind of great fantastic first date and I pitched her two books the first one was Trivial Pursuits and they and then the the rest is history I think for me the book is about the endeavor from what I find interesting about the way we live today is how important all the small stuff seems to be and we've kind of become a culture of broadcasting everything in our lives so suddenly it has a different meaning you know our houses and our interiors aren't private in the way that they used to be the clothes we wear it's you don't go clubbing to show off your going out top you just do a selfie so I think for me, it's really interesting how all those small things have become, are so important to us.

And at the same time, although I realise that big things like pandemics and famine and war are hugely important, they also can be very abstract if you're not kind of in the midst of it so I wanted to talk about being in the midst of my life right now and all of the and train an eye on the things that felt significant in some way I think it's really interesting what you say about broadcasting everything and oversharing because particularly the impact that that has on dating culture because obviously we live in a world now where nothing is private and

everything about us is probably searchable online and and that has a big impact when we date someone particularly in the early stages isn't it and I know you write about this in the book so I want to talk to you a bit about dating apps and social media stalking so you met your husband in 2009 right oh I think so so that's that's interesting because that that's the same year that Grindr launched but it does predate the kind of boom of dating apps like Tinder, which launched in 2012, and Instagram, which launched in 2010. So you're right at the time when you started dating him, you couldn't miss Marple, the people you dated on your phone. So I want you to talk to me a bit about that. Because obviously now the second you meet someone you fancy, the first thing most people do is look them up on social media. Yeah, I think for me, when I first met my husband,

oh God, on the night bus, at the back of the night bus, which would, even with Uber culture, would never happen now, I'd found his Facebook page and there were like 12 tagged pictures of him in a carousel. And I remember going round and round on it, trying to get a kind of view of this man that I was interested in and and I think it was much harder I don't do it so much now right so I haven't dated anyone for 10 years but I when I meet new people I look at like their tag pictures I can

see their history I can see their how they're feeling today and for the last week and the last month and however long, right back to the summer that they were 16 and on the arches and lemonade in Newquay. So there's a level at which when I met my husband, there was a lot of mystery between us. And I think that is something that has definitely died down. I don't know if that's really, that has definitely died down. I don't know if that's for the better or for the worse. I also think that there's always now this, you inevitably have to send a nude to somebody online, I've heard. So it seems very, I mean, we didn't even have adequate tools to shoot pictures of our own genitals at that point.

So it's quite good to... So it was all in the moment, which was quite nice. Yeah, it's interesting, the mystery thing, isn't it? Because it's so funny when you stalk someone on social media before you meet them, you obviously go into a date kind of armed with all of this intel on them. Yeah. And I always find with that, you know, even if it's not someone romantic, even if it is a friend, like you said,

or someone you're just interested in talking to or meeting or knowing more about, you meet them and then they might start talking about, you know, which school they went to. And you can't then be like, oh yeah, I know, because I saw it on your LinkedIn page. You have to pretend that you have no idea and it's new information and it's this really inauthentic kind of veil from the get-go particularly in dating and I do actually think that that is quite damaging and I think you lose you lose that kind of spontaneity don't you I think when you're first with someone it's such a delicate dance and such as very small things can send it awry so I think that kind

of keep keeping things nice and flowing is a is a huge part of it I meet people all the time and when I tell them I'm renovating my house they'll say I know and then I'll just not know what to say to that yeah it's weird isn't it yeah it's like it's almost about it it's almost the closest thing that we have to feeling like a celebrity isn't it because you know obviously celebrity fans know everything you know that is available online about that celebrity yeah and but it feels quite strange when someone confronts you with what they know about you or what they think they know about you it used to be very very. And now I just pretend it's not. Like when you could, I just remember, you know,

not that long ago when you would see someone wearing headphones, talking out loud, that being a very weird thing. And you thinking they were talking to you. So this complete normalization of people talking out loud as they're walking around on their own you know it's the same level of kind of we've just acclimatized very quickly to this sharing culture and i think there's a there's a we're encouraged to do it it's not a it's almost gone beyond a conscious choice you just automatically share I find it very odd how um that impetus to see something beautiful and instantly kind of pop your face into the frame

with it and take a picture it's just you know wildly narcissistic um yeah incredibly so and also it has very uh real consequences when people get it really wrong. I mean, just this morning, I was writing about influencers who are doing photo shoots at Black Lives Matter protests. Yeah. And videos have gone viral of them online, kind of, you know, adjusting their hair and adjusting their outfit in the street while protesters march past them. And it's just so wildly inappropriate. And it blows my mind that this we've got to that point where that's what people are now doing it's it's so unconscious um that that kind of slide into constant broadcasting and i sort of understand the that this person the when you're at Auschwitz or wherever doing a selfie, I don't think it's that,

that, that it's just, you know, humans have always diarized. You can just look at old manuscripts, I don't have any specific examples. And I think we are constantly diarising our lives now. So you end up not engaging with the sadness or the importance. You end up just trying to reflect your own self within it. You write in the book that today's dating app culture makes us more indoorsy. So correct me if I'm wrong but by that I think you mean that we're more likely to meet someone on our own sofa by scrolling through an app than we are to actually go out and meet someone at a club because people let fewer people approach

one another when they're out now because I think because of dating app culture so I wonder do you think you would have met your husband in today's dating landscape oh no oh I don't know it felt you know I think most couples have this kind of romanticized idea of how they met especially if you're like a decade in like we are and I would suggest that there's it's almost seen as a bit of a sadness if you meet someone and fall in love on an app it's just so on it's so unfairytale like and yet that is you know 60% of gay relationships we might have to check that fact have have started online now so i do think i think part of the issue from i don't think things with my husband would have run as smoothly because i think because of our scrolling culture and the idea that you you are a scroll away from something else, means that you're kind of less likely to settle for anything because we constantly are told something better is around the corner.

I think about my grandma buying a red jumper after the war, for example, a made-up example. But there's like two shops on her high street in the Isle of Wight. So you either get the red jumper from Woolies which is a bit too long or you get the red jumper from the knitting shop which is a bit too red and you just choose between the two of them you just choose the one that works well and I think in this culture we are constantly scrolling for the perfect red jumper we just won't stop until our kind of perfection is catered to. It's funny that you actually mentioned clothes because I was just going to say, it's almost

a bit like fast fashion, isn't it? Because you've got, you've got dating apps, which is, you know, swipe left on one person, another person immediately comes up. It fuels this disposable culture, like you said, whereby, you know, you never really commit to one person because you know that another person is just around the corner a lot of my gay friends are very can't see how jaded they are by the scrolling and how detrimental it is to any kind of real connection you i think you know for me my relationship with my husband and my obsessions with men before that have like festered it's been quite it's quite fun to go round and round and have your thoughts all churning up and actually that is really disappearing because the guy's coming over for a shag as soon as you

decide you fancy him I think also with the with the disposable thing it does it does kind of foster a culture of callous behavior and you know that's the reason why I think people ghost one another and why people you know breadcrumb all of these all of these weird trends that there are breadcrumbing orbiting all of these awful behaviors that people exhibit on dating apps and I wonder if you think there's a way to kind of overcome that and overcome these behaviors that are now so ingrained in us and you know if we think about how long dating apps have been around for approaching 10 years of tinder in two years time um so yeah do you think that's a way to overcome that oh good question I think it just seems very callous it is callous and ghosting it just

seems like the worst thing you could do not well not ever but yeah in dating in dating it's brutal isn't it I mean it's happened to me loads of times and yeah you know you have no idea that it's coming because a lot of the time you're kind of having this flirty conversation and it feels like it's going really well but you have no idea what's going on in that other person's head they could be in a relationship with someone else and still be on a dating app studies show that there are still loads of people on dating apps when they're in relationships i think there's we've just reached this point where these apps are designed to be sticky to keep us involved it's a bit like the dieting industry it doesn't really work if you if you lose all the weight and there's no the industry runs itself out

if it's successful and i think it wants to keep you dating and sniffing each other's bums like dogs but there's a level at which the gamification of it has meant that you are trying to win a game of sorts a bit like dungeons and dragons and you just have another life it's not really it's not that real uh because it's so it's just this flat screen in the same way you die online you just come back to life and date again yeah no that's a really good point it does feel like a game I mean the swiping thing in itself is like playing and I have a lot of friends who will just be going through a dating app just because it's something to fill an evening with but because of that you almost then you

dehumanize the users that you're swiping past and talking to because like you said they're just on a they're just a face on a screen they're just a they're just a profile yeah i think it's interesting that grinder this week have disabled their ethnicity filter which just seems like the most outrageous thing to have developed in the first place yeah so what was the filter it was i'm looking for yeah you basically choose a race or several races and you will only be delivered for people that have clicked those races it's just so bizarre i don't think i don't i don't i don't think that's um a feature on other apps. I wonder if it's just on Grindr that that was a thing.

I think people are just, I think like anything, it's like an SEO thing that people just want to narrow their options because we have this infinite option at our fingertips but it's actually just straight up racist so bye ethnicity filter bon voyage yeah good riddance yeah oh my god this episode is brought to you by google pixel i'm'm Jessi Cruikshank. I host the number one comedy podcast called Phone a Friend. I also have three kids. I need help making every day easier. So I switched to Google Pixel.

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Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. In the book, you write about sex apps versus dating dating apps i want to know what the difference is well for me and my understanding of grinder i just think it's a pornification of everything and i think grinder this this this way i think it's impossible to distill between for anyone what you what you are how you are online and what you are being shown all the time and what your actual desire system is i think they start to merge really quickly and i would say if you're constantly looking for on grinder for example at torso torso torso torso you now see that on instagram torso so i talk about kind of torso culture. I think there's a thing

for gay men in the 70s. You know, if you weren't pretty or handsome or cute, there's very little you could do about it. But these days, it doesn't really matter what your face is like, because you can tone your body to a certain degree and still be fishing on these apps. That's interesting. The dating app profile thing I wanted to talk to you about, because obviously it's, it's, it's quite similar to Instagram now in terms of the way that you curate yourself. Obviously the context is different. You know, someone on a dating app is specifically looking for, you know, love or sex or whatever whatever whereas someone on instagram is just trying to project a version of themselves what do you think do you think there is a difference between the way that we present ourselves on those two different platforms because obviously on a dating app

profile you do select a certain amount of photos you have a bio like you do on instagram you know you might you might put your height in your dating app profile you might put your height in your dating app profile. You might put your height on your Instagram bio. What do you think the difference is between those two? And I suppose the lies that we tell on each of them. To ourselves. Yeah, exactly. To ourselves. Isn't it that most men lie about their height on dating apps? Yeah, that's very common.

I think women do too, though. I know that my... I mean, for example, when I was on dating apps yeah that's very that's very common I think women do too though I've got I've got um I know that my I mean for example when I was on dating apps I'm 5'6 I would put I was 5'7 yeah and I have taller female friends who lie about their height and say they're actually shorter than they are it's really weird I I think like I was saying, it's very hard to work out whether you are just projecting your own desires or you are filling in a mold of what you think other people desire. And I think that tension is always there. And I also, I just think on on Instagram specifically you're much more on

Instagram there's this kind of lack of I think we because we're also kind of hyper individualized we can see influencers curating their feeds and we think of ourselves as above it because we think of our own personal experience as being much more enriched. And there's actually no real difference. We're just, you know, this idea of being a brand, each person is their own brand. This idea that you are just,

you are seeing nuances in the way that you're expressing yourself that isn't too influencery or too something else, but it's still the same level of careful curation of your best angle and your best self. I think a lot of people want to project their best self, but I would say on a dating app, you're trying to lure mates. It's quite feral, isn't it?

It is. You're trying to, it's like you're peacocking you know you're trying to show your best feathers yeah and I think the issue with that yeah is that it then gets the relationship or you know that comes out of that it starts from a point of inauthenticity and then it's up to you to over to both kind of overcome that and get to a level where you find something authentic between the two of you i think that's hard it's a really hard and scary thing and i think these apps offer you sexual intimacy but without any of the of the exposure of your real who you really are so that must be a bit of a head fuck for anyone who is like I'm having loads of sex and it's working and I chat I talk to people a bit shittily on this app I'm really really really sassy on this app and it

works for me but in real life I just just normal I want to I want to conclude by asking you a bit about the two types of love that you talk about in the book um so the first one is the kind of love that makes you cry a lot and feel very alive so I would say that's probably like a passionate kind of fervid type of love and then the other is the love that makes you feel totally safe so I wonder if you think the rise of online dating kind of pushes us more towards the former because it is so much more superficial yeah there's just something about it that it's it's it's I think the traditional model was that like that's how you love in your teens and it's chaotic and destructive but incredibly thrilling and then you settle down later on but I know a lot of

older people that are having completely chaotic overly passionate wild relationships that are unsustainable and exhausting um I would say that the culture is definitely I would say that culture is definitely, I would say, you know, I don't want to harp on about Love Island since it's been years since I've watched it, but there was a bit with Danny Dyer and her boyfriend, and they had been getting on for the whole series, and they were encouraged to fall out because drama is what people want to watch. And actually, my relationship with my husband but the least the less dramatic it is the better it the better it is when I think we are conditioned

to kind of seek out drama and see that as the fulfilling part of a relationship to feel shit and stressed and completely like who am I it's so true it's so true we romanticize the torture and the unrequited love and all of those horrible things in love we see them as like the most rewarding which is so backwards oh yeah you would I think I don't know being married for me was never about um I don't know we're quite pragmatic and that's not to say it makes it sound so unloving to say that we agree to work on anything as a duo it sounds like a business relationship but actually I think there's a lot of um there's a lot of fiction around being married and a lot of expectation that is about uh just this kind of passionate I've made it sound like I'm in the very dispassionate marriage but there's all this idea of your wedding day being this thing that you're building up to

and then it's happily ever after. I think I've made it sound like we're in quite a boring marriage, but I think that for me is where the safety of being with someone who isn't pushing your buttons for the sake of it to feel alive is actually creates so much security and so much grounding.

And when we got married, we knew what our marriage was going to be I said this in my speech we were very sure about what our relationship was and what it needed but we had absolutely no idea what a wedding should be and I think that it speaks to that kind of conditioning of I would say women but but straight people on this wedding day. Like girls are asked about their wedding day when they're ditty little thing, their little dots on your wedding day, what the dress you'll wear, the kids you'll have.

So I think for us, we knew it was very difficult to really get our head around what a wedding would be, the commitment and the... Also, I think relationships are so private despite this kind of online publicity the way that you are with each other intimately sexually just get like in the morning over a cup of tea that is very different to a kind of public declaration of love in front of everyone you know and I've it took me three four years to get my head around that being something that I could do I was like this is private why

are we going to say it in front of these other people so I think there's a level at which you that that we are conditioned to expect the EastEnders love the duff duffs every every other day but that's what love is meant to be and I think hopefully I'm in a relationship that has longevity because it doesn't thrive on drama of deliberate drama I think that's such a good point it kind of harks back to something that we spoke about actually in our episode with Juno Dawson we were talking about Sex and the City and we were talking about how the kind of love that's romanticized in that program is the one with Mr Big the really torrid tumultuous relationship

and I know that has had a big impact on my love life yeah he's so toxic but Carrie is too so she is she is toxic but she also has such cool clothes I I think the thing about, I can talk about Sex and the City forever, but the thing about Carrie is that we all want realistic characters and she's quite a realistic character. She fucks up all the time. She cheats on people. She sleeps with her married ex-boyfriend. And I think we resent her for being realistic

in being completely flawed oh yeah god it's such a good show 20 years later still so much to talk about um right we should we should head on to our final segment of the show this is our lessons in love segment so this is the part of the program where i ask every guest to share something they've learned from their own relationship experiences and how it shaped their understanding of love moving forward. So Raven, what is your lesson in love for us today? Really difficult because a relationship is such a like a robber off. You just keep moving through it.

You don't really have like lightning bolts. I think for us, you know, what's my lesson in love? I guess we should go back to this idea of drama. For me, I'm most in love with my husband when we are catering for each other, looking after each other rather than fighting or shagging. So there's a level at which quiet dinners in soho when you're just there to be hungry not there to stare lovingly into each other's eyes for me that is like the money shot

it's all about sharing a life with someone rather than creating this kind of scary vacuum of stress you're you know so i don't know if that's a lesson but this idea no it is it is I think it's sharing yeah sharing a human experience with another person without having to worry about how you're being perceived I guess yeah well this idea of being your best self actually just being yourself and being like I'm a bit grumpy today that's a that is a good way to be or just being really hangry and then suddenly just getting really aggy and then having like the first mouthful of noodles and then suddenly all of that anger dissipates you're just like I'm so sorry I love you so much I'm sorry I was such an arsehole yeah yeah I you know for me I

would love to put my phone down more that would definitely help a lot of a lot of different things but what do you spend the most time on Instagram spend a lot of time on Instagram I you know I love I love chatting to people whether I know them or not I really thrive off get getting like off the chat and I find it hard to just leave a message unanswered so yeah that was a good and bad thing yeah I'm the same actually I am and to a point where when I when I was single and I was dating people it it would always come across as overly keen because I would reply to someone immediately just because that's how I use my phone but obviously it then gives the impression that I'm super super into them and it puts a lot of people off but I know that if I don't reply to a message

as soon as I see it I just won't reply yeah I well I would say I would be absolutely terrible at dating today because I am a person who is not very shielded in what they really think so I would just I would just it will become I think I would suggest that I'm quite an intense person to be in a relationship with that's a lovely point to end on thank you I'm an intense person to be with that's it for today thank you so much for listening. If you're a new listener to this show,

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dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power.

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