final rant about dating

It seems terribly francaise of me to hate something linguistic with such venom, but I loathe the verb to date, as in "I'd like to date you".

I despise its blunt and mechanistic transitivity. Subject, verb, object: I, Date, You. It shocks me. Worse than that; it repells me.

Prior to coming to America, I had always used the phrase to go out with. "She's going out with him" seems to me to be about as far from "She's dating him" as "She's making love with him" is from "She's doing him".

She's making love with him allows so much more openness, gentleness, nuance and mutuality. In She's doing him the action is stripped to the most basic common denominator, in which one person operates upon another, almost irrespective of that person's own subjectivity. In this phrase, and in the mindset represented by this phrase, the other exists merely as a target for the activity of the subject. There's no I/Thou there; it's strictly I/it. And what's worse, it's I/it in denial.

It's more subtly the same with He's dating her. HE's dating HER. What's she doing? Well, in this sentence construction, not much. She's reduced to being the object of his activity of dating. She's not going out with him. They're not seeing each other. He's dating her. (Ditto by the way, with She's dating him. I'm not talking about gender roles here, I'm talking about ways of viewing the opposite sex as an instrument for one's own agenda of self-gratification.)

As I said, it seems very French intello of me to be so concerned with the deep structural psychology underlying a banal piece of surface syntax, but I truly think that the transitivity of this verb phrase reveals what is so unhealthy about the whole relationship scene here in Silicon Valley, in which it is quite normal to date multiple people, compare them on a kind of mental spreadsheet (for all I know people use real ones), and then pick the "best" contender.

You can buy tickets to expensive 'speed dating' soirees, during which you rotate through people in slots of six minutes each, and ask those with the best personal PR for their numbers. You can subscribe to online dating services, some of which (such as eHarmony) have already decided for you that if you're a woman, you need an older man (on the basis, they claim, of research). Women apparently sort men by height and income. So, if you're a short nice guy with a low paid job, kiss your subscription goodbye. I don't know what the men sort for, but I do know the woman post glamour shots.

All of this exhausts me on the deepest of levels. I'd rather stay single than enter this world, with its loaded agenda and its instrumentalist goals.

How have we have allowed ourselves to become so commercialised that every exchange has become one of profit and loss? In a society in which everyone continually looks for the biggest return on the least possible investment, every interaction becomes an advertisment, every meeting an interview.