Legal eagles, tech bros and guys pretending to work for their father’s business—the Delhi NCR Tinder, Bumble and Hinge pool is contaminated by three male specimens. And the wise word on the Gen Z street is that you must swipe left on all of them as fast as you can. Sure, a man’s personality isn’t defined by just his profession, but it does decide if he is datable or not. I don’t make the rules.
In this age when we should be diversifying our dating portfolios, it’s downright foolish to invest a single second on software engineers. No matter how adept he claims to be at “debugging codes”, his emotional bandwidth often resembles that of an NPC in a video game. My coder-ex couldn’t even fix the glitch in my laptop. Trust me, there’s nothing going on behind those geeky glasses.
The techies are joined by lawyers on the bottom rung of the male species. What’s worse is that, from Tis Hazari to the Supreme Court, an unhealthy number of them are strutting around the city in their white neck bands of entitlement. I have been informed by the grapevine that many straight women are on the brink of petitioning to ban them from dating apps. Landlords, the OG lawyer-haters, will be quick to support it.
A 31-year-old woman I know has been caught in not one, not two but three such legal troubles. That’s how she learned that all lawyers are cut from the same cloth—a very argumentative fabric bedazzled with overconfidence. L2 turned out to be the champion of cringe: apparently, menstruation disgusts him. His words. L3 is well-respected in the streets of Lutyens’ Delhi, but in the sheets, he spreads STDs. And then he puts the blame on the woman. L1 wasn’t practising law when she started dating him. Putting people down for kicks came naturally to him.
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Expand your roster
What are the other options, if one does overcome the lawyer and engineer fatigue of the national capital’s cesspool?
Gym trainers limit romance to diet charts and workout tips. Stand-up comedians will first make you laugh and then turn your love life into an immersion into how they turn trauma into comedy. You are left cleaning up the trauma. And why bother with activists if all your dinner dates will be spent talking about Modi?
Once in a while, a freethinking artist catches your eye but since broke love isn’t romantic anymore you force yourself to move past him. But it’s not easy, is it?
I wonder how folks at the National School of Drama are doing—their chai-and-samosa date offerings hardly have any takers in this heat. Musicians are too judgemental about my trashy Spotify playlists. The body-painting artists, on the other hand, are adding some excitement to polyamorous circuits. But they’re looking for a muse—girlfriends don’t have enough artistic merit on their quirky Instagram grids. Photographers are better, at least you can use the pictures to jazz up your Hinge profile. And I won’t say anything mean about cinematographers because I am currently crushing on one. Filmmakers will be rewarded with an exclusive column after he crushes my heart.
If days spent scrolling through unhinged tweets have taught me anything, modern romance is a learning curve. And navigating dating apps is as risky as trading stocks. It makes sense to spread our assets—school teachers, DJs or public policy nerds; diversity is important. However, I keep journalists strictly out of my roster—only I am allowed to pimp out my personal life for ‘stories’.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)