Rejection is part of the dating game, but who gets to reject whom? I’ve heard people reject dates for bad breath, bad politics, and bad English. Private college-educated women posting about social justice online don’t give a chance to men with unpolished grammar. West Delhi girls—no matter how well spoken, rich or sexy—get turned down by South Delhi boys for just living in the “cringe” part of the city. People also get ghosted for putting ketchup on their pizza. It’s an unfair world, and dating is really a soft site for social sorting.
You, me, everybody is guilty—including those who write earnest think pieces about caste segregation on dating apps. We pretend that we are only ‘matching vibes’, floating above class and caste, but our swipe habits on dating apps suggest otherwise. And I know all your dirty little secrets.
A Dalit woman religiously swipes left on all Muslim men—especially those with “scary beards”. A finance bro ghosted an academia girlie after the first date because she ordered Teachers Highland Cream, the cheapest whisky on the menu. I also know a pricey princess in Bengaluru who got over her situationship when he served her food in a steel thali. And my brother keeps saying that Hinge doesn’t work for him because all the girls there are “rich and dumb”. Without talking to them. Preference is really prejudice.
All of us want to sound cool and reject the concept of arranged marriages and say love is blind. But we are doing exactly what our parents and relatives do in arranged marriage searches. It’s called ‘sorting’ and ‘filtering’. The dating apps are also doing the same filtering for us. If the algorithm pushes me toward people who are ‘nearby’ when I am in Khan Market, who do you think I am likely to match with? And when we go on dates, our minds are sorting, filtering and ‘arranging’. Class, clothes, cars, pronunciation, grammar, cell phone brand — we judge our dates constantly.
Also read: What women want—a man who cooks and doesn’t seek a standing ovation for it
English winglish
In the words of Big B, English is a phunny language. It makes or breaks your dating profile. To be able to be successful, you have to create a profile that can’t be copyedited because everyone is swiping with a mental red pen. “Haw, he said ‘I didn’t liked it’” Using the past tense after ‘did’? It’s a crime that can ruin your romantic prospects.
This is where ChatGPT enters the picture. Terrified of making grammatical errors, the youth of this generation have outsourced all textual flirting to generative AI. At this point, WhatsApp might as well roll out an AI-assist upgrade—it would save our literary gods the time they currently waste copy-pasting flawless replies.
Sadly, fumbles are inevitable when you meet someone in person. At a posh Starbucks joint in Defence Colony, a guy was passionately telling me about his international trips. Singapore, Vietnam, Bali—he covered it all in one year. At one point, when he really couldn’t control it, he said, “Sorry, I will have to say this in Hindi.”
Why would he say that? Did I—a girl from Uttar Pradesh—look like someone who would judge him for not being able to express every emotion in English? He wasn’t entirely wrong. When he later pronounced couture as “cooter,” I absolutely did. Mind you, between the two of us, it wasn’t me with a passport full of stamps and a fancy job at a big bank. I couldn’t even afford to pay for my coffee at that precarious time of the month. And yet, there I was—armed with nothing but a superior vocabulary.
People like me, who ask autowallas, “Bhaiya, battees rupay English me kitna hota hai?”, dare to write off people for their accent, phrasing, emoji etiquette, punctuation, spelling, and texting rhythm. One misstep, and you’re out. So, with this messed-up scenario in the dating pool, everyone is forced to perform.
A Gurugram techie—born and raised in Panchkula—can’t talk like himself if he really wants women to like him. He has developed a fake accent, and he practices pronouncing the names of dishes at home before going on dates. “Bruchetta always gets me. I always mispronounce it,” he said. And mistakes are inevitable when you’re doing so much code-switching. “One time, my Punjabi slipped, and I called the canteen ‘cunteen.’ My date visibly cringed.”
No wonder some people just give up and delete the apps. One of my readers—who only reads my columns to mug up Gen Z dating lingo so he can sound fluent when talking to his upper-caste friends—wrote to me saying he can’t afford to love with his credentials. Apparently, he doesn’t have the right kind of sauce women are looking for in their partners. “This dating culture is designed for people with power and privilege.”
In an article titled Dating Like a Savarna, Ravikant Kisana wrote some bitter truths. “…the cartographies of romance in a caste-segregated society have landed along the predicted trajectories of reductive and compartmentalised “love”. Like parts stranded on different floors of a building that no apps can connect us to.”
Morally corrupt and divided as we are, there’s no fixing this system. Ladies and gentlemen swiping in the privacy of their rooms will always unfairly reject people. They will pick the ones who talk like them, eat like them. Love, even with the algorithm’s assistance, will never stop being political and will forever be colonised by English. And we will keep chasing it anyway.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)