who's afraid of vulnerability?
jumbled thoughts about online discourse, love is blind, and the erosion of the modern dating scene.
i have to preface this post by acknowledging the fact that the only reason i can even fix my mouth to talk at length about the state of the internet and the erosion of interpersonal relationships at length is because i am a chronically online twenty-three year old who gives way too much of her time engaging in online discourse. this is as much a self report as it is a call in.
there is a growing epidemic of people that are becoming increasingly self centered, cold, and individualistic. of course people have been mean on the internet since the dawn of time, the perceived distance and sometimes anonymity between people makes it incredibly easy to forget there’s another person on the receiving end of an interaction. within the last ten or so years the state of discourse/debate online has only deteriorated, notably documented in the evergreen “i like pancakes” “oh so you hate waffles?” tweet as well as molly’s “bean soup” rant. everyone is listening/reading to react and respond, not to truly engage and understand.
and while molly’s rant is only a year or so old, she blessed us with “bean soup” in 2023, somehow things have only gotten worse. the discourse cycle is never ending, due to the surveillance state we live in as well as apps like tiktok and twitter (i really dgaf) perfecting their algorithms to hold us hostage in a room with purposefully dissenting voices, but as the daughter of an english teacher and a lawyer i’ve unfortunately been cursed with an appreciation for healthy debate and have had a front row seat to the collapse of serious online arguments.
perhaps too late, i realized earlier this year any substantive discussion online had become almost impossible when the Cashier Discourse was making its way across my for you page. a creator i’ve watched occasionally made a video ranting about the current state of customer service and how she had some unhelpful interactions with cashiers/service workers. the video is now deleted, but the gist of it was that there was some miscommunication between her and these employees and she felt as though they were being rude to her and wanted to vent on her page. i won’t get into detail as to what the interactions were, because that’s not important to the overall arc this discussion had, but from what i gathered in the fall out this somewhat innocuous anecdote got boiled down into “cashiers don’t say hi anymore” and lead to some of the most insane takes i’ve ever seen. the response varied from, “cashiers don’t owe you shit, we don’t get paid enough to say hi to entitled customers,” to “cashiers who refuse to say hi to customers are ruining third spaces and should be fired if they can’t do this one piece of their rudimentary job.”
as someone who’s worked in some form of the service industry my entire life i was incredibly confused. creators i typically enjoy, who engage in thoughtful conversation with one another were suddenly spewing very polarizing and at times heated takes about something that seemed like two people who happened to meet each other on a bad day. and it was endless. video after video with a different perspective that was usually extreme toward either side. i knew it was time for me to tap out when a creator i’m familiar with who has a career in luxury retail decided to weigh in, chastising disgruntled service workers and insisting if they can’t hack it they should simply “get a different job.” i got so frustrated, not all of us are making tons of money serving high end clientele, not all of us are lucky enough to have jobs we enjoy, i thought, it’s so hard to get a job as it is these days let alone one that’s not doesn’t involve some form of customer service—i had to put my phone down.
everyone was talking past each other. people were appropriating activist language like the assertion that a rude cashier or barista was singlehandedly destroying third space without consideration for the poor worker who they are essentially trying to force to be in community with them. slowly but surely each person weighing in was losing more and more of the context around the original video that by the time the discourse had reached its peak people didn’t even remember what kicked it off in the first place.
more recently there was the woman who posted a comedic song documenting the ending of her two year relationship, how her boyfriend essentially let her pack up her entire life and spend most of her savings moving across the country, unpack all their stuff, and then abruptly end the relationship with a note (shout out to berger). the whole situation was darkly funny but somehow turned into another ten rounds of discourse on the hellsite that is twitter. i definitely forced myself to engage with this topic on a smaller scale, for the sake of my sanity and because twitter is less addictive for me than tiktok, but i still managed to come across the reactionary takes. this time the “i should touch grass” moment came when i saw someone imply that the girl was evil and manipulative because she does improv ?? something that in a vacuum is a hilarious assertion but when it’s said in earnest is a mind numbingly deranged thing to say.
a tiktoker and writer i love, tell the bees, has written about some of this strange polarization, specifically within the context of love and relationships at length on his substack. specifically, he’s spoken about how young people are overwhelming self obsessed in the way they frame normal human interaction/events as though they are personal sleights against them. just as people who wholeheartedly believe the woman who created the video was at fault for simply wanting to move across the country with the man she loves, (a sect of people insisted two years with no ring was the obvious sign this would happen), the people who label her ex a “sociopath” and “abuser” are also incredibly off base.
these sorts of polarizing attitudes toward mundane things that happen to be shitty parts of the human experience, (someone being rude to you, someone breaking up with you or being a crappy partner), are what give birth to vitriolic mob mentality like the west elm caleb situation (if you’re unaware what that is, sarah z has a great video explaining what happened and what that says about the state of the internet) and an overall lack of empathy going into any online discourse. there is a growing sentiment that every social interaction is something to be “won” or “lost” and that incredibly narrow view of the world doesn’t allow for much growth or reflection.
it just so happens, the newest season of love is blind, a season that has been deemed by avid and passive watchers of the show as the “worst season yet” is a perfect microcosm of issues i have with the condition of human interaction, especially among gen z.
the newest season of love is blind is full of flaws, it fails on so many levels; both as an experiment and fundamentally as a season of reality television (something i talk about at length in my newest indie black girl blog post). i like to say this season suffers from a phenomena i am all too familiar with as someone with an often outside perspective on the current dating scene: the couples fucking hate each other.
of course not all the couples ended up having such a tumultuous relationship on screen: garrett and taylor were by far the most stable couple of the season and thus the easiest to root for, and tyler and ashley…well they were a hot mess for a multitude of other reasons i do not have time to touch. for the three other couples that did not make it to the altar though, the road to their respective ends was rocky and led to another round of online discourse that alerted me to gen z’s vulnerability problem.
tim and alex, ramses and marissa, stephen and monica, and hannah and nick. four couples that are at their core wholly incompatible in ways the internet only managed to exacerbate.
starting from least to most egregious, marissa and ramses are definitely the most familiar of the bunch. two beautiful, horny people who avoided tackling the hard stuff until they just couldn’t anymore. marissa is a bubbly black woman who is ex-military and talks about her free spirit when it comes to dating openly (i.e. she dated a trump supporter for 3 years). ramses on the other hand is a self proclaimed anti-imperialist black man with an eccentric style (those two dreads on the top of his head everyone was threatening to cut off). throughout the show, for the first time in love is blind history, the two talk politics and engage in serious discussions about their beliefs regarding the military—this is of course well into the engagement process in the midst of meeting families and wedding planning. ramses explains on a couple occasions his being from venezuela and witnessing the devastation caused by the american military shaped his world view, while marissa tells him barbie (2023) opened her eyes to patriarchy.
and while many applauded ramses for speaking up on such a divisive topic and attempting to educate his partner, i felt a little gross about it all. don’t get me wrong i fully agreed with his viewpoint, i also would have a hard time dating someone who had served, let alone someone who was actively serving, but that made me question why he entertained a future with marissa at all. as the season went on, and the couple began to discuss things like sex and intimacy it seemed like the general consensus that he was clearly more interested in the physical than in her as a person. while i certainly think this pairing is the healthiest overall of the couples that parted ways, i also think they are a prime example of people’s fatal flaw dating in the modern age: too often people skirt past the hard questions and conversations until it is far too late.
i actually have made the executive decision to not touch monica and stephen with a ten foot pole because unfortunately, they were not a serious couple.
on the other end of the vulnerability spectrum, there was alex and tim. two people who built their relationship on sharing familial trauma, alex telling him about grappling with her parent’s sickness and tim divulging how tough it was living in the wake of his deceased older sisters. it was intense. the two of them ended up crumbling in the end though, because of seemingly petty squabbles over responding to texts too late and…taking naps? it’s honestly really hard to track the trajectory of their relationship due to the structure of this season, but it’s clear to me in their final breakup scene that they are two very different people with two very different personalities and went into their engagement not prepared to compromise at all. and i do mean that for both parities.
the internet’s reaction to tim and alex only further solidifies my point about polarization; there are so many people that hate alex’s guts because she’s “lazy” and “stand-offish” and at the same time people have labeled tim a narcissist due to his behavior (another topic sarah z has a great video essay discussing). granted, reality tv is heavily edited so we’ll never have the full story about what happened but the truth is, both of them definitely have their flaws and definitely could’ve handled things better between them.
they exhibited a incredibly common theme i see in dating recently are—women especially—getting into relationships hoping to “fix” their partner and somehow “mold” them into the person they actually want to date. i think it’s entirely possible both of them thought the other would capitulate to their lifestyle and when they found they were both too stubborn and set in their ways, they were at an impasse.
on the other hand, hannah (the infamous half of hannah and nick), was trying and succeeding in molding her other half into someone she enjoyed to be around. there is so much that could be said about the two of them—all if it makes me want to pull my hair out. i’ve never seen a couple that loathes each other so unabashedly while trying so hard to gaslight us into believing they’re in love. obviously i’m well aware all the members of the cast are under contract to stay on for a certain amount of episodes, and it is revealed in the reunion the (unsurprising) ulterior motives many had of building a social media career, but were they not tired? i don’t think any amount of followers is worth that level of humiliation. but that’s just me.
hannah and nick are why we are here in the first place, the straw that broke the camel’s back and launched me into writing this post. because to me, hannah is exactly what is wrong with dating and gen z and signifies the death of communication. hannah is 26 at the time of love is blind’s filming, notably the youngest person on the show, and the first thing she tells everyone is that she is “so serious” about finding love that she quit her job to be there. she’s the youngest of the women and nick is the youngest man taking part in the experiment and that is evident in the way both of them operate.
early on while everyone’s still in the pods, hannah has major issues and insecurities regarding her body image and what she’s worried nick will think when he meets her for the first time. after a lot of back and forth between whether she wanted to be with him or another contestant, leo (who i am not going to speak on for my own sanity), she decides to take the plunge with nick and the two meet soon after. it’s so clear hannah is not impressed by him, she ends up saying as much in her confessional; implying he lied/exaggerated by mentioning he played pro football (meanwhile he explicitly stated he was a punter and a kicker). despite her worries, it seems like nick accepts her wholeheartedly and that in the end she was more obsessed with appearances than he ever was.
the rest of their relationship follows this structure. nick lives his life, unbothered and operating through the world as he always has, hannah has some insecurity and ends up projecting those internal issues out onto him, and then she pretends like it was all his fault. he told her he was a kicker—she thinks he inflated his looks by mentioning playing football, he enjoys silly activities like racing inflatable ducks by the water—she thinks he’s trying to make her jealous by flirting with old ladies at the beach, he’s transparent about how he lives with his parents and still on their insurance—she believes he’s less of man because he can’t mount a tv and doesn’t know how the stock market works. the list goes on and on. none of this is to say nick is perfect—yes he should probably be able to boil pasta at the age of 28—but to me it’s clear that hannah is having issues with him not because he’s an evil, shitty boyfriend but because she does not like who he is on a fundamental level.
is he a bit immature? yes. is he a bit of a flirt? also yes; and while it’s true those tendencies can be reigned in, some people are just really friendly! they will strike up a conversation and banter with strangers and need to find a partner that loves them because of it, not in spite of it. he’s not ashamed of living with his parents, he likes to watch football, and doesn’t mind making a fool of himself to have a laugh and throughout their relationship—highlighted in a particularly frustrating scene where he meets her friends—she repeatedly says “these are easy changes i’m asking you to make” while requesting he become an entirely new person.
to me, hannah is the manifestation of a lot of polarizing comments online and a lot of my issues with the state of discourse: everyone is a villain, every sentence is an attack, and she is the ultimate victim. every time they’re having a conversation and nick attempts to calmly express how he feels it somehow turns into a direct attack on her character and is ultimately his fault; he’s picking on her insecurities, he just doesn’t understand her vast intellect, he’s too immature to comprehend things, etc. i think hannah is incredibly insecure but she’s so afraid of being hurt that she pushes all the blame for her feelings onto nick. instead of being honest about the fact that she’s feeling jealous when she watches him race with random women on the beach she turns the entire situation into him being immature and “delusional,” it allows her to coerce nick into changing without having to take any responsibility for her own part in her feelings (if you have no interest in indulging his silly tendencies, you have to accept the fact that you won’t be apart of the fun when he’s goofing around).
this behavior remained consistent through the reunion, where i saw hannah has a real obsession with the girlboss narrative of just “telling the truth” or “telling it like it is.” one thing i’ve learned over the years however, is that being mean or blunt does not make you cool or real, it makes you mean. she is a mean girl. we saw this demonstrated in the episode of the show that took place during the 20’s party where katie and nick had a very long conversation about why things didn’t work out between them, katie brought up many of the issues we’d heard hannah chronicle over the season but she discussed them with a level of care hannah never bothered to have. she believed (and as far as i know still does believe) the callous way she treated nick was warranted and somehow bettered by her abuse. it reminds me a lot of the sheraseven “sprinkle sprinkle” femininity content that has corrupted the black community on tiktok. somehow, women believe they can “hack the system,” whether it’s to shape men into someone they would want to be with or to beat them at their own game, by viewing all their relationships as transactional. it’s a really bleak and dehumanizing way to approach the world and in an attempt to reclaim some semblance of power, i think women who subscribe to sheara’s worldview are just continuing to contribute to the erosion of the modern dating scene—hannah included.
since i can remember, i’ve always been a fan of romance and a lover of love. because of this, i’ve seen my fair share of reality tv shows that center on relationships; from 90 day fiancé to love island and over the years i’ve considered how i want my future relationships to play out. as someone who definitely has some undiagnosed autism and has a tendency to be emotionally unavailable, i see a lot of qualities in hannah and others in my generation that i too once possessed. there was a time when i thought being mean to people was a personality trait, an entire era online that praised mean girls, “brats” if you will, and encouraged “telling it like it is.” i know now a lot of my thorny exterior was something i projected in order to protect myself from potential pain as a result of being too vulnerable—you can’t get rejected if you push away the person you like, you don’t have to grieve a past friendship if you hold everyone at arms length.
watching these discordant couples and absorbing discourse recently has only made me more and more grateful that as i’ve gotten older i’ve only become more empathetic and understanding. i’ve discovered much of the drive to “win” arguments online, debates on topics such as people wearing poster girl dresses to applebees or as whether or not a movie was good, is derived from some form of insecurity and every day i feel more and more blessed that i’ve managed to put less stock in what others think of me, period.
there was a time when i too labeled feeling passionately about things as “cringe” or proclaimed that expressing your feelings is embarrassing. but isn’t that so sad? it’s horrible that the only thing that stopped me from showing my unabashed love for the people and things i enjoy was this strange fear of vulnerability almost exclusively instilled in me from spending far too much time on the internet. it’s a long process and is something i’m still unlearning—i have to force myself to ask my friends for what i need (support, a hug), and be incredibly mindful i don’t fall into the reactionary take rabbit hole myself whenever a new point of contention emerges.
it’s not an easy task but it is necessary, especially in the wake of the election, we are all we have. now more than ever, it is imperative that we operate from a place of empathy and love in order to build solid communities. something that is near impossible if everyone is talking past one another and unwilling to give each other grace to learn and do better. if we can’t allow others to make mistakes and be vulnerable, there’s absolutely no way we will allow ourselves. and even on a broader scale, as i’ve allowed myself to open up more the last few years i’ve found i am generally less anxious. i’m less worried about how i’m perceived or what i “should'“ be doing because i’ve been able to build such a bond with my friends and family that i feel safe. i’m living more authentically than i ever have, and i absolutely cannot wait to only get more compassionate toward myself and others—it’s truly the only way to live.
Wow! What incredible insights from one so young. 💡