By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
Where do I get my ideas? The number one question asked by the nearly 200,000 people who have been reading my blogs, is “where do you come up with ideas?” That’s easy, I can’t stop them. I find stories, mysteries and puzzles absolutely everywhere I go.
And once they appear, they won’t go away until I work the problem out in my head and write about it. And then it’s not longer in my head. I’ll show you what I mean.
The trouble with dating Apps. I was having lunch a few weeks ago with a fellow trial lawyer, who had just settled a case for tens of millions of dollars. She’s young, she’s single, she’s successful and she’s gorgeous. She said, wearily, when it comes to dating, she’s “ready for the Asteroid.” “Dating apps,” she said, “are just the worst thing ever invented.”
I looked at her quizzically, through a lens that has walked this earth with me since the early 1960’s and said, “the question isn’t what you do about the asteroid coming . . . it’s what do you do every day that it doesn’t.” The sun is still gonna rise tomorrow and every Gosh darned day thereafter (I cleaned up the language a bit.)
This thought that has haunted me for weeks. Honestly, if she is having trouble, humanity is totally screwed. So, I went and did some digging on YouTube. And sure enough, 30 percent of young people 18-30 report that they have had no “relations” in the last year. And they have no plan to start. People are just not getting together. Which means “no babies.” And they all say “dating Apps” are to blame.
The Good Old Days. When I was young, women usually did the choosing, while men usually had to go through some ritual to win her. So, we waited for Friday night, when the dance halls opened, and after drinking just enough liquid courage from a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, we got up the nerve to go ask a girl we liked to dance. Then, we prayed she (and the rum and coke she was drinking) would say “yes.” We figured, that’s the way God intended. Eventually, if everything checked out, we got around to “what is your name.”
Let me slow this scene down, like I am replaying the “back and to the left” Zapruder tape in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. There is a point I want to make.
It is supposed to be hard. The old way of meeting our wives and husbands had self-regulating aspects that aren’t immediately obvious: (1) The window of opportunity was limited, we had to wait for the weekend, and then only a few hours were active each of two days, there was “scarcity” here (2) It was scary as hell for both men and women. Alcohol has the nearly the same pharmacological effect on anxiety as Xanax. And we needed it. Getting “shot down,” or “passed over,” was particularly swift and immediate, public punishment. Which meant that we had an incentive to choose more deliberately (3) There were consequences to the ordeal. The word “Pub” is short for “Public House,” (which is what bars were called in England until we shortened the word.) This meant for men and women, “mistakes” were very public. Whether you got shot down, or left with somebody, everybody knew it.
A Man-Made Catastrophe. But it seems to me, with dating Apps, all of these self-regulating aspects disappear. It isn’t that dating Apps don’t work, they work too well: (1) The window never closes, you are walking around with a “Meat Market” in your pocket 24/7. (2) There is no “barrier to entry” nor public “punishment” for failure. Men will “swipe right” on hundreds of women, no matter how far out his league she might be. According to YouTube videos I watched, there might be 700 men for every woman. But women find only about 4 percent of the men who message them on apps to be “acceptable,” (3) Because the “window” is always open, “mistakes,” are harder to avoid, but easier to replace.
The Perry Mason problem. Women only approve of 4 percent of men, from what I can tell, is because all they usually have to work with is a picture. It is like being a casting agent. All you have is hundreds of headshots. There are no other important social cues. This is not necessarily contrary to human nature.
If you have ever watched Perry Mason, the 1960’s television legal drama, you can always tell who the “innocent” client will be, just by looking at the faces of the actors. The “good” person, will have “neotenous” features, which means they have the “cuteness” of young creatures (like puppies, or kittens. Smaller noses and faces and larger eyes.) That’s why puppies are adorable. But always, the Perry Mason actors who are up to “no good,” have something that doesn’t “look right,” slightly sharper features, shifty eyes, and a hundred other defects IYKYN.
Strangely, however, we extrapolate or project “good” from limited information, like cute neotenous features. (Until the cute little puppy enters your life and tears up your house.) Which brings me to my next thought.
You should never meet your idols. An “idol,” is an “ideal” in tangible form, which you should also never meet. In dating apps, Mr. or Ms. McDreamy in the photo, usually will not live up to the ideal. Underneath the “cute,” there is something terribly wrong. Even American Idol’s 2005 winner Carrie Underwood’s agreed in the song, “The More Boys I Meet, the More I Love My Dog.”
Relationships are hard, while dating apps are easy. You won’t get three pages into the Bible, in Genesis 3:16, to find that we knew 3500 years ago that men and women don’t really get along so well. One of the things that made it all work for all these millennia, that apps have eliminated, was that it was and ordeal to find your person, and difficult to discard one, knowing how hard it would be to replace the one you chose.
If humanity has one thing going for it, it is that each succeeding generation, considers anything done by the preceding generation “lame.” And if there is a just and loving God, this will include dating apps.
Meanwhile, rather than wait for an asteroid that isn’t coming, get the hell out of the house and “touch grass.” Dating apps show you can’t pick people like you are picking a puppy. You gotta get back to the real world, and get to know people, where you have more than just a picture to evaluate.