Ayatollah, We Are Tired: Dating and News Fatigue

I sat at a bar, sipping on margaritas with two friends I had gotten close to this year. The friendships were new but already dear to me. We gossiped about boys, how dating was going, and how hard it was for them to feel motivated to put themselves out there. I scanned the surprisingly empty bar for a man to smile at. “How many men have you slept with?”, new friends asked. I’m not about to reveal my body count here. My mother reads these.

A week later at a different bar somewhere in East Los Angeles, I sat in front of Old Soul. He was handsome, had a good career, and genuinely made me laugh over wine he meticulously picked out for us. Looking down at his hand as he moved his wine glass around, I could just about make out his expression in the candlelight as he asked, “So how’s dating been going for you?”

I tell my friends they don’t lose anything by letting a guy buy them a drink, but the more I go on dates, the harder it is to live by that principle. In the past six months alone, I’ve been on about ten first dates. Most ended after one drink. Some turned into seconds. Few turned into thirds. One ended up being almost exactly what I was looking for– had he been ready for all the things I was ready for. If dating is going through a recession, I’ve been single-handedly stimulating the economy.

After six-ish months of ten-ish first dates, I wondered if I’d developed the romantic equivalent of news fatigue. Six months into the Iran war, another strike barely interrupts my morning. A ceasefire gets my attention until it collapses. War stops feeling like war and starts feeling like the weather. Another man across another candlelit table tells me he’s looking for something serious, and somewhere between the first glass of wine and the check I had already figured out how this story ends.

Old Soul was having a hard time in dating, which shouldn’t be the case. Truthfully, he’s a catch, but as we compared future dreams I realized I’d already dated Old Soul. I’d dated him many times, and every single time found I overwhelmed him. His question was difficult to answer, not because I didn’t know how to respond, but because the words under it were, “Are you going to give me another reason to give up on dating?”

When things go on long enough, we forget they weren’t always that way. Dating is probably the most vulnerable thing we can do. It requires us to sit in front of total strangers and essentially ask, “Are you capable of loving me?”, making it almost impossible to separate their capacity from our worthiness.

Old Soul wasn’t the only one who felt like he was in a dating stalemate. My friends have all had enough. They’ve grown used to the problems of dating and have therefore declared them unfixable. Half a year is apparently enough time to get used to anything, as I struggle to keep myself from that conclusion. When the war with Iran began in February, I had been seeing Egyptian Guy but found myself refreshing my phone for news notifications and not his texts. Every headline demanded all my attention. I wondered what would become of the region as my little cousin was called up for service, again, after fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.

When the war started, I also thought of my Iranian friends and their personal stories of immigration. Most of them had either been born in Iran or were first generation Americans. Their pain was sharp and tangled in hope. I thought of my family in Venezuela who still didn’t have the freedom the administration had promised, who were now worried they had become yesterday’s news. They were worried the world looked at them and felt jaded, too.

I don’t consider myself easy to date. This column is Exhibit A. I don’t just want my space in the world; I want all of it. I want to gobble the whole thing up. While that can sound like a man’s pixie dream girl fantasies, reality gives way to tragic endings. I knew where this would lead, and even though the idea of sitting at a jazz club with Old Soul, building coffee tables from scratch together, and what he called “the little, important things”, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when my dreams eventually became too big for his Old Soul picket fence to hold. Sitting across from a jaded man as he smiled at me, I wondered if I, too, was jaded.

Ayatollah, we are tired. Fatigue, news and otherwise, doesn’t just change how we experience significant events. It changes our capacity to recognize them as significant. The extraordinary becomes ordinary. Oil prices find a new norm. Washington and Tehran exchange fire after weeks of relative quiet and we roll our eyes at the familiarity of it. I read the alerts. I understand the significance. I open Hinge.

I pictured my two friends as Old Soul got us another two glasses of chilled red wine. How could I keep motivating them to get out there if I was feeling ready to give up? Maybe we’re all jaded. Some of us keep showing up anyway.

After making sure I got home, Old Soul asked when he’d get to see me again. I slept on it and told him I didn’t think we were a romantic match. It had been a good date. Had we been on this date two years ago, I would’ve let myself get carried away by a perfectly nice guy who had every intention of taking me seriously. I didn’t know how to explain that I could clearly see our ending, so I offered up a friendship instead. There are worse fates than jazz clubs, handmade coffee tables, and a man who wants to remember “the little, important things”, but maybe somewhere underneath all my exhaustion there remains the obnoxious conviction that the life I want exists. That someone out there wants to gobble the whole thing up with me.