tfw dating is a bizarro dance of personal traumas and society expectations

Gonna piggyback off pushing yesterday’s uncomfy-yet-thrillingly-so fictional story on modern dating with “Swipe White,” a Longread essay from Jennifer Chong Schneider on the complicated power dynamics involved in interracial dating.

This one’s also pretty squirmy as a merciless self-interrogation on how the author relates to her parents (the buffet anecdote GUTTED us, you guys), and how her status as a biracial Asian-American often leads to either A) being fetishized by white guys, or B) being judged by Asian guys. In a post-Carrie Bradshaw media landscape, it’s hard to find such a personal essay about dating and relationships this unflinching and honest. And whether you personal identify with Jennifer or not matters less than her bigger point: that The Man / patriarchal society dictates our ideas of attraction more than we’d like to admit.

So, yeah, tl;dr, dating is a bizarro dance of our personal traumas and the collective weight of societal expectations, cool cool cool. Go forth and Tinder in this new year accordingly we guess!!!