In ourLove App-tuallyseries,amateur employee sex videos Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating. It is cuffing season after all.
During the talking-but-not-labeled phase of dating, the person I was seeing sent me a stale meme.
We left a party together, spent the night at my place, and then made plans for a proper first date the following weekend. But in that agonizing seven days between having already slept together and waiting to see if we'd get along sober, we settled into getting to know each other through text.
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The early stages of "just talking" are so earnest. In the intricate dance that is flirting over text, any fumble can be met with a conversation-killing, solitary "lol." Crafting a good text is an art form; not only does it need to be clever, but it must provide the opportunity to keep the conversation going.
When that person sent me something I'd already seen before, I was faced with a moral quandary: Tell him, or laugh and move on? I didn't want to kill the conversation, so I tweeted about it instead.
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A year and some change later, I still believe that not telling someone you've already seen a meme is a particularly tender form of affection. My now-boyfriend, however, disagrees.
"Honestly, I don't think it would've affected anything, I probably would've just tried a little harder to send more recent memes," he told me when I finally showed him my tweet a year later.
As someone who's literally paid to spend the work day online, I don't expect anyone I date to be as entrenched in internet culture as I am. Still, we live in a world where in-person interactions are becoming more intertwined with online aesthetics. Dating is even more complicated, especially when two people engage with the internet differently. Sending memes back and forth can break the ice on a relationship that starts online, but it can get awkward when one person doesn't understand them.
Being able to speak the same language can be a dealbreaker
Sam Miller, a 27-year-old legal case manager, recently matched with someone alsonamed Sam on Tinder. Miller was immediately drawn to the other person – they seemed "very cute" and had a cat.
"All the preliminary boxes were checked," Miller said.
As an icebreaker, Miller sent a GIF from a 1967 episode of Spider-Man, in which two people dressed as Spider-Man point at each other. They "naturally" expected the other person to understand the meme.
Via GiphyInstead, the joke fell flat. The person responded with, "...hello?" followed by a dissatisfied emoji, and Miller ended up explaining what the GIF meant. In the excruciating process of walking their match through the joke, Miller lost whatever attraction they had to to the match in the first place.
"It's a stupid meme right? And an old one. So why was it an *immediate* dealbreaker for me?" Miller said through Twitter DM. "It was like I sent them a hieroglyphic; without context of how it's used, it's just a strange GIF of a busted old Spider-Man cartoon."
The interaction made Miller realize how important it is that their partner engages with the internet the way they do. It's not just a shared sense of humor that they're looking for, but feeling like they can speak the same language.
"Some of the things that truly bust me up are so deeply niche that I wouldn't even know where to begin explaining them to someone uninitiated," Miller said.
Internet culture evolves so quickly that whatever's popular tends to be swathed in layers of references to past trends. Humor is becoming increasingly absurdist. Online interactions, and the language we use to have them, spawned their own dialect with an ever-growing assortment of slang. If you're fluent in that language, you'll probably expect others to be as well.
"Memes are like, the communication style of our generation...if you don't look at them, you don't speak the language."
"Memes are like, thecommunication style of our generation," psychologist Andrea Liner said. She specializes in relationships and treating millennials. "They've become such a pertinent part of pop culture that it's like, if you don't look at them, you don't speak the language."
For Miller, texting compatibility is necessary for romantic compatibility. If their meet-cute was in person, they may have hit it off. But meeting over an app designed to make dating easier also highlighted potential issues.
"I think you can get a pretty good idea of someone's overall personality by how they text," Miller said. "In the dating app context, texting is all I have to go on."
And it's not just about being meme-compatible over text. This dealbreaker factor stretches into punctuation and slang, signifiers for the very online, too.
The acronym "lol," for example," doesn't literally mean "laugh out loud" anymore. When's the last time you physically, audibly laughed before sending an "lol?" In her book Because Internet, internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explained that "lol" evolved into a qualifier that could soften a sentence or add plausible deniability to flirty texts. On the other hand, ending a text with a period is seen as passive aggressive, bordering on confrontational.
Sending someone an "ok lol" carries less weight than sending them an "ok." If you've already established your relationship and you're already comfortable with each other in real life, then it may not be as much of an issue because you know that person better. But if you're still in that talking-not-dating stage, then it's easy to write them off. Ending sentences with exclamation marks, meanwhile, comes off as optimistic.
"If you're not starting from a place of mutual understanding, you can really misfire," Liner added.
It boils down to shared interests
Compatibility runs deeper than communication methods. Similar engagement with the internet can open the door to more meaningful interactions. Myles Berrin, a 23-year-old research assistant, is frustrated that most of the people he's gone out with only want to discuss pop culture references like The Office and Harry Potter.
"I've got severe brain worms, and a lot of special interests since I'm autistic, so my areas of interest are quite limited but very deep...mainly when it comes to video games and internet humor," Berrin said in a Twitter DM.
SEE ALSO: Ghost Exorcism Day: How to move on after you've been ghostedIn his experience, references to The Office and Harry Potterdominate dating apps, and as someone who isn't interested in either one, it's a "conversational dead end" for him. In online circles those references are seen as dated and local, a somewhat disparaging term for Twitter users considered simple and unaware of meme culture. He noted that fans tend to use them as personality markers, like astrology or Myers-Briggs types, and is turned off by people who claim they embody certain traits because of their Hogwarts House.
When someone told him they would never date a Slytherin, ironically, Berrin immediately wrote them off because of the Harry Potterreference.
Granted, Berrin admits that he's an asshole for being willing to disregard someone so quickly.
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Liner compares involvement in internet culture, from managing large meme-sharing Facebook groups to contributing to a niche Discord server, to any hobby. Sharing these interests, she says, adds to the "arsenal of things you can talk about."
At the same time though, like any hobby, don't be a gatekeeping asshole about it. Katherine Hertlein, a couples and family therapy expert at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, cautions against being so quick to dismiss potential love interests based on how online or offline they are. While dating apps revolve around snap decisions, Hertlein says in-person meetings tend to be more forgiving.
"In person, you don't have the gatekeeping features that are limiting you from making connections with others," Hertlein said.
Similarly, Liner questions the priorities one might have when dismissing a potential match.
"If this is the way you communicate your sense of humor, OK," Liner continued. "But if it's just 'Oh, this person isn't hip or cool because they don't know this came out three months ago,' maybe you need to reevaluate your priorities."
While the internet's ubiquity makes connecting with others even more accessible, it's also fostering a culture where people are more demarcated by their interests. Like Berrin, Miller says their friend group is similarly online and that they tend to stay in that bubble. When it comes to actually dating people who don't engage with social media the same way, it gets complicated.
Breaking out of the clique
Ana Diaz, a 24-year-old journalist, tends to keep up with viral trends. Her boyfriend, a Ph.D. candidate studying applied math and computer science, couldn't care less. They recently argued about Diaz's references to internet culture; he felt left out and she felt like he didn't respect her.
"I feel like I'm the burden because it plays into this age old idea that there is something inherently wrong with being online," Diaz said. "Or like, being with real people or reading books are both better than spending my time online."
Memes, the culture that revolves around them, are the internet's giant inside joke. Some follow specific rules and easily learned formats. Others simply adhere to the bizarre melting pot of millennial humor. If you get it, you get it. If you rarely check Twitter and weren't shaped by the early days of Tumblr, you might not. At times, it can seem like everyone else is laughing at a joke you just don't understand.
"We're not always going to share the same hobbies as our partner, and that's OK," family therapist Jennie Marie Battistin said.
Battistin likens being online to her husband's fly fishing hobby. She may have no idea what he's talking about, but she supports his interests, and he supports hers. It would be rude to dismiss each others' hobbies simply because the other doesn't understand. Like every aspect of a healthy relationship, there's a level of respect that each person must have for the other, no matter how frivolous they think those hobbies are.
"We just make my internet stuff into a shared thing rather than something I have to explain to him."
Diaz and her boyfriend learned to bridge that gap by watching TikToks together. That way, Diaz could share something she was interested in with her boyfriend without making him feel out of the loop.
"I think if it's something we are sharing, and it's an activity we are doing together, it's generally fine," she said. "We just make my internet stuff into a shared thing rather than something I have to explain to him."
Dating without filters
For those whose careers areall about what they share online, coming home to someone who doesn't need to engage with social media much is refreshing. No matter how "authentic" someone claims to be online, they're still presenting a filtered, molded version of themselves.
Rachel Charlene Lewis, an editor for Bitch, told me she could never date someone as online as she is. Lewis, 27, maintains an active social media presence for her career. Her girlfriend, who works at a college, doesn't. Being able to shed the filtered, online version of herself at the end of the day is a relief.
"My online presence is SO MUCH, and I'd hate to date someone who saw that all the time," Lewis said in a Twitter DM. "I like that she's rarely on Twitter and doesn't get annoyed with Fake Internet Me Who Uses Twitter For Work."
Similarly, Harry Hill, a 25-year-old influencer who used to work at Mashable, would rather date someone offline because he doesn't want to date himself. In his most recent relationship, which he kept a secret from his 51,000 followers, he tried to prove that he didn't need to broadcast everything in his life.
"Since I'm online so much, it's nice to ditch all the — excuse my German — bullshit and just be with someone IRL," Hill said in a Twitter DM. "Obviously it's tempting to want to broadcast my relationship and the happiness it brings me but we've all seen how that ends [when] it does inevitably end."
That relationship did indeed end, but Hill has a point. Being with someone who doesn't partake in the constant rush of the internet is grounding.
I struggle with sounding condescending when I try to explain memes to my boyfriend. He's never been interested in the most recent call for canceling or break up announcement. We likely wouldn't have ended up together if we met on a dating app — I would have written him off as disconnected, and he probably would have dismissed me as too caught up in social media.
But he does patiently listen to me rant about the drama conspiracy theory threads I end up diving into, and it's nice to be with someone who can pull me out. I find myself explaining the messier parts of the internet like an in-person version of the Reply Allsegment "Yes, Yes, No," peeling back each layer of context step by step. He, on the other hand, introduced me to his interests like rock climbing, which I love, and old movies, which I keep accidentally sleeping through. Before the app blew up and everyone was writing it off as a lesser version of Vine, he even convinced me to get into TikTok.
And occasionally when I send him TikToks that I think are hilarious, he'll respond with a cheeky text that he's already seen it.
Dating between the very online and very offline works. There's just a steep learning curve.
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