did u laugh

The Yes Ander's Dilemma

randa and harry

May 05, 2023

Tuesday, 2:11PM

From: Randa

hello harry

this week i started to feel insecure about my long-held strategy of ruthlessly ghosting people who can’t riff

take this conversation i just had with Mohamed:

let me give you some context. mohamed is a prophet in islam - when you say his name, you’re supposed to say “Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam” which translates to peace and blessings upon him.

this guy is named after the prophet, so i thought it would be funny to say sallallahu alaihi wasallam to him. needless to say he did NOT “yes and” my message. to me, this is a dealbreaker because it suggests the guy can’t riff.

but what if he CAN riff and i am just putting him in the impossibly difficult position of riffing about religion on a godless dating app? i texted my friend emmad (whose real name is mohammed) to gut check:

this breaks my mental model because emmad is one of my number 1 riffing friends, but he alleges that he too would not know what to say to my opening message (despite saying “Screaming” and all-caps LMAO twice).

because i am unsatisfied with emmad’s response (he is disagreeing with me) i am bringing this to you, harry. i guess i have a few questions…

is my riffing strategy (which fwiw i once published in the mainstream media) leading me astray?
what should i say, if anything, to mohamed?
am i doomed?

Tuesday, 10:55 pm

From: Harry

To be clear if someone bangs my hinge in a foreign language the first thing i’m doing is putting it in google translate, and i do think someone who’s got a compatible sense of humor with can lob a riff back your way, or at the very least a LOL.

Mohamed’s tepid response does bring up something that I think about in my own dating life which I suspect you’ll relate to, The Yes Ander’s Dilemma.

The Yes Ander’s Dilemma, as i see it, relies on the idea that in general, people who can adeptly riff in digital spaces, are less good at Being Alive. So sometimes I’ll be enticed by the witty repartee, and shorty’s grip of meta irony, only to get to the date and not be able to make eye contact.

At the same time though, if you are hitting the hinge prompt with a list of things you earnestly like to do, even if they are things I like to do, it’s just a non-starter for me at the moment.

It’s funny like what are we both signaling, that above anything else, we want the potential love of our lives to have…..a good grip of ironic detachment?

And yet,

Of course, the name of the game seems to be finding a balance, tolerating some uncertainty, keeping calm and carrying on, etc.. (YUCK).

Also, I want to introduce another problem, which you might also be dealing with.

When I was 14 or 15 I was hanging out with a new friend, who would grow to become one of my closest Bros. He said something one time we were hanging out that i think about often. He got out of the bathroom after pooping and turned to me and said “Isn’t it funny how often we text girls while we’re pooping”.

It is funny! And that’s to say that you have no idea what headspace (or poop space) Muhammed was in when he received your riff. Now a fella like me, I’m DTR pretty much 60-70% of the day, but that still leaves tons of time to message me and have me totally not prepared to riff. I’ve seen the woman of my dreams on Hinge and hit her with a heart / no message combo because I had low blood sugar in that moment or whatever.

Maybe timing is everything?

All of this being said, i do think in this case you gotta ghost his ass. I hate when people end a serious message with “lol” - conflict aversion alert!

Thursday, 2:49PM

From: Randa

You make a lot of fair points. I think the Yes Ander’s Dilemma is very real – I have plenty of friends whom, if I were to have first encountered online, I may have judged as unfunny and therefore unworthy of my friendship (sorry).

i am realizing that though digital riffing is not necessarily limited to word-y jokes, this type of humor does thrive online. me and LB (my friend and old roommate who i met on craigslist) love to make jokes by translating english slang to spanish. for example, “short king” becomes “el rey corto” and “raw dog” becomes “perro crudo.”

i don’t think it’s about signaling ironic detachment for me – it’s actually, maybe, about being a wordcel:

Wordcel is a slang term derived from incel used to define someone who has high verbal intelligence and is "good with words" but feels inadequately compensated for their skill, the "cel" suffix denoting frustration over being denied something they feel they deserve.

i made a joke that demonstrated my verbal intelligence and now i am mad that a guy didn’t think it was funny… i am definitionally a wordcel. but do i need to date my own kind?

anyway i think you’re right that mohammed may have been pooping so i decided to give him another chance:

Thursday, 5:39 PM

From: Harry

I’m dying at did you laugh haha

And re: LB and non-meta-ironic-regular-bits…you are right. Those are really different. There’s sort of this first level of digital performance on dating apps where I do think it’s pretty much crucial to signal some degree of ironic awareness of how depraved the whole idea is. But once you hit the DMs everything changes. You can be just plain regular funny. And plenty of cool people in the real world can also riff over text.

If you are funny irl you are funny (duh). If you are funny digitally when the audience is 1-12 other people, you are funny. If you are funny digitally when the audience is “n”....you might not be funny. I’m not sure why exactly this feels true but it does.

I think this all boils down to a nugget I heard last night when I was tucking into the first episode of Netflix's new tv show “Jewish Matchmaking”

JK…but that show is fire.

Idk maybe the answer really is what you did, which is to give them two chances to riff. A good ole two-strike policy. It seems unrealistic to give everyone unlimited chances to be cool, but giving people one-half of one chance doesn’t seem to have worked for us just yet. A middle ground perhaps.

So if Muhammed doesn’t hit you back, I’d say just post his real picture online and maybe we can ruin this dudes life.