Does taste matter in dating?

The Good Hang Roundtable on a possible Letterboxd x Hinge Integration

HK

Randa let me paint a picture for you…

One of the earliest Tinder features I can remember was an integration with Spotify. You could connect your Spotify and it would display your top artists. You also could select an anthem. I believe there is something similar on Raya (currently shadowbanned bc my ideas are too dangerous). 

One hilarious part of the Spotify integration is that it would mostly get your top artists…wrong?? For the longest time, I remember having Tinder say my top artist on Spotify was “Da Baby”. It currently says my top artist is “Earl Sweatshirt”. It is almost like the app is conspiring to keep me single. (Hard to imagine a scenario where I’m not wifed up if Tinder accurately reflected my incessant listening to mid-2010s Future, though).

Here’s the thing. We should have kept going down that path. I’m talking about Mandatory Dating App Cultural Analysis. Right now representing yourself on hinge is a huxlean death spiral of long walks and a24 and dusted recycled answers from a CIA-backed TikTok hive mind. 

It needs to be more fascist. To even get on one of these apps you should need to put your favorite 3 movies, favorite 3 TV shows, favorite 3 albums, (and perhaps a wildcard of favorite 3 micro internet celebrities, podcasts, or books.)

Right now you can squeeze some of that stuff into a regular hinge profile, but similar to Being Alive, you’re levied with the burden of free will. You chose to put a screenshot of Christopher Molticanti in your profile. You aren’t saying anything about your relationship to the sopranos, you are saying something about your relationship to irony (which is low-key useful but NOT as useful as what ur third favorite movie is or whatever.) 

So yeah– letterboxd integration. Fuck it…goodreads integration, hbo max integration. I don’t care. I just wanna know what all the bad bitches are actually watching. 

What do you think Randa?

RS

i personally find emphasis on media consumption as a means of connecting romantically to be kind of annoying / not useful which is why i deleted that section from hot singles. for example, i find my interest in hiphop/rap to be completely irrelevant to my dating life.

it all started in middle school, when i had my navy blue sony alarm clock radio wake me up to channel 95.5, detroit’s hip hop and r’n’b station. my brother was bringing home parental advisory CDs that my parents would later dramatically break in half. eventually i grow up and remain a fan of rap and hip hop, and in 2017 i attend a music festival–my first–in miami called “Rolling Loud”

me and the people at this festival ostensibly had the same taste in music, but looking around, i felt i had nothing in common with them. i am a calm and generally happy person. these rap fans were… the opposite of that. there was a palpable aggression in the air; violent moshpits sometimes turned into actual fist fights, i even got into a physical altercation myself when a guy wouldn’t move out of the way to help me get to my friend. if anything, it made me highly skeptical of rap fans as romantic partners (which maybe is the opposite side of the same coin lmao).

anyway - i do not care if a guy likes hip hop or a24 films or bad bunny. i suppose it would give us something to talk about or do together, BUT, i fear people (like you) care too much about this when it is a weak signal at best for compatibility.  i don’t want to read the three-body problem or portnoy’s complaint and i think that’s OK - we can still get along. 

HK 

And this is one of the many reasons its good to have a marketplace of ideas. It’s so nice that substack allows for nazi’s people who disagree on if taste matters on hinge.

I’ll just say it plainly I think mutual taste in a relationship is extremely important. I’m this guy from the High Fidelity remake 

I don’t care about someone’s taste so much as I care about their relationship to taste. And I care about that because it says a ton about someone. It is not difficult to extrapolate how someone with overly pretentious taste in film may feel about open-mindedness in other aspects of their life. Its not difficult to extrapolate someone’s overly internet-brained taste may mean they are…. internet-brained.

On the other hand, if there is an underpinning of the Good Hang political project (beyond Theilian covert warfare and manufacturing consent for his “PED Olympics” project) it is that there is a lot of value and beauty in paying close attention to hanging out and chilling.

On a recent episode of the very good New Yorker Critics At Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham said something astonishingly beautiful about what it means to be a critic. He said 

“It is a disposition, that comes even before attention to art. It's someone that looks at any phenomenon…and wants to extend their life by, uh, by paying attention.I want to juice this aspect of experience for all that it's worth. Someone who is like, not to be morbid, battling death by saying I could extend this moment, and this one, and this one, and this one, by way of attention. And so the best way to practice that disposition happens to be on art. 

I am no critic, but this “disposition” Cunningham is talking about is exactly what I’m looking for in myself, and perhaps in some Jungian way….a girl on hinge lol. 

And frankly, this is why we need my fascist mandatory taste infrastructure!! The problem with the infinite choice with these dating apps is that it incentivizes using one particular specific film or tv show or song or morsel of taste as an extension of your individual identity. It blurs too quickly into some kind of starter pack type of guyism…but if you got to see a tapestry of all the stuff someone consumes artistically I think we’d have a whole lot fewer mid first dates. 

Plus the closest i’ve felt to proper intimacy on a first date is being 3 drinks deep and being like “yes….The Leftovers also changed my life” 

RS

i bet i could go an entire first date without mentioning a single piece of art or culture

HK

I’ve never gone on a first date without mentioning the following 

• The leftovers

• 9/11

• 26 being the first normal age 

RS

this is how i experience your kind on dates:

HK

Ah yea see for me its more like

RS: 

ok but to level with you–i don’t think i care about taste to the extent that you do, and intellectually i try to resist it, but sometimes i still succumb to ruling someone out for their bad taste. i like how merritt tierce put it in her essay The End of Love (which is very good and i think the hot singles / good hang universe would enjoy it):

One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there. I judged this a stupid reason to stop messaging him, given his other, surely more important qualities, so I continued messaging him. But then he said he mostly watched Marvel movies, and the combination of Starbucks and Marvel was too much, so I stopped messaging him, even though I judged my own judgment in this case to be ridiculously shallow and flimsy. If he hadn’t been American, I might have excused it or interpreted it differently. Or if I had met him in another context, his consumer tastes might have barely figured in my estimation of him. But he was just an overeducated, emotionally available American, with many winsome attributes and poor taste in coffee and movies; I myself didn’t even understand why I lost interest in him, and recognized it was a bug in my programming, rather than anything to do with him. Or perhaps, the obvious ominous thought goes, it wasn’t a bug but an actual feature of the programming—not mine, but the app’s.

i think what tierce is saying is that the apps make us more inclined to judge people by their consumer tastes ALREADY. perhaps a full tapestry of taste would make us less judgmental, but i fear that adding letterboxd would create a lot more false negatives than good matches. like if a guy has all his anime movies on his hinge profile imma swipe left. but if he brings it up after we’ve talked about our childhood trauma on date 5, then i’ll prob let it slide… 

HK

Going to the dating marketplace and playing ‘big thief’ off my beats pill…