How Swiping for Love Is Like Bobbing for Apples

Once upon a time, our romantic fates were bound to the cruel geography of rivers and mountains. If there was no eligible soul in the village, we resigned ourselves to knitting sweaters, writing bad poetry, or drinking too much ale.

Historically, choices were scarce, expectations were low, and romance often meant marrying whoever smelled faintly less like goat.

Now, through the barnacle of technology, we have become Renaissance emperors of choice. Dating apps have gifted us an orchard brimming with apples. Yet, here we are, face-first in the barrel, biting into one, spitting it out, grabbing another, convinced that somewhere, beyond the soggy pulp of human imperfection, there is a flawless specimen awaiting our incisors.

We swipe as if we are gods of selection, forgetting that every apple is bruised under the skin, that every dazzling smile conceals a problematic past, and that every “loves hiking and travel” bio masks the kind of tangled psyche that cannot be tidily cropped into a square profile picture.

We tell ourselves that friction in a relationship means we picked the wrong fruit, never that our own teeth are crooked or our own chewing is careless.

Our apps whisper to us with seductive optimism, suggesting that the perfect partner is always one swipe away, as if the problem were geography and not the unlovely fact that human beings are catastrophically complicated to love.

We persist in the charming illusion that the trouble lies only with the apple we just bit, never with our impatient jaws or the human condition itself.

After all, why learn patience, forgiveness, or empathy when we can outsource responsibility to the bottomless buffet of new faces?

Why grapple with one person’s difficult moods when another promising profile awaits, smiling under good lighting and a dog filter?

We have become connoisseurs of first impressions and amateurs of commitment.

Everyone looks delicious until we taste them.

This endless orchard of possibility, paradoxically, leaves us starving.

Despite hundreds of potential partners within thumb’s reach, there are not so many we can truly love. And here is the cruel joke: the problems that arise with one apple will reappear with another, just in a different variety.

Fuji, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Gala, or a person who really digs NASCAR, each one carries the same seed of difficulty. Be it impatience, misunderstanding, unresolved traumas, or the eternal human tendency to sulk when we do not get our way.

Swiping is easy, but living alongside another’s flaws, while dragging along our own, is the true, improbable art.

So we bob and we bite, lamenting the sogginess of the pool, grumbling that all the apples are chewed, when in truth we are refusing to hold our grip long enough even to taste. The great irony is that love, real love, does not bloom from infinite options.

Love germinates in the modest recognition that, though many are available, very few are viable, and the only way forward is through the mutual discipline of learning to tolerate one another’s sharp edges.

The pool will always look bruised, because people are bruised. Divots and brown spots adorn us all.

The trick is not to keep dunking our heads for fresher fruit, but to learn how to savor what we already have between our teeth.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.