If you already find online casual dating daunting and sometimes depressing, Black Mirror takes it up a notch. The season 4 episode “Hang the” did what the show does best, highlighting the dangers of our growing reliance on technology. Though the episode is set in the future, it actually provides a comprehensive look at what casual dating is like already today. The episode highlights the pitfalls and
Is already so pervasive when it comes to dating
How does she do that? Okay, spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen the episode yet (and you should), it’s about two dates in. In this episode, Frank and Amy meet on a date determined by “the system.” The system appears to be a self-contained world where you are matched with one person and the two of you stay together for a predetermined period of time (whether it’s just a few hours or years). You have a personal coach, a pebble-like device that you can carry around and ask questions to, and this device also knows how long you’ve been together. It gathers information about you and how you respond to each partner, and ultimately finds the perfect partner for you. But there’s something strange going on from the beginning of the episode: there’s an intimidating-looking bodyguard, they seem to adhere to the rules and not talk too much about life outside the star system; there’s no connection to the outside world.
Frank and Amy comment on some strange things on their first date
Which only lasts about a day and a half Then they get involved in other relationships, but they’re all ill-fated, especially compared to the actual chemistry that seems to exist between the two. Frank and Amy continue to clash all the time, but when they get a chance to work things out before Amy is permanently set up, they decide to run away together and try to escape the system. As they escape, the world around them unravels and it becomes clear that the entire episode we just watched was a simulation run by a casual dating app.
The simulation runs thousands of times for each potential match, and the more times the simulated version tries to escape the system, the higher the match score. Frank and Amy make sure they score very high for each other before they actually meet eyes across the bar for the first time.
While it may seem outlandish to run hundreds of simulations with virtual versions of ourselves, many details in the episode spoke to how we interact today.
We are not there enough
As a result, Amy has more short flings than Frank, who is stuck in relationships he hates most of the time. Every affair seems to have some kind of premise that they will have sex. Amy seems to genuinely enjoy casual dating, but at one point she felt so alienated from them that she almost fell out of her body and saw she across the room, realizing how casual they were. Expiration is superficial. Well, casual dating is incredibly wonderful, and there is nothing wrong with dating for sex. But our swiping culture already produces a lot of unfunny, kind of trashy casual dating, where you just go because you’re available. And we deserve so much more.
We constantly complain about the nature of casual dating
The characters in the episode joke that they couldn’t imagine casual dating before the “system” of having to deal with messy breakups and make decisions for themselves In real life, we shudder at the sight of old types of dating, like arranged marriages or marriages based on wealth. Meanwhile, our parents often think that casual dating online is just about sex, even though thousands of marriages and long-term relationships have happened through apps. The way other people get to know each other always seems confusing because it’s so hard to get right.
