The Flirt-Alert Button and Other Dating Hazards

I wasn’t ready to date after my husband died suddenly a year ago. I felt heartsick. But I also felt lonely. I had spent the previous 30 years writing alone in a room, which was great when I had a family who magically materialized at the end of the day. But now, with my husband gone and my daughter off to college, writing alone in a room all day no longer seemed appealing. I needed someone to talk and laugh with, face to face.

Or F2F, as they say on the dating sites.

That sounded good, so I signed up, choosing “female seeking male” from the dropdown menu. I added that I was looking only for friendship.

Shortly after I filled out my profile, I got an alert, “Robert flirted with you! Flirt back!”

The flirt-alert, I discovered, is a button. It provides no opportunity for nuances or fine-tuning. You either flirt or you don’t.

I didn’t.

To make communication even more clumsy, when you hit “reply” to a question, a pre-composed message pops up. If you aren’t careful you can end up sending a message like, “Let’s meet F2F!” when all you wanted to say was “Hi.”

In “The Politics of the English Language,” George Orwell notes that “prose consists less and less of wordschosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrasestacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”