Anti-Dates

created 2024-04-22, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified

NOTE

Anti-dates are just thought experiments I come up with, revolving around love.

It could be silly. It could be romantic.

Lovers will seize on whatever means of communication are available to them.

I read that and copied it down. I believe it was in a book about people writing to one another in pages of a book. I find it true, and fundamental, and beautiful. People in love will strive to connect with one another, a communication that is beyond words.

Fabricated meeting date

the romantic condition is characterized by the ironic perception that one can only repeat what has been said already, or one can act as an actor in an anonymous or stereotypical play

I was thinking on this, the blurring of romantic reality and romantic fiction, and how to devise a romantic but completely im/practical experience.

You match on Bumble or Tinder in a dry, superficial way. On the first date you agree to abandon that narrative and instead take out this old journal that you will share for as long as you talk. From here you might have two options:

• You create your shared ideal scenario of first meeting, which you meet up and attempt to roleplay exactly. You are both in on it, so fully a blend of fiction and reality.
• You both devise a completely repulsive and unattractive first meeting narrative, a failure of compatibility (Late arrival, different interests, odious clothing).

The second could be a stronger test in a way to see if in this pressure of antagonism something arises.

The journaling aspect, in a good scenario, could be itself the ideal scenario (you grow fond of handwriting or a habit of putting the pen to the mouth/cheek, a hair curl gets dislodged etc).

Whatever story you two write together, is the new truth. When people ask, this is how you met.

NOTE

Calvino - “Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading; one reads in the other the unwritten story.”

Shared Plate

Lovers, and family are people with access to your plate. I’ve seen people get extremely hostile when anyone outside of their inner circle touches or even comments on what they are eating. This isn’t the case for all but in general: Imagine a stranger reaching into your bag of popcorn at the movies. Imagine a co-worker. Imagine the person you love.

For certain people, once you are in that inner circle, you have a greater degree of access to the plate. Certain couples might even reach the point where the plates are unspokenly shared, a hand goes directly to the partner’s plate and removes a fry for their own. It isn’t thought of.

This anti-date will begin with a single shared plate. All meals happen on the same plate for the entire time they are in the relationship.

This plate must be sourced from the location of their first date at a restaurant and must be stolen from that restaurant as they leave.

Now it goes like this: you want for breakfast Belgian waffles with syrup and your partner wants something salty. They’ll be placed on the same plate that you both hover over and eat. Your syrup will slowly infiltrate their meal. You’ll invariably end up sharing bits of tastes, even if eating different things.

What will happen? It might be that you end up converging on a taste. You always tend to want the same things. This is the “Lady and the Tramp” Bella Notte version where the spaghetti noodle is shared, leading to a kiss.

You might find a way to partition the plate in time. Maybe even deliberately learning foods that can stave off the flood of sauces from infiltrating territories. You don’t want bread, but it’ll work well as a bed to absorb these sauces, so you courteously apply this to the plate.

The plate is limited space.

The plate can be a warzone. You might be angry one day, and vengefully bombard the plate with peas (which you know your anti-date partner hates). Inserting them directly into the mashed potatoes, or concealing them in places. Deliberate cold gravy each meal (that must be shared).

Your meal choice can be a message.

You share a birthday together and two equal slices of cake. On your anniversary, you go back to the restaurant put the plate you’ve stolen on the table.

You make her her favorite meal, as she is tired after a long day and decide not to eat yourself. You clean the plates while she eats and she hums that happy little hum that comes from these simple well deserved meals. When she is finished and seated at the table, you kiss her neck and bring the plate to the sink to be washed later.

NOTE

Who else has intimate access to your plate? The chef does. The wash staff who will clear it for you, allowing you a second meal without the taste of the last.

What is it about food that make a food fight a thing? Why has this action of pure waste been associated with conflict?

In traditional weddings the wedding cake is a central point of the event, which you all share a piece of.

I had a plate at my house. It had a couple in old time dress. Through use, and fork abrasions and cleaning, the decal had eroded, leaving bits of the woman missing and turned to the original background white of plate.

It turned to nothing. If I used it enough, nobody would know they were there.

Difficult Date

The popular wisdom for many dates is to find an environment that is conducive to love. The first date should be a romantic scene, with lots of interaction. Countless articles exist that provide guidelines for the best date scenario. But this is the wrong way of thinking about it, or at least there are other ways to operate.

If you and your anti-date partner were up for it, you should at first challenge your date. Rather than a coffee date (open environment, low commitment) you might wait on lines for the entire date (this can also be done at a coffee shop, you’d simply find the most popular one in town and continue to wait on it, and when you get nearly to the front, return to the back.) The idea is that in formulating this miserable and tedious experience (in full opposition of best practice), if love can exist it will and it will shine through the two of you (perhaps in a more beautiful way than a conventional boring date.)

On your second cycle waiting of the line, you both start commenting on the people around you and talking to the people on the line. You smile at the joke you two share secretly.

If you and your love years later, did not have one another, even the most dull five minutes together, or minutes of impossible pain were experienced… you would pray for the simplicity of waiting on line together. That is, the joy of spending time with one another, even in quiet, no matter the circumstances. It wouldn’t just be an easy café date or some fancy moment that dominates the scene, it’d be the two of you together.

So waiting on line together, walking, a destination with no arrival, is the most romantic act.

NOTE

Don’t set the date up for success. It will be an easy success. Set it up for failure, and if it succeeds, then you know where the success came from.

I think the root of this is that a bad date, is difficult with the right person.

You might also simply stand in the rain together, precisely because neither of you would want to regularly.

Random

This date is complete chaos. Each date participant has a hookup to random device, or a number of devices. It can be a prompt generator, a card deck, dice or app on your phone. To best adhere to the rules of the anti-date as possible, as much chance should be injected as possible.

For example: what you each wear might be decided by drying numerous clothes the day before, and blindly removing the first complete outfit out of the drier before you go. Clothes will end up mismatched, or possibly even missing (within reason, it’s not that kind of date yet.) Tangent, but what is kind of interesting here is that with this wardrobe you in some ways get a fuller snapshot of the person, an outfit that encompasses many styles the person possesses in their collection.

But every aspect of the date where couple choice could be automated by randomness, it should.

Your initial impression of your date, is not your own but selected from a random range of 0 to 10 at the moment you meet. The date length, or length of a segment all by chance (so you’d finally arrive at the place, end up sitting at different adjacent tables by virtue of a random selection of chairs in the restaurant and then only end up spending 152 seconds sat anyway once again by virtue of the randomization agent.)

A phase of randomness causes the date to swap targets of who you are on the date with. Briefly you are on a date with the server, the manager of the restaurant, the pigeon on the roof and the tree outside. Distressed, it lands back on your anti-date partner (who for a minute is is still on a date with your fork.)

For another example you step together to begin the date (most dates will be guided by a step in the same direction) but what must happen here is that the lovers must spin a spinner, and the direction of the arrow is the place they go (this can be repeated multiple times, possibly resulting in going the completely “wrong” direction).

The directions you look are like this: spinning your head on its axis in a random pattern, like you are both tracing the path of an invisible fly. Occasionally, it so happens your eyes collide, just briefly. It is like looking at someone but actually not — they just happen to be in the space where your eyes rest at the time that your eyes rest there.

If speech is also the target it becomes tricky. It might be possible to write a note, have the anti-date partner rip it up, and then assemble it chaotically for interpretation. A radio might be used as well, for example you can begin your sentence to your love, then pause while raising the radio volume which whatever playing will serve briefly as your voice. Then you can continue on with the conversation. A Ouija board can be deployed.

If things are going well you can do things like speak to one another completely in numbers or a stream of generated symbols, pure chaos where you both try to interpret whatever is coming out of your lover as some type of love because you might love them as well.

But what I wonder after all of this observation of chaos and randomness, what breaking that would look like? Like if you spent all day, walking in circles together, speaking gibberish, rolling dice and having all your emotions controlled by randomness. Everyone else wondering what was going on with those two.

Late in the day,

There’s a small selection of cartoon emotion faces to pick from.

The randomizer lands on “smile.”

You take her hand in this chaos. This ridiculous date.

You see a smile, for a moment.

But of course, you know this the anti-date.

It was just chance after all.

The spinner spins and the two of you are off.

NOTE

In a world of chaos and randomness how will you know what is true? Perhaps your heart.

There is a tension here. You say, the flow of my life is pre-determined and I have no actual choice here, so how can I change that? The response might be an act of complete randomness, which seems the only way to demonstrate choice - like yelling “Archimedes! Microsoft Excel! Dffhhswiii” or lifting your hands and never letting them down and saying “I willed this”.

It is an attempt at obstructing the flow of time, some spiteful act against time. But something about this act, seems like giving up all choice as well. There isn’t really a choice in randomness. You lose your self no matter what.

Where does the middle exist? or a space where you don’t really care. Where does the random space you look at, not look through another human being, in their direction as a point in space and time but at them.

Realizing the relation to the sound of lyrics to be your voice, with the booth scene in “Before Sunrise.”

NOTE

One of the central questions of complexity theory is whether randomness adds power; that is, is there a problem that can be solved in polynomial time by a probabilistic Turing machine but not a deterministic Turing machine?

Full conversation edit date

This date takes place in text form. It is a conversation with only two messages (or at least a designated minimum) sent (one from each party) of full unlimited edits. You begin conversation and message, and then subsequent messages are scanned every day and refined. All hindsight alters context “would have been better if I ended it with this remark” so the entire thread becomes wobbly. There must be constant iteration. The conversation is bubbling with uncertain ground and malleable truth and history.

Later in the day you find the conversation changed, refined. New motives come to the forefront or recede.

As you are walking, you think of the fine retort. Perform the edit.

Alternative spin where free edits of the other lover’s text is possible. You are no longer fully in control of the record of your words. Years later hindsight is garbled (did I write that?). If fully experimental, a single message is possible. One message shared between the lovers. All message text is implied fact, for example if you are disagreeable to making plans but the edit says you will meet at such an hour, it must be done. Perhaps the app that facilitates this date would make the low sound of rubber erasure when being edit by the lover, with a soft blow (like a kiss, but blowing away the rubbing scraps.)

NOTE

This is a good bad good bad good bad good bad idea and I love you.

Just generally in written text, there’s a type of information leak present in edits. It reveals some post-response thinking that can be a highlight. You see an addendum to a response, and there was an effort made so it might be worthwhile to focus on that. The writer dwelled there and thought it important enough to submit.

There’s a relationship to this post-written edit, the P.S. that is analogous to someone looking back at you, right as they leave the room. You were the last thought, and this conscious act reveals it.

NOTE

Found this quote after writing this:

All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? - Foucault

You write on one another all day

For this date you write and draw on one another all day. Or maybe you have a few words that you can write on one another’s hands, and these are the responses you can use. Perhaps even on the space between the fingers, single words.

Maybe you both, the evening before, draw on the part of the skin that will be concealed beneath fabric and clothes so that only you two know that a fish floating through clouds exists on the upper arm of your dating partner.

Or as a variant, you trace your partner’s hand at rest, with a pencil. Remember this feeling of the pencil gliding off the contours of the hand? The occasional pressure and smoothness of the wood. You can do it further, in this anti-date. A large piece of white paper becomes a palimpsest as different shapes of you are imprinted onto the page: your nose, their nose. Your head (left, right, anterior, posterior) - smiling, mouth open, tongue-out, frowning. All of you and your anti-date partner, compressed and living on the same page.

Repeated date

You two experience a date, it is a conventional date like a walk around the park (ideally in a loop). Perhaps you haven’t seen one another for a long time. At the end of this date, when you are about to depart one another at the parking lot (and perhaps unsure of whether to kiss, or hug, or wave) you begin the experiment. You are tasked to do the exact date again, precisely following the steps and actions you did the first time as closely as possible. (This is even a stronger symbolic link if you know the person, or it is an ex-partner).

This can act like a director’s commentary. This can act like a revision, or director’s cut. Ideally you are open at this point in the date (Here is where I noticed how you had changed. I tied my shoes here but lingered a bit. I felt a bit of love here, like a memory.) You should expose your thoughts and provide insights on why you acted the way you did in that moment (I decided to stay back because…)

When you finally complete the loop, you’ll be reminded of the decision you were wondering that kicked off the first loop. Will you ever see one another again. Should you kiss? What are you two?

NOTE

For some reason after a long day of travel or adventure out, when I’m nearly home I’ll frequently have this perverse thought of if I should start again. Could I, now tired and experienced of it all, start again? It just seems like such a neat loop, and there’s the tension of just wanting things to end and relax but challenging that.

It’s like if I forgot something imaginary, and must retrace my steps to find it.

Alone. What am I missing?

Async date

Aided by GPS and a recorder you both agree to walk a similar path, say down Huntington main street over the course of a half hour. But rather than walk present with one another, you walk alone while recording observations - almost in a kind of podcast format, but also carrying sentiment, humor and feeling (ideally). The audio is transferred between the potential lovers, when they walk down the street another day separated by time. The scene is similar, but different and you are their gateway to this time. You are their gateway to the experience of their eyes.

Their first date is together but apart.

This date would also work like this: You can almost imagine reformatting of a phone booth in a crowded space, and you go to it and lift up the receiver and it’s someone who was once there that was also looking for love. They describe things from the booth that they see, in the living street.

Maybe if there’s a twist that the partner was in fact tracing the street in real time but on the opposite side of the street.

They have to do this walk, up and down main street till they notice someone on the opposite side of the street was doing the same thing. Didn’t you see them before? Why do they feel familiar? So odd.

They describe them. This person they see, pacing up and down, talking to themselves.

And then you realize it’s you. Their anti-date partner all along.

NOTE

My dad told me once, he met his first girlfriend over CB radio. Not that he was overly into it, but I’m supposing there was this open air forum. He would be on air because my grandfather was a Taxi driver at that time and they would communicate like that (pre-cell phones). So his friends also had a setup and other people would listen/join in on the conversations. One day this girl Lynne was on air. They’d arrange times to meet, like be on CB at 11 etc. They decided to meet halfway between Uniondale and Plainview. First girlfriend after that.

Extremely Slow Walk

In the style of a Noh Drama, you must walk together but it must be at an extremely, painfully slow pace. This can be done on a busy NYC street, or it can be done in an arboretum.

You can even spend the entire day if you want, moving at reduced speed. This can include speech along with movements, or movements only.

After the entire day walking together, lock step so slowly you have options. You can either have one person speed up to normal, and run off into the distance. Then after the day walking together at this slow pace, you have about a half an hour of time to approach one another, again at this extremely slow speed. (The option is there to pass the person, or instead walk backwards away, or walk past and only lightly brush your partner.)

Collision date

You and your anti-date partner will find a circular track, one for track runners. You link up via phone but on opposite sides of the track, and walking in opposite directions. Every time you pass one another, you inch closer to the center, all while continuing to talk on the phone. So each increment, a lane of the track is gradually jumped.

The idea for this anti-date to work would be that point of first contact. The idea is to make it as delicate as possible, almost celestial in nature of your orbits. So after walking and talking for about one hour, you’ll only experience the contact of that person with the mostly precisely delicate touch of the fabric between you (perhaps not even that, perhaps it’s just the slipstream gentle wind of you two passing, you voices fading from reality and returning to the virtualized world of the phone as you continue your orbits).

You should fully embrace subsequent collisions, as your paths get more and more intertwined. First the hands collide, then the full arms, and then the torso, closer and closer to the core.

I think the best way for this date to end might be as you are pushing directly into one another, in forced and sustained collision - literally attempting pushing through as if the person isn’t there, you realize that person is there. From here you then do almost a traditional dancing ball like twirling orbit between one another for another lap. The more disorienting this is, the stronger the experiment of the anti-date where at the end of the final lap you just collapse into a bundle.

Lover’s Discourse: he is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere out of nothing, and it is meaning which thrills him: he is in the crucible of meaning. Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.

Horrible Pairing

Similar to a difficult date, you both become one another’s worst nightmares. You have a sheet of paper that describes the kind of personality you’d be least attracted to. Then you must become that worst match of a person, completely in character for the duration of the date. This would be even better if the notes were exchanged prior to allow for props to be brought into the action, or date suggestions made (for example, if one partner is bookish and introverted their example worst match might be a raucous day in the sun at a sporting event.)

Collision interaction

The anti-date partner must always collide as a way of meeting. There is never a moment when they approach, noticeably in the distance. You turn a corner and you drop all of your books, like in the trope. It’s forever a surprise.

NOTE

In The Dialogic Imagination - M. M. Bakhtin A normal course of events is interrupted - and provides an opening for sheer chance, which has its own specific logic. This logic is one of random contingency, which is to say chance simultaneity (meetings), and chance rupture (nonmeetings).

In this random contingency, “earlier” and “later” are crucially, even decisively, significant. Should something happen a minute earlier, or a minute later, that is, should there be no chance simultaneity or chance disjunctions in time, there would be no plot at all, and nothing to write a novel about.

Library book anti-date

You pick books and talk to one another in the books. It could be the titles that conjure an atmosphere. Or, it could be sitting next to one another deep within the rows of books. Your fingers trace the page and point to words that you mean to say, turn pages. The anti-date partner sees something on the book of your choice, slides it towards their body and with delicate emphasis underlines with their finger a phrase.

NOTE

I had this vision in my head and it’s a hand that is hovering above page. And the finger is lightly tracing the words, pointing reading. And as it is doing this, it encounters another hand and it bumps into it. They are both pointing at the same word.

It’s that understanding we would share, even briefly, and being comfortable in that. I almost mean the literally, because reading is such an isolated mental act.

But then I can take this idea, and imagine everyone in the world reduced to these ghostly hands focused on browsing the stacks of this massive library. I was wondering if from watching the hands, viewing their interests and patterns, could you pinpoint and find someone you know. The personality in the hand. Or if you could fall in love like that, like a human distilled to this wandering eye flitting around a world of documents.

Or even, probably less romantic, but a browser. Some browser surveillance that monitors movements, with no human and you learn about them. Love via artifacts.

NOTE

Frompostcards “Prisoners would stroke the handwriting on the postcards, tracing words and letters, because it was a physical connection to the sender”

Walking Path - Movie

This anti-date could be a movie. You do the same thing for your break every day for ten years, you go for a walk precisely at noon or you work a coffee shop in a small town and sit outside on a break. It could be raining, or it could be snowing, or it could be blisteringly hot but you do it every day. In this, you are in your head fully. Seldom you’ll walk with someone.

If this is a film adaptation, this part of the movie could be quite boring and tedious. You almost might lose some of the audience. It could even be 30 minutes of this, possibly even longer if the experimental director decides. Occasionally this walk is interrupted by things, like an interesting flower showing the change of season or a conversation with someone.

But, there is a moment when someone you might have the capacity to love comes into your path and it’s like “something has changed.” You are struck deeply in your core. After all of these walks, somewhat the same, what internalized, someone has stepped into your path who seems interesting. There might be promise to break this cycle.

This anti-date partner comes to you when you are on your same path that you do forever all alone, and might do forever all alone. But then they are there and things are changed.

Eyes averted, eyes locked

For this anti-date the two dating partners should spend the entire date never meeting eye contact by rule. The entire head could be avoided. Perhaps it’ll be best to meet late in the day, where the sun casts long shadows. It’s completely find to interact with one another’s shadows, following them and interpreting them.

When the date is to end, then you both can look. You must look then or be in violation of the date. You then have half an hour to be like this. You can continue the date, or do whatever you want - but the eyes must be locked (outside of blinks, or closing your eyes during which upon return the date partners eyes will always be there.)

This is almost comical. It can also be dramatic. All functions of the date, such as walking now take on a different style. It has become difficult to walk, because all you must keep focus on the other. Everything seems in tandem.

That’s the date.

NOTE

I was watching this British Show The Undateables where people with “long term conditions” are put on a path toward love through coaching and dating experiences. I recall one woman early on struggled to maintain eye contact (contributed by her autism). She went through the entire date, basically without looking at her partner once, always looking around.

Towards the end of the date, something shifts in her to make an attempt at looking at her date in the eyes. She does so, only briefly and with distress, if I recall correctly.

What this illustrates is the varying difficulties we all have with things. For many people, it’s very easy to converse or do things like eye contact. Mainstream love and dating are all about maintaining your cool, and being beautiful/sexy. It’s easy.

Everyone has their own set of struggles, some greater than others, even for similar acts.

I found this “simple” act, attempted with such difficulty to be really beautiful, because of the challenge and the clear signal that she was pushing herself in an effort to connect.

Hate each other (superficially/symbolically)

You have a date and you are forced to speak all with a sense of a disdain for one another. You yell, even when it is kindness that is spoken. The entire body language is a joke between you two.

For example, if people view you in the distance they’ll say “those two are having a rough time, that won’t last” but you are actually talking normally. It’s purely the emotion being put into the words that is meaningless. It is just the trappings of a fight.

Certain people act like this. They are mean, in a way to their friends. I’ve never liked it, but this anti-date could be fun, if not socially corrosive and a bad idea.

False love a whole life

You go on an anti-date. Regardless of how it goes, or how incompatible you think of the anti-date partner you force yourself into the trappings of love. This isn’t the one. Your anti-date partner shouldn’t be aware that they are on an anti-date. This love is probably a complete lie but still you must pretend that’s your soulmate, all consuming, completely and utterly yours. Rather than toil over finding “the one” your partner is now “the one.” They smile, smitten and finally feeling that feeling they sought. Someone loves me and it is reciprocated.

But this is a complete act, and a performance. This is one of the cruelest anti-dates, or at least it has the capacity to be. Because you must hold onto this performance till the end of each of your lives. There will probably be 30+ years together, many breakfasts shared and moments together. You’ll walk the beach together, holding hands and watching the waves come in and out. You’ll kiss, filled with love but a dark secret within that you are on an anti-date still. In a way you’ve saved yourself the toil of finding “your one” or compatibility through delusion and artifice.

But as you’ve lived your life, it will come to an end for the two of you. This is the strangest part. For this anti-date to end, in the last moments of your life or the life of your partner you must reveal that it was all false. You had simply been doing what is like an art performance piece all along. It could have been anyone, you just picked the first person as your anti-date partner. As you hold their hands, and remember the walks together, as the life fades, you never truly loved them. This will be a major moment, and so close to the end of their life.

I wonder what they’ll feel and think. I wonder what you’ll feel and think. It’s the last moment together, out of so many days together. There is no time to review. There is no time to feel anything after. It all came before. Now they are gone. What did you feel? Is love possible between anyone?

You’ll never meet

It occurs to me that I’d be completely fine talking for the first time to someone if the entire possibly of contact was ruled out.

As in, if I messaged a crush and said “I am fine to talk, however it’ll now be impossible for us to meet” and then the courtship could begin with comfort and freedom and without regular expectation. “Did you mean anything with those looks?” etc. So the anti-date is this, the subjects will match but by contractual obligation of the impossibly of ever meeting. That impossibility will be ever present either through occasional voiced repetition between the partners “we will not meet”, or a chrome addon to inject “you will never meet” into messenger dialogs etc. Also, through this rule they can speak freely in the sense that it’s completely ruled out that they’ll meet. But within this, there will be a irresistible urge that, if the date is working will organically develop.

If there are date orchestrators, they could arrange things that the two met prior, unbeknownst to them, prior to actually meeting. Say they were both at the market, in different stalls. Same library, opposite side of the same stack. In that scenario the date orchestrator might be a plant librarian and force them to hold the same book, or swap a still warm seat. It could also involve some manipulation that this interaction is captured on film. This will be revealed to both of them. This will be incredibly tantalizing if the anti-date is working.

This is a date that is resistant to dating. It begins with the impossibility of the date. It might even be possible to adapt to a more machinic distancing solution

This is a date that begins with the impossible, so there’s no pretense (only post-tense). It’s almost anonymous.

NOTE

There’s some overlap with the scene in Haru (1996.) After months of text discussion (via emails), two protags only meet through passing trains. Waving a white handkerchief and recording the footage back to see one another.

Confront fear date

You and your anti-date partner will dress up as the other’s fears. So, for example, if someone is afraid of spiders, you’ll be provided with an elaborate and anatomically realistic suit that resembles a tarantula. You’ll wear this suit for your first date.

Alternatively it could be more subtle, such as awareness of the spider fear and then wearing a cufflinks that are shaped like a small spider, or a small temporary tattoo that resembles a spider, or some facial hair grooming that invokes the vague sense of a spider when squinting.

Favorite food

The anti-daters will select the opposite’s favorite food for their meal. They can then only eat the favorite meal, for every single meal till they have their subsequent date (this should be greater than a week). This also means that the partner will be fully denied their favorite meal for this time frame. When they do meet again, say at a restaurant, they’ll both select their favorite meal that is on the menu. When the meals arrive, they’ll either swap plates (slowly, without the plate leaving the table) or they may also choose to feed their anti-date partner.

Tower

In this anti-date everyone builds a tower. This tower will be made slowly over the course of the time you meet. It can be made out of whatever you both decide on appropriate, such as 2x4s or cement or clay. The effect is like a rubberband ball, initially just a tangle of two rubberbands but through progressive layers a shape emerges and scales.

It would be best if all of the world participated in this activity, for massive effect. There would all of these derelict wobbling towers, crumbling to dust as the result of the anti-daters breaking up. Other anti-daters might scavenge these husks, or maybe take up residence in them and try again with someone else. As they topple, they’d attempt to take down others.

The most established anti-date couples will construct spires that lord over the rest, reaching into the clouds. They’ll often be beautiful and majestic, visible from many miles around. But others are unable to interact with them. Their entire existence becomes fixated on maintaining the structure, and warding against collapse. They go up and down the stairs with supplies, only occasionally meeting in the middle.

Maybe somewhere two anti-daters will collaborate. They ignore the spires that shift and bend in the wind and require constant artificial work. They’ll make a tower, and realize they might build a tower that extends into both the sky and the earth.

At the top layers they stop growing up, and refine the interior. They make a window to view the sky, with a telescope. In the basement, just beneath the soil they make a small room where they read. They read about towers and stars.

Deep inside, they sleep upon the tower that is a bed they made made within the tower. Whenever they find a piece on their travels, that feels appropriate to add (in a sense it calls to them, even if it hurts), they do so.

They’ll add it to this smaller tower at the heart of things for all the days they know each other.

Microscope

We, as anti-daters are human, and think of one another in a human scale. The brain is designed to see what it sees. You love the person, but what do you love? Do you love their metabolic pathways? Do you love their neuronal networks? Do you love the individual cells? The love of the unconscious bits just as much as the conscious bits that are dependent on them.

You see your anti-date partner through human, not microscopic nor telescopic eyes, unless the cells go wrong and cancerous.

For this anti-date you’ll try see them at this other scale, myopically.

You meet in a room with your date orchestrators who have connected you and your partner to high powered magnification equipment.

The entire time you have a conversation but it’s just a very, very close up of them. You see no other pieces.

This is arranged on a large bi-directional display that blocks both the daters, but displays their respective selves.

In a grid: The corner of their eye. The sole of their foot. Their inner cheek. The back of their head.

A mosaic of details that make up your anti-date partner.

Is it revolting?

NOTE

When you have access to high definition photos you begin to see details. Fine hairs. Blemishes. Discoloration. Classical imperfections. We retreat. Zoom out.

Sometimes you have to change your perspective to see things correctly. “See the forest for the trees.”

Every time you fight, you just see nine cartilages, mucosa, muscles and ligaments. The detailed interior of a straining, neck. Vibrating vocal cords.

NOTE

JJ Gibson

There’s a physical structure on the scale of millimicrons at one extreme and on the scale of light years at the other. But surely the appropriate scale for animals is the intermediate one of millimeters and kilometers, and that is appropriate because the world and the animal are then compatible.

Bird in my shirt

Anti-daters are brought into a large space and fixed with an apparatus beneath their shirts. Prior to this, a large scale survey/evaluation is done that will point out pieces of compatibility such as OkCupid’s previous percentage of compatibility. In the event of a complete and total match, an almost unbearable physical sensation will occur via the “love” apparatus everyone will wear. It must feel either like an electric shock, or like their is a literal bird attempting to escape beneath the clothing they wear (even better perhaps, if there is a simulated bird there and onlookers can see the outline as it attempts to burst through.) It must be unbearable.

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Distance walk

Variant to the across the street date walk. You decide to walk together, but always with just enough distance that nobody would ever suspect that you actually are walking together. All communication must be gestural, with looks etc. The exercise almost must be kept something the two of you are only aware of, in that it could easily be denied that you two are walking away from another. Occasionally one can overtake the other, so the lead should not be kept by only one.

Buffer Date

What makes a date unique when you, yourself will always be a party in the equation? Every date, every moment of your life, will trivially include you. All relationships you have, will include you. You cannot escape this.

If you have a relationship with someone and it ends (you break up), you will hopefully begin another in time. Your life is naturally limited with things to do and things repeat. You live in the same area. So there will be overlap in moments with whoever is next.

You try to keep isolation of the moments, to pave an experience that doesn’t conjure any memories of the one you lost. Your new love is in a new channel of experience, distinct and independent of the one before.

But this is tough to maintain.

You go to the beach, just like you did with her, recalling the memory of the woman feeding the gulls swarming around her. Your favorite shop, that was both your favorite shops, you continue to go to with the new him. You say some joke, or some simple phrase that worked well with the previous her. You watch a movie, you watched with him. She sits in the passenger seat, daydreaming out the window on the way home, just like she did.

So for this anti-date, you have a person to love that is just a buffer for the person you actually date. It’s the buffer anti-date. They exist as a preamble, for the actual experience of the date… of the moment of the memory of love.

As only a buffer, you’ll remember how they made you feel, but in the one you actually love, yet to come. You’ll take her on a walk at this same park, and walk the same steps but this time it’s for real. It exists on its own, without any memory of whom (the buffer) who you lost.

You share with her your favorite song, with her again, again, again.

You’ve been here before.

A buffer keeps things separated.

But it really isn’t like that. In time it is all changed, though you are still there. You seek out these places, memories and films to watch again and now see not in the past, but through new eyes as well.

You can share the same book with many people, and see a different thing in each of them. A different discussion in each page.

For this anti-date to end you know it is not them, the new and the old love that is the buffer. You are the buffer, always there, thin or thick as you please.

NOTE

Do we only fall in love once?

Love knot language

This is tied to Trapped Projects. In this date, you are only allowed to talk to the other person with thread (various multi-colored threads). Inspired by quipu, you might make knots or have different colors represent. The further it deviates from a purely 1:1 syntactical mapping of say English, the better.

I think there are advantages to this, and the knot language might persist even after the end of the date. Imagine returning home, and finding a knot poem lying on the countertop for you. Imagine being able to read words in cord, and being able to read a memory of an event by holding it in your hands. You could close your eyes and hold words. You could weave and pass the cord between one another. You could construct sentences collaboratively in your fingers.

I think it would be beautiful to see how lovers would communicate in a private language of knots, that they make together.

These are my thoughts after thinking upon this briefly. But what would a gift of “I love you” look like in 50 years.

NOTE

I love it when you see people in love, or who are close and they have their own private language. Little bits of jokes that are otherwise nonsensical and unexplainable to anyone on the outside (they might even deflate with explanation), but through shared experience they have value.

“You’re my country girl!”

What does this mean? You’ll never know.

Reversible Poems

Su Shi embroidered the reversible poem. Five colors were intertwined; it was a treasure for the heart, a splendor for the eyes. This brocade measured eight inches long by eight inches wide, more than two hundred poems were inscribed there, and one may count more than eight hundred words. Read vertically and horizontally, turned in one direction and then another, all ways offered poems. The characters were flawless and the delicacy of talent surpassed any that had existed since Antiquity. It is called “Map of the Armillary Sphere.” Nevertheless the reader cannot entirely grasp it. Su Shi laughed and said to people: “The poems are composed by moving about in all directions, but no one except the man I prize can understand it.” She sent a servant to take it to Xianyang. Tao read the embroidered characters with great attention. He found it to be a wonder without equal, and thus sent Yangtai back to Guanzhong. With great ceremony he had a carriage prepared to fetch Su Shi and bring her to Hannan. Their mutual love was thus reinforced.

Symbols - A room written and everything is a letter communication, cheat sheet

This one is motivated by living in a book, or reading the physical world. It seems that even as kids, if we wanted to cheat during exams we could do so by embedding information in the world steganographically. For example, a class could collectively take a quiz, unbeknownst the proctor, where the angle of the right foot corresponds to the multiple choice answer. A pen shifted toward the window means this. Even detection by the teacher might be its own form of code, so you could embed meaning directly into failure states.

But for this the two lovers must construct rooms in this sense, so you would enter the room and the room itself would be a letter or a message. It would be best if it isn’t simply one thing said, the room itself should be laden with meaning, aggressively. Right now, you look at this page and the words on the screen are there, with probably a minimal amount of noise. Most of the semantic information is in symbols here, but I am talking about expanding that so that everything you see has symbolic subtext prepared by the date (i.e. the battery indicator on your laptop as part of the narrative).

With this date, everything is maximally communicated. Every single piece of observable elements should try to be part of the room’s message.

So the plate of dinner you prepare for them, isn’t simply a meal on plate. The entire thing is dense with information, for example the amount of peas on the plate means the lyrics to a song, and then angle of the fork means ”…” and it spirals outwards. The position of the lights, their flickers, a cricket deliberately left in the room that occasionally sings means ”…“.

It’s saturated with symbols, that you gradually realize were “written” by your love.

Then you open the door to your lover’s room, and the date begins. They explain it to you. You walk in a love letter.

NOTE

You go into a room, and it’s all bells and noise and light flashing.
But it’s in fact a code and the room is speaking to you, and you must wade through the noise, filter and select.

Then you may read it.

NOTE

As a variant, encode your message in your face

Chernoff faces, invented by applied mathematician, statistician and physicist Herman Chernoff in 1973, display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty. Chernoff faces handle each variable differently. Because the features of the faces vary in perceived importance, the way in which variables are mapped to the features should be carefully chosen (e.g. eye size and eyebrow-slant have been found to carry significant weight)

Anti-girlfriend/boyfriend

This is also applicable for an anti-friend scenario. The anti-girlfriend/boyfriend is an individual physically closest to you, who you are capable of loving. This person exists fully compatibly with you, maximally so. This person exists by fact, but you might not have found them.

You can picture a map of your local state, and nodes for every human being there. You know a fraction, which we’ll color red. There’s a node, which is closest to you who is capable of loving you and you loving them back, that is colored blue. We’ll circle it, and put a halo around it on the map as this anti-date node walks around the earth, experiencing things without you. Occasionally this person will change, love feeling will swap. They’ll find love elsewhere. The blue ring will transfer to another adjacent node.

This is the date, two nodes that never meet. The blue node, never turns red.

By essential nature of being an anti-girlfriend in this experiment you will never meet them (though they are perfect for you). There’s a previous anti-date where the temptation to meet is always there (where it’s insinuated this transgression of the rules is the point of the love.) This is the opposite.

For this anti-date the existence of this person is defined by you being maximally compatible (and in love should you meet, almost in a cosmic soulmate sense) but never meeting. You are two parallel lines. Should you meet this anti-date partner, they immediately cease to be on the anti-date with you and are swapped by the next adjacent maximally compatible love that you’ll never meet.

You cannot win this one. It’s a soulmate for another life. A soulmate that might be thinking of you right now. A soulmate you’ll never know.

NOTE

We think, mainly of people I am connected with in some way. I almost want to say only. Think of the people you think about: a celebrity, a co-worker, a family member. You think of them because you have encountered them, by virtue of some path of your existence.

For this anti-date you think of someone by definition, you are unconnected with. Thus the connection you derive is fully your own doing.

When I would TA and nobody would show up, I would go onto google maps. I would zoom all the way out, and then all the way in, to some snowy desolate stretches of the north. It’d be a completely unconnected place in my life, almost random, and I’d suddenly be connected with it. I’d imagine that lonely patch of land and the idea that I could, if I wanted to, go there.

NOTE

One of those dreams that sometimes occur, when you fall in love in the dream - but the figure you fall in love with is unclear. You don’t know who they are from your waking reality.

Who is that person?

Surrogate

For this anti-date you and your date partner live their love experience completely through the love experience of another couple. It’s a date by proxy. At the start of your date you’ll be assigned another couple, who have been dating for at least a month and might have confessed love. Their love experience is now your love experience, completely through a passive observation of the events. In a way it is like two nations waging war through control of two smaller nations.

At the end of the day the actual couple might recap their day together, or their concerns about how things are going. They are completely open to the anti-date partners, perhaps even at a deeper level than they are willing to reveal to their actual lover. The anti-daters are free to discuss proxy love between one another, and are encouraged to be emotional about it.

The anti-daters are completely enmeshed with the fabric of the surrogates love. Their victories are the victories of the lovers. This could be equated to the sense of love we feel, enveloped in a film that details a “true” movie love. Someone feeling in love after watching that. A couple watching a love drama together. A long running series in which the two uncertain lovers are tested, but over the course of many seasons learn to love and understand one another. But everything here is real and detailed.

They are to give advice and discuss freely between one another, but only pertaining to the real romance.

It’s also possible for the anti-daters to show up at dates or intimate moments with the surrogates. They’ll be in the bushes with binoculars on the park date. They’ll be at the table during a fancy dinner date. If it proceeds toward a wedding they’ll be at the wedding, possibly even in the wedding party of respective sides (causing wonder and confusion to the audience.)

They might only date for a few months, and despite best efforts move on.

In the event that the actual couple break up or get married, the date is over and a second date begins, but it isn’t an anti-date, it’s an actual date.

Edits Revealed

The world exists superficially. There’s a massive space of possibility, of the edited space that is not documented. Things left on the cutting room floor. Things kept inside and never presented. Letters never written, or sent. Messages deleted. These can be pivotal, life changing realities. But no record will be there. Like a trapped song Spaces in Song and Saturation

I might have written this elsewhere on here but it does fascinate me. It’s like each book in itself in an invisible library that surrounds it, full of hidden texts, ideas and deletions. When I think of this space and scale it up to a library of books, you have a library of libraries. When you think of messages everyone sends every day, you have a constant ghostly streaming world of text.

People I’ve adored, might not even know me. Someone who changed your life, might not even know your name. There are small romantic mysteries that I could get answers to, but will now just remain uncertain. Even just grade school crushes or wondering who was unknown but might have had feelings. Thinking of them an exorbitant amount and they never know. Love in particular remains locked behind a veil.

For this anti-date to occur, a couple must have been dating for a long time. So this is a contrast to most, where the date is a way of meeting someone. What happens here is that that mysterious multi gigabyte partition of data on the two anti-daters tech devices is revealed to be a kind of black box of edits since childhood.

Gradually, all texts will begin to show a complete history and reveal themselves dramatically.

An “I love you” early on that was self-censored for a “sounds good.” A picture that was never sent. Reams of shadowy data, thought lost. A moment of vulnerability lost.

Things along these lines, inserting the context in the message, stuffing the present with the full picture in a probably disastrous way.

This is all here, invisible, and moves the world.

NOTE

If you browse /r/unsentletters you see a hint of this anonymized, hidden world. The unsent space is a subset of the edit space. After reading a few, you see they are applicable to you. If you desire someone, they might be mapped to this anonymous user. It all seems so familiar. What if that person is writing about you? The unsent letter, is sent.

Yelling

For this anti-date you begin with talking in whispers to one another.

The absolute threshold of hearing (ATH), also known as the absolute hearing threshold or auditory threshold, is the minimum sound level of a pure tone that an average human ear with normal hearing can hear with no other sound present.

Actually, just below a whisper is more appropriate, so that you introduce yourselves through reading one another’s lips and gauging that.

As the date progresses you’ll be adding to the volume of your voice but in a way that is subtle.

The idea is that you never go lower than your partner’s speech volume. Any detected raise in voice, is attempted matched but with slightest intensity toward erring on the side of being louder than them. A Decibel Meter might be reading their voices, reading incremental changes.

After mouthing things for a bit, the mouth starts to produce sounds. You hear one another’s voice for the first time, but it is in a whispered way. Perhaps 30 minutes later, a speaking voice is established.

The date might be going well, but it will soon have inevitable tension, especially if conducted in a public place. They know where this is going. The threshold which people will notice will be just touched, forcing head turns. As such, I can see certain ways things will go.

They will refuse to talk, leaving to go to a private place. They never speak again, just studying one another with an inevitable yell held in, and a thousand questions unasked.

They’ll go to a private place. They’ll close the door and continue to learn about one another to the point where in an hour they are screaming at one another. Yelling begins to hurt, and they are exasperated. They truly are reaching the limits of the human voice.

They stay out in public and let their voices rise, finding natural occurrences such as large storms, plane take offs or monster truck rallies to consume their voices.

They recognize the looming threat and precisely attune to one another. The scale of decibel raises go from increments of .5 to .1 to .01 to .001 to .00001.

They yell into one another’s mouths, like a really angry kiss.

How can they bring their voices down? How can they not yell when the very project leads them toward that no matter how hard they try? Can a yell be avoided?

NOTE

A shouting match.

I’ve seen couples argue and it’s like a ladder of volume, completely ignoring what the other one is saying. I am louder and I am right.

In this anti-date you are considering someone else while they get louder. The intensity of focus should be on detecting that raise in volume, so that you are so precisely attuned to their voice, and what they are saying.

There’s also a togetherness in the project. It isn’t a competition.

Historical

Years ago when I was on OKCupid I realized something. The OKCupid databases had tons of questions and responses for people, which at the time they used for compatibility rankings. These records could exist for as long as the data is maintained, which can be longer than a human lifespan.

Imagine the data existed for 500 years and was of a much higher quality. It would be possible for you to find a match across time, meaning, across lifespans. So your perfect 100% match (or at least someone you curiously might get along with) might have died 100 years ago, or exist 600 years in the future. The program might be able to map broad features of the times to make it make sense temporally and romantically.

They might introduce it as an Easter egg for their 500th anniversary, to get your historical match. I say this, knowing it is a very slim chance it would happen, and I am taking this to a fantastical place.

This could also get extremely creepy and inappropriate, so I think a space of an entire lifetime would be necessary. As in one person in the anti-date would always have to be dead.

But if this data existed through time already, you do wonder who you’d get along with. Viewing a black and white photo, a relic of times past. Where would I fit in the culture. I’d be different, but how different? Who would I fall in love with?

I just think of myself appearing on that screen, or a hologram. Some image of me locked in time. I’m resurrected as a memory. At that time they might be able to use a historical corpus of my text to speak in my stead.

But imagine that anti-date. Someone looking at you from afar, or you looking at them — literally across lifetimes. There was a chance you could talk to one another and learn something about yourself. You’d take a bit of their time with you.

You might not even say a word and just look at them. Look at what could have been, what was and wasn’t; What will be and will never be.

Prognostidate

Much is said of “chemistry”, and “love at first sight.” You’ll know immediately if you’ve met someone you work well with. Attempts beyond the first date, seem doomed to fail. In the absence of a life, it’s fully impression based. In the space of a swipe, you look at it, and say “I’m not sure what this is, but this isn’t it.”

This is one of the shortest anti-dates and the longest, and takes place in a minute (but with a lifetime of setup.) It takes place in the subjective mental space of an impression.

You both meet each other and know your answer, a lifetime compressed into an instant. A hunch you can work with.

The candle at the center between us. You see it growing! Surely there will be ups and downs, but this is the spark you sought?

You can build a life with this spark. Make it a sunny day together, that you can hold up in the sky. You can this. You can that.

So you think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And it’s better! And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it. And think on it.

And thi-

Your eyes, they were closed all along. Despite all of the thoughts, you said nothing.

Open your eyes, and the room is dark.

The candle at the center is still warm with a faint glow of the wick.

Were they waiting, while you were absent in your reverie?

You had left them alone, without tangible action. Sure, it felt sincere and lived on your end — but how would your anti-date partner know?

Your deepest desire, to share and to be given something. To be gifted access to your anti-date partner’s thoughts. To struggle with them. To learn and grow. Feel them. Speak.

You lost: To be refuted of your thoughts. Surprised. Vulnerable. Another actual mind. The real world.

You should have acted. But it just like you, to think on things too long. Prognosticate and doubt.

All of these moments and conversations, are left locked in. Hypothetical.

They saw someone silent. Eyes moving behind eyelids.

For all you felt you did, a lifetime in an impression, what you you did was basically nothing.

Your anti-date partner doesn’t know you. You waited for certainty to act. You shared nothing.

NOTE

“I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At weddings other celebrations, I’ll look at all of these people, wanting to dance but sitting on sides of the dancefloor their lives. It is so clear.

They are left dancing on the inside. In their heads. If someone just pulled them out to the floor, they’d explode!

Or sometimes when they summon the courage to dance, push through the nerves, it seems occasionally even the most minor movements are magnified. The mere tapping of the foot, like a single root visible, but pushing through miles and miles of soil.

Worst are those who say then “I never cared much for dancing anyway.”

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “‘when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

Everything past is unreal, everything future is unreal, everything imagined is absent, mental… is unreal. Ultimately, real is only the present moment of physical efficiency (i.e. causation) - Fyodor Shcherbatskoy

Tired film

You both deprive yourself of sleep before the anti-date, excessively. It must be a precise balance of desiring to meet someone, while also not feeling up for it. You meet at the movies, but it is a specific type of film experience designated as for an anti-date. When you see your anti-date partner there is a brief rousing of your consciousness. I might like you.

The theater is dark and welcoming and filled with those indulgent recliner chairs. You are provided warm milk, and oven fresh cookies.

The film begins and it must be a special type of slow cinema film, such as pictures of grasslands in the wind or fair weather clouds. The soundtrack is light classical, or ambient hums. It lasts for four hours, but neither of the participants know this (they aren’t afforded the luxury of shaking a mouse cursor to be aware of the time remaining. It is deliberately, and only indefinite length.)

There are two cameras positioned toward the front of the cinema and they are locked onto the two people on the anti-date, with software (or date orchestrators) monitoring their eyes.

What happens eventually is a series of microsleeps, where the tired anti-daters close their eyes, while fighting to remain conscious of the experience with their partner, who seems wonderful. But whenever one of the partners eyes close, what is on the theater screen is swapped with just that, the live feed of their sleeping anti-date partner. This is projected massively on the screen.

This might cause an alert the first time, or interruption, where this is realized as the main mechanic of the anti-date. The still-awake one might release a yelp. Since both eyes are now open, the slow film continues replacing the sleep feed — perhaps now showing waves crashing on a lonely shore.

This push and pull of consciousness and unconsciousness continues on, till completely tired both of the participants are pulled into the lull of desired sleep. This could happen at the very same time, but probably will end up with one person just watching the other asleep, and being powerless to their own slumber.

It might be a light sleep, with a vague awareness of who you are sitting next to like a constant presence or shadow in the room. It might be a deeper sleep, or one with vivid dreams even closer than what you feel physically.

This date ends with the two of you, in the dark cinema, scaled up to the size of a building, sleeping.

NOTE

I wonder where this date takes place? There could be an argument for a variant where the date is fractured, and only exists in the sleep segments?

How many people in long term relationships fall asleep to the glow of television? How many people can barely stay awake during a film?

Lag

This is a distanced anti-date.

You are connected for a video call.

To simulate extreme lag, you and your anti-date partner will have 1 frame a minute transmitted to one another while on the date. This will be taken precisely every minute and sent to the partner for the next week from a rotating camera some distance in front of them. Voice data will be unaffected and real-time.

You should do things, and not simply sit on screen and talk.

NOTE

The idea of this anti-date is a few things.

What to make of photogeneity? Watch a film and pause it. Chances are the person on the screen will be making a strange, unattractive grimace. They are mid-blink. The mouth is misshapen speaking a name. The face a blur. Had this been a photo, it’d be requested to be redone. The natural is suddenly, interrupted and unnatural.

With this anti-date you see a snapshot of the person, streaked across the screen and have to linger with that for a whole minute, ridiculously. Frozen.

Most of our profile pictures are made of these “composed” moments. Rarely, except for the special ones, will you see a hint of movement in the subject of a profile picture. Pose, still and smile - perhaps some legacy of older cameras which required stillness to produce images.

The only reason this these lag photos are strange is because everyone does otherwise. We are producing sculptures and not humans. They appear to be worse sculptures than they actually are. A random photo on a dating site - “they don’t know themselves” - it is artificial. The living light, being near someone makes them magical. You learn to love a flow of them, and then later care for the moments. Captures. Stillness and storing them. There might be something to this you that you live.

The other reason for the lag is this:

In a long distance relationship, mediated by video communications, you realize that a feeling of being real time was there but it was just an illusion. All is lagged. If it is across the ocean, you stop and contemplate the delay and systems that produced this image of your anti-date partner before you.

You contemplate the network that facilitated this representation, from star systems giving off light, the fragments of clouds in the distant neighborhoods that occluded it, the miles of ocean floor internet cable that the bits of her images traveled through, then pressed into crystals just microseconds ago in front of you.

The voice on the phone, a memory. The device speaking in place of her or him.

Speak, and it is spoken into wires and light. Lips, to wires, to lips. There was never a moment of the shared now, just a stream of snapshots.

You cannot get any closer in this, despite your want.

So then after all of this lag, you meet in person.

You say “At last in real time. The now.” But then there is that doubt.

We met, and became close but I said to myself, even this moment of contemporality, there are leagues between us. I see her hand move in narrative real time, but still my senses and the pathways that interpret her impose differences.

I must wait for the reflection to hit my eyes. The minute disconnect over a voice hitting my ears.

Maybe I am delayed by microseconds. Maybe by seconds, Longer?

How would I know how long it takes me to process this world? Are our lags different?

All still it is all me, my subjective now doing the timekeeping. The processing. My time to sense.

This shell of solitude. Lag machine me. Us, like ghosts, like stars, passing through one another.

Your constant perceptual chase of reality that you cannot win. A collision in the future, propagating to you.

This is terrifying.

So why not make a dumb anti-date about it and fall in love? Fuck it.

Solo

Your anti-date partner for this doesn’t exist, but you will do all the regular things you would normally do with your date. All love should still be applied to this void. So if you go out to eat, you purchase two meals and two seats are reserved etc.

It’s fully one sided, but not really about you.

NOTE

The ChatGPT boyfriend anti-date

Moon

“We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

In a long distance relationship, or even one city over - you constantly seek things for shared reference points. Everything around you is distant, but that person is in your head. There’s no sense of a shared physical setting. The distance between you, is long.

The one thing you can look at is the sky. At night you’ll be alone, thinking your thoughts, and the moon is floating up in the sky. That common thought of us all seeing the same moon hits differently, when you are striving for connection and realize it is there. It is the reference point you sought. A link between you two, tiny dreaming earthlings.

This anti-date is about a shared space, and a reference that will connect the two of you.

You set up a picnic, or simple meal with wine and sit under the moon. Or you just sit and look at the moon at the same time. Whoever you are on the date with, no matter how far, will sit under the same moon or a distant star. Like love, you look at it at the same time, the same distant object in space.

And through it see someone. Can you touch it?

It’s like a table you share in the sky. A chair. Sit with me.

NOTE

I’m reminded of this exchange from “The Dispossessed”

“If you can see a thing whole,“ he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” “That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don’t want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.” “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?” “Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!” “Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-” “Don’t be propertarian,” Takver muttered. “Dear heart, don’t cry.” “I’m not crying. You are. Those are your tears.” “I’m cold. The moonlight’s cold.” “Lie down.” A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms. “I’m afraid, Takver,” he whispered.”

Signs of Love

How do you know you are in love? If philosophizing aliens were observing a community of people (their distant spacecrafts pointing delicate instruments toward you), scrutinizing their actions and documenting - what criteria could be used for an absolutely sure classification of human love?

Again, what external reading could they make that would undeniably classify as love? And not just two human beings wandering the same space? Emotionless. Something that runs through them all.

• heart rate elevated, but also in a fire.
• live together, but also roommates.
• have sex, but also done by strangers. For certain alien readings they’d find people in the background in love, deeper than with people they are in relationships with. Like a reading of a figure who loves from afar. They’d need to know, possibly even getting notifications of love detection prior to the people involved knowing their state. (someone knowing you are in love before you do.)

A reading of deep love of someone who doesn’t even having a living referent, their love’s heart BPM 0. They go to a grave.

Some find nonhuman interests, companionship and love through their pets.

Some have spikes of love-associated readings, and never again.

For this anti-date what you and your anti-date partner must to, is to simply live your life with the idea that you will undeniably be in love. That distant alien machinery that interprets your every motion, will be constantly trigger in the on state, never off.

How will this be proven? Will when you first meet, know it is true and then say “I love you” immediately and nothing else (the aliens have speech analysis software that measures the waveform of this and variants, filtering out television sources except when they are experienced in the vicinity of presumed lovers, which marks a slight signal.)

That won’t work.

Does love actually exist? Is it triggered even before knowing someone? Is there a distilled form? Is it distinct? Can you shave off pieces, wither it down and still find love? Can it find you, without you finding it? (A hug from behind).

Maybe the aliens will wait till all humans have lived, and die out. They’ll sort through the data they have and the various cosmically short human lives. They’ll pick out a few, and look at them on their cryptic displays. One is your anti-date. They hold it in their grey thin arms, your document.

Within: A scrapbook of photos moving in together. Crying. Hating them. Sharing yourself. Being alone. Dying. A day at the beach. Not wanting them around. Not wanting them around. Not having a choice. Circling back to you. Circling back to you. Circling. Smiling.

All of humanity gone.

They’ll say, “Yes, this was love. This blip.” or “Inconclusive” And they’ll fly off to a distant galaxy, trying to understand.

NOTE

I’ve read these stories of people trying to understand, “How do you tell if he/she loves you?” Because they don’t want to open themselves up to the vulnerability, that uncertainty of knowing or expressing before you know. They live their life with a sense of love they have built up, but might not break through. Things like body language is then analyzed, all of these external sources looking for some concrete answer - yes or not.

What’s interesting about reading these “signs” of love, is that they are varied. People will say things like “if they laugh, they’ll look at you first” or other signs that reveal inner intent. But below each one will be people refuting it.

It seems there are no absolute physical signs on one level, that precisely evidence love.

But one thing I believe, to an extent - is that the way of finding out is that person making an effort to stay in touch, or be around you. If it is a situation where they are going out of their way, or comfort zone to do so - it is even a greater indicator.

Would you like to come to the store with me?

It doesn’t have to be love. It could be friendship. Or the chance at interest.

Later on, there’s a strength in understanding where you can do your own thing and not worry.

NOTE

Both figures are probably males (one was definitively identified through a DNA test, and the other is implied through osteological analysis, though not 100% certain). We don’t actually know if they were really “lovers”, and their death positions may be purely coincidental.

It seems they were buried by rubble, as the building they resided in collapsed on top of them. Due to the lack of significant physical injuries relating to the collapse, it seems they survived initially but suffocated to death shortly after.

But they forever are “The Hasanlu Lovers”

No Pause

Everyone knows that if you have an awkward pause in a date, there’s a massive problem. Compatibility is off. You’ve only just met and yet there’s nothing to say. How awkward!

For this anti-date you’ll both prepare multiple pages of simulated conversation or monologue in the ten month lead up to the anti-date. The input of this document can be endlessly edited prior to the date, however you cannot have external input. It is essential that the text is only things you’ve wanted to say, but had nobody to say it to. The deeper to the heart, and less previously exposed, the better.

You’ll also have to prepare two pages of ambiguous, openly applicable rejoinders and responses. Things like “Wow, anyways.”

What can happen is this for the anti-date. You two begin the conversation. Whenever there is the chance for an open awkward pause in the conversation, dialog will be pulled from the pages through a simulation of your voice reading the entries. It’s fed into both your ears through wired earbuds, meant for one person that you both share.

• “So, umm…” (here the silence detection engine kicks in) AS I WRITE THIS I’M LISTEN TO MY TWO YEAR OLD NIECE FACETIMING IN ANOTHER ROOM. SHE WAS ASKED WHO SHE LOVES, WHICH SHE PRONOUNCES AS YOVE BECAUSE SHE CANNOT PRONOUNCE L. SHE STARTED A LIST OF ALL THESE PEOPLE IN HER LIFE THAT I KNOW AND THAT SHE KNOWS. SHE BEGAN WITH PEOPLE I WOULDN’T EXPECT FIRST. MINOR FIGURES IN OUR LIVES. I REALIZED WHEN ASKED WHO SHE LOVES SHE WAS LISTING EVERYONE SHE KNOWS, ONE BY ONE. I WONDER IF I’LL EVER INTRODUCE HER TO SOMEONE I LOVE TOO. IF SOMEONE I REALLY LOVE WILL BECOME SOMEONE THAT SHE LOVES. I’M BEGINNING TO DOUBT IT,”
• “I mean we could move on. Heh…” (here the silence detection engine kicks in) BUT IT MAKES ME HAPPY TO THINK OF THAT SCENARIO. SHARING. SHE’S LOSING BITS OF HER TODDLER SPEECH. WHEN WILL YOVE BE LOST. I BOUGHT A FIELD RECORDER TO RECORD ALL OF THESE AUDIO MEMORIES BUT SOME WORDS ARE ALREADY LOST. WE’LL ALL FORGET THEM. I REMEMBER WHEN SHE WAS A REAL BABY AND SHE ACTUALLY SMILED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FRONT OF US. I FEEL I HAD NEVER SEEN A SMILE BEFORE THAT MOMENT. A SMILE WITH AN UNCLEAR REFERENT. WHAT WAS SHE SMILING ABOUT. MY PARENTS CRIED AND SMILED. I KNEW I HAD TO LIVE. THERE’S A CASSETTE DEEP IN THE CLOSET OF MY CHILDHOOD ROOM. IT HAS FRAGMENTS OF MY BOYHOOD VOICE FROM WHEN I HAD A TALKBOY. MY VOICE IS HIGH PITCHED. I PLAY A PRANK ON MY GRANDMOTHER. THE MAGNETIC TAPE IS DECAY…
  This speech will continue till one of the magic, prepared response words are spoken by your anti-date partner.
• “Well, I’ll be damned.”
• “You don’t say.” etc

You two might listen to these vulnerable thoughts, first coming out in spurts between almost pauses. Maybe you want leave awkward silence, just to get access to those inner thoughts that your anti-date partner reveals.

Maybe you leave it running, just listening to your thoughts together, with your shared earbuds and your lack of awkward silence.

NOTE

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words your utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. -Sylvia Plath And when at last

NOTE

Sometimes I only want the awkward silence. Words aren’t enough. A smile.

Diamond Dust

In darkness, where the information is reduced, details can only be grasped one at a time in a process analogous to touch, in the darkness the eye picks up small pieces of information; a glint of light on a polished surface, the shadow of an outline.

This anti-date takes place initially in complete darkness. You, and your anti-date partner are lead into a sealed room.

You are positioned at random places and begin to speak to locate one another. At first you should not move, only position your body in the suspected direction of your partner.

This done, you’ll notice something. There is a slight pulsing of dim light from the direction of your anti-date partner. It is barely perceptible at first like a summer firefly, or you must look at it indirectly to even see it, like trying to locate star in the sky. Eyes adjust. It ebbs, light to pure dark.

You begin to talk to one another, and get to know this person. A timer on the dim light apparatus gradually raises the intensity of the light. Soon one of you might realize these resemble rhythms of a heartbeat. What the device is though, is that the light it produces is not the owner’s heart but it is wireless linked to their partner’s heart, which is projected on their chest.

Your heart beats on them.

It is still very dim, but soon, enough to cast some shadows, or it is just your eyes adjusting to the light. Now you may approach, but slowly and as you feel comfortable.

The trick at this stage is this: prior to starting the anti-date you were both dressed in all black body suits that have been treated with glimmer glass, or any transparent material that will glimmer when exposed to light. Thousands of thousands of tiny facets, angles which to reflect the light you produce and they produce (the light you produce, being linked to their heart). Your movements, the light you produce, are broken up into a million pieces and reflected back.

What I want to happen here is all of these tiny points of glimmering light to be just barely visible. This is the point of the anti-date in a way, to see the outline of a body in the dark, but composed of spaces of void, and minute light. Being able to see someone, but only in fragments. A shifting point cloud.

All around you, between the heartbeats, should be darkness, the deeper the better to make it appear as if there’s a celestial being standing before you, something human but not. A constellation.

The minutes pass, and the conversation continues, and what was a dim light now grows and grows. With this, so does the light in the room, fed by dimmer switches that are gradually raised.

The room is fully lit. The bulb that is on your chest, you can see the electrical filament reacting still, but now drowned out by the stronger lights of the room.

You can take your anti-date’s partner hand now.

You touch.

But don’t look at her.

Watch the lighting filament on your chest. Watch the bulb.

That once dim light you saw in the dark, it is a human heart beating, to be here with you, in a world of dark, empty spaces.

NOTE

Diamond dust isn’t diamonds. It’s regularly just composed of broken glass.

I saw a painting at a gallery that was saturated with diamond dust. If you approached it from the front, you would see occasional specks of light where the angle of the glass so happened to coincide with what your eye would accept as a reflection.

When approached close, and from the side it was almost all white. Every speck was visible. There was a completely hidden texture.

Put your head up to someone’s chest, and listen to them breathing. Put your head up to their chest and listen to their heart.

I remember the constellations in the night sky and this game to be played in a field. You lie there, with the stars in the sky above you. Stretch your arms full left and right, so there are no points of reference, including your own body.

Gradually you trick yourself. You flip your sight.

You frame sky as existing below you, so you soon feeling like you are flying over the stars.

Close

For this anti-date you’ve broken up with your previous partner, or you’ve distance between the two of you that cannot be mended. It might be for the better.

Still they are around you, but now in a phantasmal way. Your experience betrays you when you let your guard down. The frame of reality slips ever so slightly into the past, shifting just enough to give you a glimpse of them that feels to exist at the edges of all things.

For this anti-date you will walk alone through the streets of the city.

You hear what sounds like a familiar voice. The sun shines down on you.

Someone approaches in the distance and you know in your heart, that this it. Your anti-date partner, returned.

Your stomach flips.

But no, you were wrong. It wasn’t them. The person passes, and it becomes clear all the ways they aren’t them, and couldn’t be them.

For a moment, so close but no. They walk away.

You’ll never see either of them again.

This anti-date is the lag between your senses and your imagination. Between bodies and minds. In the moments before a face is formed. An early sound. Waiting to see someone again.

This anti-date exists in the sum of those pieces and moments.

The

Poor hill farmer astray in the grass;
There came a movement and he looked up, but
All that he saw was the wind pass.
There was a sound of voice on the air.
But where, where? It was only the glib stream talking
Softly to itself. And once when he was walking
Along a lane in spring he was deceived
By a shrill; whistle coming through the leaves;
Wait a minute, wait a minute-four swift notes;
He turned, and it was nothing, only a Thrush
In the thorn bushes easing its throat.
He swore at himself for paying heed,
The poor hill farmer, so often again
Stopping, staring, listening, in vain,
His ear betrayed by the heart’s need

Variant

Date orchestrators use a physical features database to curate a list of people who are interested you that physically resemble in certain ways, someone you love. But only in pieces. A person with a brow with 95% match. Lips with 99% match.

A street in the city is planted with whoever is interested in dating you, with these matching features.

It doesn’t matter. You don’t notice.

NOTE

When you are separated from someone, there is further loss of accuracy in how you perceive them. They change, more and more. You’ll eventually forget a face, and the face you are referring to has changed anyway, so it doesn’t matter. But for a while, you might see people that remind you of that someone. Maybe in pieces, or maybe enough that you are fooled into thinking it is them.

In your mind, there’s some hopeful arc back to you. But there’s only a thin line of connection where it becomes true, and the reality is matched with the desire.

“Faces begin soon, to ‘dislimn’: features fluctuate: combinations of feature unsettle. Even the expression becomes a mere idea that you can describe to another, but not an image that you can reproduce for yourself.” - SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS: BEING A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.

Olivia De Recat - Closeless lines

Facts - Aram Saroyan

Tell me anything I knew it

What a coincidence it always is

I recognized you the minute I saw you

The Anti-date Anti-date

For this anti-date you come up with pages and pages of anti-dates when you think of them. You do this in absence of pursuing actual dates. Nobody reads them, except for you. Who is this you?

Who are you reading this?

Yes, You reading this.

You are on this anti-date with me right now.

Look, I am here right now too. I’ll make this entry so that I am forever here. Of all the lines written, I am present whenever this is read.

What would you like to do?

We can.