“The apps erase the ambivalence, the finesse and the ambiguity, which create the beauty of the romantic encounter”, considers the journalist Judith Duportail

In a personal essay, Dating fatigue (Ed. De L’Observatoire), journalist Judith Duportail examines romantic relationships in the 21st arrondissement in the light of her own experience. Fresh out of a toxic relationship, the author recounts her difficulties finding her place in the 21st century love market governed by apps and their narcissistic excesses.

Can you come back to this concept of “dating fatigue” which is at the heart of your essay?

The dating fatigue, it’s a new version of loving melancholy. An emotion that oscillates between weariness and hope, with a touch of bitterness. This hope that we continue to feel we want to protect it because it is the bearer of happy possibilities. I wrote this essay after a relationship that left me bloodless, because it was toxic. I came out wrung out like after a cycle in a tumble dryer.

This hope is that of building a couple, which is desired, but which we feel also represents a danger for the individual, in your essay?

The whole question of my essay is indeed to know how to love and how to love better, without, however, losing a part of oneself and of one’s dreams. It’s a great adventure, but it’s also an adventure that is sometimes likely to lock up, especially women. How to build a couple when you still want to be free and pursue your dreams …?

What have the apps, which you explored in your previous essay “Love under Algorithm” (Ed. La Goutte d’Or), changed in the adventure of dating?

Apps move away more than they bring together, I’m sure. I’m still trying to understand how these apps and their algorithms work. But what I do know is that they emphasized judging a person solely by their appearance. They impose presentations of ourselves with shortcuts and clichés adapted to these standardized universes. However, psychological studies show that, paradoxically, the less information we have about a person, the more important each detail becomes. Having to judge someone in seconds makes you think with clichés. The apps erase the ambivalence, finesse and ambiguity, which create the beauty of the encounter. With the apps in addition, we find ourselves caught in an established course: first contact, first conversation, first drink, first report. It is a completely marked out course, which mortgages our desires, and even, our consent, and this creates a multitude of failures.

You point out that the meeting is today and because of the apps parasitized by narcissism …

Of course, these apps only value us through our image and our status, No other trait of our personality is highlighted. When Tinder publishes statistics on the most liked profiles, we realize that the place taken by gender clichés. Among men, powerful men like CEOs or, among women, models or care professions. Either way, it reveals what is less glorious about us. Making the other a trophy that values ​​us socially.

The problem is that today, outside of apps, dating has become almost impossible …

It’s difficult ! Afterwards I recognize that I undoubtedly come from a particular background, but, in my environment, it is hardly possible any more. The proliferation of failed app experiences puts us collectively on the defensive. Because we come to meet people about whom we do not know much about in the end and that in addition, as far as relations between men and women are concerned, we are still in a period when the issue of violence is very present. . When you spend your day hearing about guys raping women, it’s harder to be light at night with your new one. dated. Our only solution is to collectively move towards more gentleness.

However, you clearly register in a heterosexual couple relationship unlike your entourage who you gently pin with his woke designs

I evolve or have evolved in environments where polyamory for example was praised as the ultimate modernity, as the liberation of oneself, but personally it is not at all something, a mode of relations, which would suit me. And, indeed, I also claim to be able to free myself from the doxa woke, who would like us to be obliged to be polyamorous, to display certain codes of freedom, which do not necessarily suit everyone.

You often mention the notion of consent in your essay, for what reasons?

I find it a fascinating notion, but, in my eyes, it is exploited in a somewhat simplistic way, in the public debate. However, in the love affair, the fact of learning to respect your desires, is at the base of everything: the meeting, the sincerity of the relationship and the exchanges, etc. However, today I can see how difficult it is to hear your own desire, all the more so when you are a woman and have grown up and lived with the violence and harassment of the desire of others. Today, I force myself to listen and seek the signals of my own desire. But I took so long to understand it, to understand the volatility of my desires… I feel like I am so late on this subject. However, it is fundamental to distinguish what we would like to want from what we think we want.

You bring up the concept of hetero, can you explain why it resonates with you?

Being heterosexual is a straight woman who lowers her arms, who wants to get out of systems of domination. I really like this concept, which gives straight women a sense of power. I thought to myself that he could create a political current for straight women. It prompts one to wonder: Have I not sometimes enjoyed my power with men? Haven’t I enjoyed and played with my ego in the apps too? The fact, in some relationships, of pushing men to see how far they can go. The words we use to talk about people we frequent, in a sometimes unfair or degrading way. All these mechanisms can be deconstructed to become heterra.

In this essay, you fail to fit into the pattern of the bachelor who multiplies the adventures …

Outside of the couple, you should definitely be Carrie Bradshaw [personnage principal de la série Sex and the city], but it is untenable. Having sex all the time is not that important! It makes no sense to accumulate adventures if not to consider meetings as trophies. This multiplicity of possibilities and encounters can be dizzying for individuals. We may have mistakenly believed that freedom would suffice, but freedom alone becomes the law of the jungle.

On this subject, in your essay, there is a very erotic scene with a physiotherapist, who massages you and only massages you.

Nobody dies from not having sex anymore, I think. But we can die from lack of contact and love. We make up this need for tenderness by wanting to “kiss”. But the most important is care, attention to others.

You dedicate your book to the future loves of your niece de Prune, as an echo to the quest for love that you lead in your essay, is this the case?

But yes, I am the greatest lover in Paris, and, like great lovers, I burn my wings. How to be a great lover without losing yourself? This is the question that drives me. All of today’s feminist work will, I hope, benefit the new generations, including that of my niece to whom I dedicate this book, and will allow them to live smoother relationships than we do today. That’s all I wish them.