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Dating in the Multiverse
When the angry commenters on YouTube are kind of right
I knew what I was getting into when I decided to read the YouTube comments on the film I made about love and dating. “Ignore the comments,” DUST’s programming director warned me a few days before the film’s release. “People can get really nasty behind avatars.”
I didn’t listen. My film, Multiverse Dating for Beginners, is about a woman who suffers many broken hearts while struggling to secure a date with the guy she likes. She jumps through several parallel universes in attempts to get it right. In doing so, she notices how differently he responds in each situation. Specifically, she notices that he responds positively if she “plays it cool” and negatively if she shows him interest. It’s a brutally honest story that’s 95 percent true to my personal experiences.
Hours after the film’s release, I took a deep breath and began to scroll. I was expecting the comments to be rude, mean, and violent, and a lot of them were: “Neurotic, insecure…” “A perfect example of how toxic modern western females are.” “The typical needy nutcase…” “Fellas, avoid women like her.”
Both women and men are taught that love is magic and out of our control.
But while they were cruel, I also felt like many of the comments rang true. Amidst the vitriol, I couldn’t help but admit: The Angry Men of YouTube were right. Or not “right,” per se. But some of their criticisms were valid. We don’t live in a singular universe where everyone holds the same beliefs and plays by the same rules. There is no “right” or “wrong” when it comes to opinions. And because we live in an infinite multiverse where every individual experiences a slightly different reality from the next, everything is subjective.
Don’t get me wrong; many of the comments on my film are awful, crazy, and straight up suspect. “I’d rather date a Klingon” comes to mind. You do you, sir. But many of the comments hold a grain of truth that explains what’s missing from our conversations about love and dating: We’ve been socialized to act the way we act and think the way we think. This is why we continue to fail in securing the love we’ve been told we deserve.
