Relationships

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.

I don’t know who Joe Jonas’s publicist is, but whoever they are, they deserve a raise. In the wake of the singer’s divorce from Sophie Turner, the coverage of the split in gossip outlets like TMZ and the New York Post’s Page Six describes has made quite clear who the good guy is (Jonas), and who the fall guy is (Turner).   In the wake of the split, tabloids explain that Jonas is caring for their children “pretty much all of the time” and that he is in “dad mode” while on tour.   In the pages of the gossip outlets, the divorce is explained by the fact that Turner “likes to party” while Jonas “likes to stay home.

Have you made your “date-me doc” yet? “Date-me docs” are, per an article in the New York Times last week, “long, résumé-like dating bios” — think of them as the antidote to terse, image-reliant dating apps.  They're thus far confined to the digital outposts of startup, Rationalist and Post-Rationalist communities; at this point it would be more accurate to describe them as a specific cultural phenomenon than a reaction to dating apps. Whereas dating apps such as Hinge and Tinder are made for “normies,” websites such as OkCupid — where the term “sapiosexual” was originally popularized — or even Craigslist tended to attract a more eccentric caliber of dater.

When I was fresh out of college, a week before I started my first job, I had my first grown-up relationship. I met him on JDate, a Jewish dating app. He was a nice guy a few years older than me, living near Georgetown with a few roommates. We texted for a few days before he proposed a crazy first date: an overnight trip to Atlantic City with his friends. There was no hotel stay — we were going to pull an all-nighter driving there and back in twenty-four hours. With a healthy sense of adventure and perhaps a slight death wish, I said yes. We had an epic time and began a fast and furious relationship for the next few months.  While we had a lot of fun together, it became clear pretty quickly that we were very different people.

There was a viral tweet last year that read, “do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam?” The answer is a resounding yes. As bad as regular modern dating is, it’s that much worse for celebrities. In early June, actor Jonah Hill had a baby with his girlfriend Olivia Millar. About a month later, seemingly out of nowhere, his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady posted screenshots of text messages from Hill from back when they were dating, accusing him of emotional abuse. Hill has moved on but twenty-six-year-old Brady has quite clearly been unwilling and unable to do so. The couple met when the actor slid into the direct messages of the surfer on Instagram, striking up a conversation.

Like all men, flawed as they are, Cockburn has indulged in the odd message to an Instagram beauty after one mojito too many. But as we’ve learned from Adam Levine over the last week, it’s probably best to follow some rules when doing so. After the Maroon 5 singer was caught sending multiple messages to women who aren’t his wife, people have been quick to shame him for being a scumbag. Cockburn recognizes that extramarital flirtation is frowned upon, but he also believes there is a way to do these things. It’s all in the delivery. Step one If your wife is a Victoria's Secret model, and you are a declining rockstar covered in tattoos that make Post Malone's look like the Sistine Chapel, maybe message her instead?!

A scroll through a millennial’s Twitter feed in the time of coronavirus shows a few dominant themes: adorable pets; extravagant home-cooked meals; worrying scatter charts; and the Text From An Ex.All our exes are bored, the meme goes, and nostalgic, and it’s so annoying, and so typical. 'Crazy times,' they say, 'Hope you’re doing OK ;).' The thing to do is to post the screenshot and complain about the ex’s ham-fisted manipulations while secretly reveling in the attention, smug and secure in the knowledge that we’re the ones who got away.Don’t get me wrong: a ritual ‘checking in’ on significant figures from your past seems to be a harmless, if slightly disingenuous, emotional safety valve in a catastrophe.