For the Sake of Experience
Graphic by Annika Schmidt
by Noor Mirza-Rashid
“there is a sickeningly pervasive idea in our culture, by the way, that a young woman can only become interesting and complex by experiencing untold quantities of pain— and so we seek this suffering in an attempt to become artistic, but only end up learning that we were operating from a flawed premise in the first place. pain is nothing but pain.”
I was 12 years old when I first took the Rice Purity Test. I was with my friends, and we were sitting in the back of English class, giggling and Googling the terms we were unfamiliar with as we scrolled through the list. We’d only checked off about three or four boxes each, and thus had scores in the high nineties (out of a hundred, one hundred being the most “pure”).
I got one of the higher scores among our group by a few points. I remember feeling ashamed of that. It was— or it is, maybe— a status symbol of sorts, to have experienced more, to have “lived” more. And since that inaugural taking of the Rice Purity Test, at least in my circles, it’s become an odd tradition. Unceremonious but consistently periodical. Throughout the rest of middle and high school, and even now, in college, we take the test and congratulate ourselves as our scores dwindle, as we experience, as we “live.” 92, then 87; 64, then 28. And so on, and so forth.
“My Rice Purity score went down by, like, 20 in one night,” a fellow Gallatin freshman (who requested to remain anonymous) tells me about her first Tinder date. She is one of many peers I’ve met in my mere two months at NYU who use dating apps.
“I say that in, like, a joking way I guess,” she continues. “But it is kind of…” she looks for the right word. “Gross, maybe? Yeah, just kinda gross-feeling. ‘Cause you just kind of dive right into it. As soon as you say ‘fuck it’ once, then you’re in it. And he was just really— he knew what he was doing, ‘cause he’s older, he’s lived in the city for a long time so he knows where to go, he’s got money, and I’m just, like, a college student.” She taps her phone sitting on the table between us, scans a few notifications she’s received, then clicks it off. “I don’t know.”
“How old was he?” I ask.
She shakes her head, “Too old.”
“Was it a good experience?”
She sighs, shrugs, taps her phone again, clicks it off again. “I mean, I don’t know. I guess it’s prepared me for a lot. Now, I guess, I’m a lot more comfortable with myself, in a way. Like, the other day, I went on a Hinge date with another guy. And I felt like I actually almost knew what I was doing with this one. I had a lot more— I don’t know, control?”
She thinks a moment longer. “I mean, it’s kind of not even real control, ‘cause I still could’ve gotten murdered or whatever, but yeah. I don’t know.”
“Why’d you go on the second one? If the first one wasn’t necessarily a good experience?”
“Shit,” she sighs. “I mean it gets to be a bit surreal. So surreal it becomes funny. I had this one ridiculous interaction the other day with a Hinge guy. I asked him what he’s doing on the app. ‘Cause, I get why me and my friends are on it, being in college and trying to get with people and stuff, but I don't know. I thought, of course, he’s probably on it just for sex, but I asked him anyways, and he goes, ‘Biological clock,’ with such a serious face.”
She pauses and mimics the expression—stony eyes, pursed lips—and then bursts out laughing.
“I couldn’t help but laugh at him! It was so fuckin’ ridiculous. And he was all confused, like why was I laughing at him? But it was just mad funny to me, like I’m feeling small and insecure. But then this guy’s over here, worrying about his dwindling sperm count. And,” she exhales again, “I don’t know. It just puts everything into perspective, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“But, also, I guess I kind of romanticize it? The experience. That’s just a fuckin’ Twitter buzzword, ‘romanticize.’ but I guess it fits. I just kind of romanticize these things during and after. Like I’m in fuckin’ Skins or Euphoria or something.”
The question of “why” dating app use is so prolific across NYU’s population yields many possible responses. Of course, it’s a stereotype of our school that has been corroborated by many people I interviewed. Consensus says that it’s paradoxically hard, at a college with 28,000 undergrads, to meet people that aren’t in close physical proximity to you through your dorm or in your program, thus making dating apps “necessary” for anyone in search of love. One Tisch student even describes NYU’s dating scene as an “incestuous cesspool.”
There’s also something very addictive and very easy about dating apps, of course. It’s perhaps the addictive quality possessed by most technology and media in our era: you click a button, upload a few photos, maybe answer a few prompts, and, now, you have the whole world— of romance and sex, in this case— at your fingertips.
And this digitization of our romantic and sexual lives as adolescents is multifaceted: social media creates certain external pressures to tick these boxes of experience (as described by the Gallatin freshman, we often compare our lives to fictional depictions of adolescence like Skins or Euphoria). The Rice Purity Test, among others, is a simple metric of monitoring our stage of “maturity”; and dating apps are the media that grants us illusively easy access to these box-ticking experiences.
I’m in a dorm room, sitting across from a Tisch freshman on her bed. She’s picking at her silver-painted acrylic nails, obviously nervous. There’s honking outside the window, sirens.
I assure her again that she’ll remain anonymous, that I won’t doxx her. She nods. I hit record on my phone.
She downloaded Hinge, she tells me, because she wanted to “lose her virginity.” In other words, she wanted to tick that box.
“I was so nervous,” she tells me, picking at her nails. “I got super high beforehand. So high, I got dry mouth.”
“Did just being on the app make you that nervous, too?” I ask.
She sighs. “I was nervous to meet him. But when I was just using these apps, I wasn’t thinking about myself in the context of who I actually am, but more in the context of the pictures I put up on them. Because it’d be like ‘this is completely who I am and there’s no in-between.’ And when I thought of myself that way— ‘cause I looked really good in those pictures— I would feel a lot more confident than I actually would be if I was thinking about myself as myself. You know?”
“And how did it feel?” I ask. “Was it good?”
“During, it was good, I guess. I was shocked.” She pauses, then corrects herself: “No, not shocked. Afterwards, I felt good because I felt like I achieved something. And then only when I was given the space to think about it that I realized it was kind of fucked up. Actually pretty fucked. But during...” She trails off, then laughs, “God, I can’t look you in the eyes!”
“You don’t have to talk about this.”
She shakes her head ‘no,’ and takes a deep breath. “When I was with him, I just,” she pauses. “It was complete, like, depersonalization. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah. Like, detachment?”
“Exactly. Detachment from yourself as a person. When you’re doing it it seems completely normal because he thinks it’s normal, which I didn’t understand because I was naive. But it’s like Hinge, and the guy, and the life-experience gap, maybe, created this sort of choicelessness?”
“You said something about achievement, a sense of achievement?”
“I just felt, immediately after, good about myself. Like, ‘Oh, look, I pulled.’ And he was good-looking, he was hot. It was just… That’s not even important.”
“Yeah, but in the moment, it can feel like it is.”
“Yeah, in the moment I was like, ‘Oh I just did that, I’m amazing. Look at me go.’”
I start to ask her another question when she exclaims, “Fuck!”
The acrylic nail on her index finger has snapped off. She curses under her breath and tosses it into the garbage.
“That’s what talking about this shit does to me,” she laughs.
The dissonance she describes between the “self” on her profile and the “self” that actually met up with the guy mirrors the gap between the feeling of achievement and the apparent nerves she gets from even talking about her experience. The gap between the online and the real, and the gap between the romanticized and the real, are parallel. This, I believe, is a fundamental issue with so much of the dating-app use proliferating across NYU (and broader college scenes), and an underlying reason as to why dating-app experiences are so often described as producing an “empty” or “gross” feeling.
“It’s embarrassing to admit, but I just don’t want to be boring?” another Tisch student tells me, her voice rising up at the end as though asking a question. “I’m scared of being a boring person, you know? And it’s kind of as plain as I want to see how fucked-up things could get. And I haven’t felt any repercussions beyond, the, you know, emotional, which I can ignore. And so I just keep doing it. And I know all of it rationally, and I tell it to myself [that it’s bad] but I really struggle to get it on the subconscious level. Like I didn’t [go on the Hinge date] despite the fact that it could turn into a sad story. I went, I guess, because it could turn into a sad story.”
Coming to college, especially, we have this notion that this is the time when you must live when you must experience. You’re eighteen, a young adult. You’re in that liminal period of freedom after the rigidity of high school yet before the responsibility of real life; this is your only chance to live the storied college experience.
It seems almost innate to this construction we’ve developed of that experience—for young women in particular—that it must be painful. It’s not that the pain is a worthwhile side-effect of the experience; it’s that the pain itself is the experience.
Since her acrylic nail has snapped off, the Tisch freshman I’m speaking to in her dorm room has moved on to picking at a rip in her pre-distressed jeans. She tells me she’s thinking of getting back on Hinge. She’s apprehensive because the app “literally scares” her.
“If it scares you, why would you consider going back on it?”
“This is college, isn’t it? There’s a sort of expectation that college is supposed to be your time to, I don’t know, live. That sounds stupid. And, also, though, you know what’s getting at me?”
“What?”
“You know how many goddamn times you’ve heard the phrase, ‘We met in college,’ when spouses talk about each other? Like, what the fuck?” She slams a hand down on the bed. “What the fuck do you mean you met in college? I don’t know how anyone meets anyone in college!”
She takes a deep breath and her liveliness seems to fizzle to a sort of disdain.
“Or maybe it’s just this college,” I contribute.
She nods and chuckles half-heartedly. “Fucking NYU.”