Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4
Hello and welcome to my new bi-monthly column where you are going to get to accompany me, a gorgeous and brilliant queer woman who is single for the first time at the age of 25 after a long-term relationship ended. Join me on my adventures in navigating the adult dating world. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until I tell you that the last time I was single was when I was in the 11th grade and demonetisation had not happened yet. Yes, it has been almost 8 years since that fateful day. And yes, we are all officially that old.
This is my fifth column entry.
TW: Experience of biphobia and racism, mention of transphobic remarks
I officially have dating app exhaustion. I recently sat down to re-download one after a short break, and found myself really, really not wanting to be on it. So, I decided to do something different by searching online for queer dating events in the city. The search engine happily informed me that there was a lesbian speed-dating event happening in just about an hour’s time and even though the ticket price was a bit steep, I decided to do something spontaneous and just went for it!
The first thing that I noticed when I walked into the room was that everyone else looked a bit older than me – which was generally okay because my upper limit for dating is 35 – but it made me wonder why people in their 20s weren’t there that evening. It was only afterwards that I found out that for every other event except the one that I had attended, the organisers had advertised the recommended age group as between 30-44 years. Oh, well!
The thing about speed dating is that you must compulsorily talk to every single person for the five-minute time slot, even though it might be very obvious to everyone involved in the situation that neither was interested or invested in it. Somehow, probability worked itself in a way that the first person I spoke to was also not in the recommended age bracket – she was 52! I decided to use the time to get advice from an older queer woman, but it ended up being the other way around. In this span of 5 minutes (and the extra 5 minutes that we chatted towards the end as I waited for my last date to be free) I ended up teaching her how to add filters to her online dating profile pictures and introduced her to Gen-Z slang. I would be lying though if I painted this as a wholesome interaction between an older queer person and a Gen-Z girlie (those 100% exist and are magical) because the truth is that it involved a lot of me asking her to NOT be transphobic and at one point she referred to not understanding one word because of my ‘accent’ (yes, she was white, and yes, she said it in ‘that’ tone)!
The other women looked like they could definitely be in the upper limit of my dating range, but as I heard them list impressive job titles (one of them was literally a partner in a law firm), my head was inundated with thoughts about what if they felt that I was looking for a sugar mommy? And honestly, my full support to anyone who is trying to do that – get that moolah – it is just not what I was looking for that evening, and I wouldn’t have known how to navigate the situation had someone directly asked me if I were. Overall, the dates were mildly pleasant, and if you are wondering why I did not leave mid-way, it’s because I felt adventurous and wanted to see it through. People asked me questions and were nice to interact with, even though I wasn’t into anyone except for one person.
Later, 4 of us from the event complained to each other about how messy it had been and that we should probably get refunds as we sat at the bar casually chatting. One of the other women was clearly interested in me – though there were 4 of us sitting around, she looked at me no matter who was speaking (in a non-creepy way) and asked me questions about myself aside from the group conversation. Then the 52-year-old got the biphobic ball rolling and everything went downhill. She told us about how a bi woman that she had dated had gone back to her children’s father and now she is only open to dating ‘full lesbians’. While one woman said that biphobia is a real problem, it was not met with unanimous agreement, which led me to delivering the whole ‘As a bi person…’ speech, because come on! Knowing that I was bi made something shift for the woman who had been into me thus far, and she turned away from me for the first time in the entire night and said, “You know I have been with many bi woman who have left me for men” (I pointed out that they could have left her for women as well) and then justified her decision to never date a bi person by saying, “We have a right to choose who we want to date just like bi people do.” Except, excluding an entire community based on a stereotype is not a dating ‘choice’, it is prejudice. But I was too drained by then to say anything more.
The question is: would I go to a speed dating event again? And the answer is: not unless I knew that there were going to be more people in my dating age-range there AND that the organisers had very clearly communicated a no-tolerance policy with respect to discrimination. This is why queer people should be running queer events – and I know that that is not what happened, because the MC told me that he was straight and that this event company organises these speed-dating night for cishet people as well, which I understood to mean that most of their events targeted cishet people primarily. If I had wanted a night where I would be forced to hear transphobic and biphobic statements sprinkled with racist remarks about my accent, I would have asked Seema Aunty from Netflix to organise it. Simply naming something an event for the community is not enough – you also have to make sure that you create a safe space that actually makes everyone feel welcome in it.
