The TV news reporter kept asking everyone the same stupid question: “So, what are you doing here?”
Crass, perhaps, but so is our culture’s obsession with performative courtship, the kind in which two parties bludgeon each other with cloying romantic gestures like, well, riding a 200-foot-tall pink-hued ode to true love. That thought didn’t occur to me until later, because when you’re busy chatting up a bunch of randoms on a Ferris wheel in hopes of finding the One, it impairs everything beyond a conversation-heart level of thinking. Or discussion, for that matter.
Had we been served booze (it didn’t flow freely until later on the boat) or provided with the right soundtrack, we might have also believed we were in a tiny gyrating VIP room at a nightclub. Instead we talked to strangers in sober silence—a stark reminder that modern urban dating is bizarre and alienating.
“I’m a first-grade teacher. Live in the west suburbs.”
“Cool, I’m in merchandising. I live in the Loop.”
“Oh? I’m in Old Town, work in logistics. You know—supply chain.”
“Actually, I know how to make meth,” said her seatmate, a woman whose name tag pinned to her black top identified her as Elliott. Was she serious? Devon and Elliott were both in their late 20s, tallish and blonde, with easy smiles and rat-a-tat-tat banter. They struck me at first as sisters or an improv comedy duo, but they told me later they were just close friends. Regardless, they seemed ready to break out of this stiff format.
At some point, I let it slip that I was recently single after a breakup. “Dude, are you like OK to be here?” Elliott asked me. We all laughed. We’d earned a small achievement as a group: we’d created a modicum of intimacy in 12 minutes together.
For an hour and a half, we the singles-who-no-longer-spun sipped boozy drinks, nodded our heads to the DJ’s dancey tunes, and chatted in the hull of the ship. Now all 90 of us were trudging the length of the pier through the snow to our separate ways. Elliott, Devon, and I were laughing at the ridiculous antics we’d witnessed. The drunk woman who kept chain-eating shrimp! The guy who faked a southern accent to test-market it with the ladies! (Spoiler alert: it did not go well.) And what was up with that dude who kept approaching small bands of women with the line “Hey! Where are we all going after this?” (That did not go well, either.)
