Dating Apps Are After Me

& short, sweet films

Mar 22, 2025

Dear Jean Claude and Ludwig and Those of Your Kind,

I think you are frauds. This little parasite of a dating app wormed its way into my email inbox and keeps telling me that you two are interested in me, but how can you be interested if you don’t have a picture of me and know nothing about me? Be gone. You are a fruitfly. You are an algorithm gone awry. You are a guy on a computer designing a lie.

So much is in a name—is it not true? We all, eventually, become our own people, known by our names. Yet when we grow, or move forward in some significant way that leaves our past selves behind, it feels fitting to take a new name. Does it not?

The tradition of marriage requiring a woman change her name is just hooey. And yet if you don’t change your name and you have children who have one name or the other, confusion abounds in a culture rooted in conventionality to get things done. A woman who keeps her name is the outlier, the weird woman, the feminist, the one with the agenda. Hmm. Hmm-hmm. Oh, you. “You’re one of those kinds.”

And we as people have little to do with the name we are given at birth. We just show up and our parents give us a name. Maybe it fits; maybe it doesn’t. It might make sense to change yo’self and check yo’self before you wreck yo’self being called something you are not. I had a beautiful friend who wanted a female name that made him happy. His parents did not like the new name—it hurt them to hear it. It hurt him to hear them call him by his childhood name. And during a season of my own life, I asked people of status to call me by the masculine pronoun instead of the feminine one. I loved the way it felt: so much more powerful and in charge. What a mind-trick to preserve my own sanity.

We are here to be wise and foolish and live in the paradox of our lives.

Your name is on everything you do—everything you create. You are known by it. It must be something you feel good about, especially if you want others to know who you are. If you want to hide and be not known and not seen and not heard, then maybe this conversation is all just fluff to you and please go back to your candlelight dinner in a cave.

This is all to say, Jean Claude and Ludwig, that I don’t like your names and I don’t believe in them. I could never date a Jean Claude because there is a van Damme. And I could never date a Ludwig because there is an Angry Itch. And so, if you are to have any chance with me, I will need to christen you with new names. (But I doubt you will have any chance with me; you don’t even know what I look like or sound like or what I like to do on Sunday mornings and still you’re trying to connect with me? Puh-leeassee.)

Anyway, may I point you two gentlemanly avatars (and your kin) to two delightful little films that will give many people comfort and warm many hearts on this beautiful spring day? Maybe this will cheer us all up—single, robot, human, feminist, cop-er, what have you.

1. “PaperMan,” directed by John Kahrs

I love this animation that is classic film/noir with a romance twist. It has simplicity and such relevance for people of all countries, ethnicities, faith traditions, et cetera. My students think it is about not giving up on your dreams and desires.

2. “Happy to Help You,” directed by Jeremy Beiler

“Happy to Help You” is about a woman who loses her job and tries this free therapist thing she is offered by the HR staff. I love this inside look into the world of volunteer therapists who “hold space.” And the bleary-eyed Nora (played by Amy Sedaris) wants to know what “holding space” actually means.

I was watching this with students in my freshman high school class who requested it when they saw it suggested on YouTube. I said, “I really have been wanting to watch this but I don’t know if you’re going to like it. It’s kind of more for adults…I think?” But they said no, let’s try it! So we did. Their faces were a bit perplexed in the beginning, but I kept laughing out loud because I know the weariness of standing in a bee costume in an office, waiting for the coffee to pour. I also know what “holding space” means, and fortunately no one asked me to explain it on that day.

This film has a great message of heart and truth, and I think it leaves a very good impression without being preachy. My students and I loved it! It gave us something to wish for! Two thumbs up, director Jeremy Beiler! This film is like the very best, purest buttered shortbread cookie. (And I, for one, think shortbread cookies ROCK!) (Tell that to Ludwig.)