So you want to date a journalist?
If someone gave me a dollar every time an online dating match claims I am the first journalist he’s spoken to in real life, I could end up becoming the first journalist to retire rich by 40. Something is fishy. The news industry is facing an existential crisis but journalists are everywhere. We can be found ranting in our echo chambers on Twitter during the day and happy hour bars at night. Almost all journalists I know are single; happily so until they get sick of attending weddings without a plus-one. Almost all journalists I know hate dating other journalists, so everyone is a reluctant swiper.
Are we purposely being ignored by online dating search algorithms because of a nasty exposé someone wrote somewhere in the world? How did we end up becoming such an elusive, obscure community?
I don’t know how to respond to this childlike excitement from a total stranger. I don’t know any magic tricks. I can’t burst his bubble and tell him we are nothing like our caricatures in movies and television shows. That, in reality, we are narcissistic, arrogant and socially awkward, morally and monetarily broken by our profession, with undying love for free food and drinks. Our minds begin judging you the second you send that first grammatically incorrect sentence without a full stop. We will bombard you with more questions on a first date than a man could ever ask his partner in a lifetime. We often put our investigative skills to exhaustive use while stalking our best friend’s love interest on social media. That our obsession with finding a beginning, middle and end to stories means your ghosting, bread-crumbing, digital orbiting and all other millennial, commitment-phobic dating tactics will never work. Contrary to what Enrique Iglesias said in Escape, you can’t run and you can’t hide.
I can’t respond with sarcasm either. One time someone, after reading my Bumble bio that had ‘Not Fake News’ written next to employer/industry, earnestly told me he was a news junkie but had never read a magazine called Not Fake News.
Responding with honesty is tricky. I can’t lie about our profession because seasoned, frustrated daters know how excessive digital stalking is the first step towards finding love. Like the time I told someone on a first date about my first journalism gig and he blurted out “I know”. On the other hand, embracing my profession in Trump’s America or Modi’s India means self-sabotaging my dating prospects and reducing my available pool to single digits. Even if I take a chance, I will still need to coach myself to politely laugh every time someone tells me I should write a story on them, or says “off-record” before telling me something interesting. I will also need to train my ego to not shred into pieces every time someone tells me they fell asleep while reading my heavy-duty financial reporting, or how they are fascinated with journalism and writing but have never read a book in their lives.
Truth matters but even for an ethical journalist, fake news and alternative facts can sometimes be more rewarding. After all, who can escape from love?
