Olu Online

relationships

last updated 9 hours, 39 minutes ago

and i, yeah, i still need you, but what good's that gonna do? needing is one thing, and getting? getting's another. – needing/getting, ok go

needing

i have a list of values, square of me i know. they change occasionally, but one that has stayed on the list of six for years is rapport. this is a froofy way of saying that i love relationships, relating, chatting, ki-kiing. i crave companionship in chores, company in fun, and body doubling and comrades in all my harebrained passion projects. i am weirdly introverted for this to be the case - i prefer socialising one on one for example - though we all contain multitudes!

i really don't like the way that i have farmed out1 so much of my passion-based, rapport-centered needs to big corporations. instagram contains all the gay people in my phone i want to keep up with day to day. whatsapp contains all the looser tied groups, places to find out what's happening, as well as a place to catch up with my group chats. discord2 to keep up with the artists, sewists, writers, technologists, people "at the intersection of art and technology", and other people i'm interested in learning from and being in community with.

at the moment, being online in the equivalent of a crowded yet cosy house party seems to require a big, annoying platform to host you. Sadly that means they get to decide what the rules are, who's allowed in, when the party should stop and whether you can have one at all.

dating apps have become a focal point for this frustration in me, that i want and need what they offer, and they seem determined to either block me from getting what i want, or at least make it prohibitively expensive.

the fact that we all crave companionship to some degree, that we all know that apps are one of the more efficient ways to do it, and that the apps make it incredibly difficult to get off them, all fester together to create an awful dating landscape. beyond ghosting and other fairly uniquely online dating phenomena, it seeps the consumer logic of every other part of our lives even more brazenly. either pay the platform to have the best experience (and thus the best potential relationships, or best chance at them!), or look at ads and have a capped, impoverished experience whilst you do it...

the majority of them have no incentive for you to find love, sex, friendship or whatever else you are looking for. there are as many ways to love as there are people on the planet. apps make us constrain ourselves to tiny categories, shorten our horizons, and make us think of relationships in terms of toggling between 'casual' and 'long term'.

i've had and have a lot of online only friendships i cherish. losing the possiblity to find people this way is the one of the things i worry about with a smaller web, as i've said previously. the joy of meeting someone an ocean away is a uncommon one, perhaps, but i love it. the dissolving discoverability mechanisms of the web should be protected, not that i know how we do that.

getting

i understand why everything that has ended up this way, has ended up this way. financial incentives ossifying patterns, greed, lack of reason to change what "works" for some sense of the word and lack of funding for reasonable alternatives. the usual suspects.

i get that the web might be lost yet. i get that many people are trying to salvage what they can of the social parts, the technologies, the edifices we have put up with technology, and build new stuff in its place. i get that it will be a matter of being superseded, and i assume it will not be a quick process, but i'm still desperately sad about the way the web might go out, choked with (AI) slop and unusable.

i get all that. doesn't change what i need from it. i think there's still possibility for things to change, but i am a hopeful person. i see hope as a torch beam, cutting it's way through and allowing me to maybe see a path forward. struggling with that at the moment, given the current state of the world, but i can't help it. hope i must.

do you think i'd give up? that this might've shook the love from me? or that I was on the brink? how could you think, darlin', i'd scare so easily? - francesca, hozier

i keep thinking about how i'm more of roses supplier, in the bread and roses view of the world. but really we need both. whether we get them, another matter entirely, but accepting this about myself has helped my outlook on my life so much.

this post is a lot more rambly than usual3, but like i said. roses. where do you fall?

this piece is part of my attempt at alphabet superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (i passed a year in september 2024 — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge finished on 11th August 2025). other posts so far: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge, leaving, monotony, no, permanent and questions.

if you liked this post, please:

  1. i say "farmed out" like it's not deeply encouraged by the systems in the world for us all to deeply rely on profit making systems of relating...↩

  2. i've been trying for ages to persuade people to join a discord for tech-related writing stuff (can be other stuff too, but that's how it's ended up! join us?).↩

  3. if i turns out i always ramble, i'm sorry for bringing it up.↩

#alphabet-superset