I tried not to think about the sudden upswing of male attention I would get when my hair was long and straight. I hated myself for questioning whether I should have kept my hair long for the MOY to make myself more “easily digestible” so that men, black or otherwise, would see me as a viable option.
“All the terrible stuff that happens outside the platform also happens within the platform,” she says, referencing the racial discrimination that often plays out on dating apps. “People come with expectations of what women of colour are ‘supposed’ to act like. We don’t get the same blank slate.” Antwi also helped me realize that a lot of the anxiety I feel is characteristic of what she calls “mission-based dating,” thinking of dating as a fling.com mobile site job or chore. She admits to experiencing the same uncertainties I felt during the MOY. “I often told myself ‘I’m dating to have fun,’ but I wasn’t,” she says. “The part of my brain that is feminist wouldn’t let me admit that I was on a husband-finding mission.”
Toronto-based Bridget Antwi started The Dating Doula, a dating concierge service for women of colour who, like me, want a better online-dating experience
That was me in a nutshell. I couldn’t remember the last date I went on that I actually enjoyed. Like Rhimes, I was scared – scared to fail, scared to be vulnerable and, above all else, scared to be alone forever. I had been putting so much pressure on myself to meet the man of my dreams ASAP that I thought that opening the floodgates would resolve issues that, in reality, are more about myself than any of my suitors. Yes, I want a lifelong partner, but I also want to feel valuable and whole, with or without a man, and this is work I have to do on my own.
Though my life experiment did not yield my Prince Harry, the MOY was a definite success. I learned that I have to spend more time giving real, unflinching thought to what I do want in a spouse and why. Sure, as Cooper Traynor says, I want to meet a man who is financially secure, mature, responsible and not a hoarder (okay, I added that last bit). But I need to take her advice and focus on how I feel when I’m in the company of somebody – focus on meeting a person who makes me feel good. It took a MOY to realize that, at least for now, the person who makes me feel good should, at the very least, be me.
Through saying yes to every man, I realized that I had to stop making my dating successes and failures an indication of my self-worth
So, I decided to just say yes. Using Hinge as my app du jour, I matched with 43 men, had real conversations with 21 and went on 11 dates in 30 days. My experiences were as varied as the men, from the musician who te and grilled cheese to the Bay Street lawyer who asked me about my porn preferences before the waiter had time to ask if I wanted sparkling or still. I expected bad seeds, but what I hadn’t accounted for was the influx of interactions with men I normally had to disqualify: the ones who reminded me that for a black woman on dating apps, fetishization is a problem – like the men who referred to me as “brown sugar” or “chocolate angel” or some other confectionery-related epithet. Or the guys who were overly fascinated with my “exotic upbringing” (Oakville, Ont., born and raised).