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It Sucks to Be Single in Trump’s America
How to keep the existential panic at bay
It was the early morning of November 9th, 2016 and the fear was tangible. Donald Trump had won the presidency against the assumption of every rational prediction on earth, and no one knew who to trust or what was going to happen. For my part, I had just done something I never thought I’d do again: I had reinstalled Tinder. I couldn’t sleep; I was feeling empty and lonely and scared, and if the world was going to end soon I didn’t want to leave it with no one to love.
After a few minutes of flicking through potential partners, I’d found a match. We started chatting and soon she asked me what I was doing up at that late hour. “Anxiety Tindering,” I confessed. Her response? “Same.”
Now more than ever, dating feels like a race against the clock, a gambit for validation and security in a world that feels a little more unstable with each passing day.
Singledom can be a grueling psychological burden even under the best of circumstances, but in 2018 the stakes feel higher and the cost of loneliness has a sense of permanence to it. Trump’s mainstreaming of bigotry, his disdain for law and civil rights, and his inclinations toward…
