Shelby Lorman - Awards for Good Boys: Tales of Dating, Double Standards, and Doom

I took a Tinder date back to my apartment while writing this book. This was a bad idea.

For a moment he was flying, held aloft by the authority afforded to a boy like himstraight, white, cis. But my room was the sun. Rest in peace, sweet Icarus.

The walls of my room were plastered with drawings of awardsmedals, laurel leaves, trophiescommending men for just barely eking above our collectively low standards for them. In one corner, my detective-trope dreams are fulfilled, with actual pieces of red string connecting suspects like sonic manspreading and things men have said to me after Ive set boundaries. And my pice de rsistance: a mountain of printed-out and annotated Tinder conversations. Right there on my desk. Annotated. Tinder. Conversations. Nice to meet you, too, Tinder Stranger, oh-did-I-mention-Im-writing-a-book-about-good-boys-of-which-you-are-one-have-a-great-night!

His face was like: what the fuck?

Which is a really good question. What the fuck?

So... I give awards to good boys. Its that literal. I co-opted language from the Dog World to describe the praise we heap on men for meeting the barest of minimums, for avoiding being the Outright Worst.

I look at how men are put on literal and figurative pedestals in public spheres andcruciallyin our private lives for, again, achieving what should be THE BASELINE FOR HUMAN DECENCY. I use humor to do so because (1) Im hilarious and (2) HOLY SHIT WE DESERVE TO LAUGH RIGHT NOW.

Some of you reading, hopefully, will be able to use what I make as a way to offload some of the emotional labor involved in walking people, especially men, through why their self-proclaimed goodness isnt actually so great. To validate your perhaps still unspoken suspicions, to reiterate that, though our experiences are unique, youre not alone.

Some of you might feel more like my Tinder date did when he looked at my walls: a mixture of panic and fear and WTF IS HAPPENING? THIS ISNT AS SEXY AS I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE!

But look: in order to grow, we must first all become that Tinder date, wandering unsuspecting into the den of my bedroom. We must confront this messiness, the raw material, the strings on the walls, and piece together how these dynamics manifest in our own lives. Its complicated. But thats where Ill be spelunking: into the murky depths of attempting to name the not outwardly bad but not quite good we might not have the words for yet. Im exploring the fathoms of the hell that is living in the world while being treated as womana journey, in our case, that will take us down a road paved with good intentions and some very, very good boys.

THE INSTANT-NEXT

MTV used to have a brutal dating show called NEXT. The show (compared to, say, The Bachelor) didnt even gesture at future romance between the contestants, as was evident in the very premise. It was speed dating of a grim variety: eligible dates waited in a tour bus that trailed behind the NEXTER who could, at any minute, say-slash-scream the titular phrase to someone they were, at that moment, on a date with, sending the reject back to the tour bus as another person seamlessly emerged for their own hellish debutante date entrance, complete with freeze-frame fun facts that seemed to be written by a bot.

If the tour bus date wasnt Nexted, they were offered a second date or the option to take the moneyoh yeah, theyve been counting this whole time, you get a dollar per minute spent on the date, everyone really wants to be hereand run.

There was no great way to say NEXT to the person you were, at that moment, on a date with.

But there was a particularly bad way: the instant-Next. In these tragic instances, the date would barely make it down the steps before a bellowed NEXT forced them back inside. It was the public version of swiping left on someone via Tinder. The performance of (likely arbitrary) judgmentand rejectionthat we are usually, blessedly, spared from.

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I was instant-Nexted once, just short of hearing the words themselves, resulting in the shortest date Ive ever been on: thirty seconds or ten minutes, depending on when you stop counting. If I were a NEXT contestant, I wouldve received two quarters.

It was my first date back on the market after mutually breaking up with my first love (he sucked). I set the date up with Thane, someone on Tinder who seemed artsy and mundane. I anticipated getting anxiously overcaffeinated and oversharing when the conversation I was desperately fueling like a fire on the cusp of going out lulled, even a bit, and then happily heading home alone.