Deserve this

Matchmaking, slow burn summer, and Materialists

About two years ago, I got an email that I’d gotten the job I’d spent months interviewing for. I would be a content designer for a dating app company that owns almost every app on the market. I was surprised and relieved as I read the email. My last interview round hadn’t gone that well, or so I thought. When asked why I wanted to work there, in classic Evana form, I began to babble.

“Dating apps,” I said. “For better or for worse, are our modern vehicles for serendipity. They shrink the world, with each swipe they bring you closer and closer to the person you’re supposed to meet.”

I left the interview smacking myself in the forehead. Too candid, too profuse, too unprofessional. But then, in what seemed like a happy mistake, my offer of employment arrived on a snowy February morning. Those several weeks ushered in a series of changes, leaving my life resembling less and less what it was before the new job. My at-the-time love interest became my boyfriend. I moved into a new apartment. My beloved, but very terminally ill cat passed away. At the job I was about to leave, we launched my heart project: an astrology-based crush report analyzing compatibility on a deeper level.

So I left that clouted job to continue the same work I realized I was already doing—trying to solve love.

When I worked at the astrology app, my friends would joke that I had an inordinate amount of power over women all over Brooklyn. At any party I attended, if the inevitable conversation about work came up, I would field questions about others’ charts for the next few hours. Most often, I would be asked about someone’s compatibility with their crush, what it meant if they were a fire sign and the object of their affection was a water sign. This ended up being useful field research, as my last project at the company was a crush compatibility report. I used that project as evidence in my interviews for why I could make a seamless transition into the dating app space.

I don’t credit my monologue for my success in securing the job. Mostly because the sentiments I expressed were nice, but don’t exactly line up with the day-to-day duties. My current job is less about solving problems in love than it is figuring out the best way to communicate with users. Hours of my life peering at screens on my laptop screen to ensure the content design reflected the goals of the user and business objectives. Sometimes, I forget altogether that I work at a dating app. I don’t influence any algorithms. I simply write, often very neutral copy about how to navigate a sea of potential matches.

If you read this newsletter, you likely know that I almost exclusively write about love. But for someone whose entire career has been focused on helping people foster deeper connections with the objects of their desire, I famously give pretty bad relationship and love advice. My theories are sound, the application of those theories often miss the mark.

I’m no real-life matchmaker. To be perfectly candid, one of the most disastrous things you can do is to try to set your friends up. You can evaluate compatibility, just like an app would, on basic preferences, goals, and shared interests, but there’s no telling what happens when two people take it off the apps or agree to the blind date you and another friend tipsily conspired for. I haven’t set any friends up in years. My vague attempts to suggest one single friend to another have been shut down.

But I can’t help but feel a little smug when several friends have dubbed me a love genius. In reality, I’m not a love genius. I’m only (maybe a little too) willing to share what I’ve encountered and how it’s informed my own philosophy of love. I’m qualified only by how valuable others see my experience.

Last week, I watched Celine Song’s Materialists for a second time. To be totally honest with you, snippets of cringe dialogue and character tropes aside, I loved it. Which is why I’ve read, with much disinterest, the general negative response to the film, particularly on this platform. When I began writing this piece, I considered critiquing the critiques I’ve seen, but that became less interesting to me than examining my own relationship to matchmaking and the use of matchmaking in the film to critique what might be the most pervasive problem in modern dating: which is our attempt to forge relationships only based on arbitrary points of compatibility.

I felt recognition watching Dakota Johnson as Lucy the matchmaker guide her clients through the haunted house of New York dating where yuppie men are the jump scare. She was shrewd, at times clinical in her assessments of compatibility, and throughout the film, brutally honest about the brutal landscape of dating. After my rosy-colored poetic waxings in my interview, I can admit my own jadedness watching daters (IRL and through user experience) as they try and fail to play a game stacked against them.

Lucy is a mostly competent matchmaker until she sets up a client with a “bad man,” a match that almost costs her her career. This incident, she’s told by her boss, is a known risk of dating. I was less interested in this plot point, mostly because I didn’t feel like this particular failure was as interesting as what proceeded it. The client who endures this bad experience is unmatchable. She’s a nice girl, with “no niche market,” as Lucy’s coworker diagnoses it.

The failure to match the client prior to the incident comes partly from the client’s high list of expectations for her potential matches. Watching Lucy navigate this problem is something I consider every day at work. Are some people doomed to be trapped in the matchmaking loop forever? Lucy isn’t bad at her job (i.e. failing to successfully set up a difficult client) because she doesn’t understand the game; she completely does. In some ways, the matchmaker is a bad actor because if a client doesn’t find love, then the matchmaker still has a client (and client means income).

I’ve come to discover that the practice of matchmaking itself is misguided. Whether it’s on an app, or a professional perusing her rolodex of eligible clients, selecting preferences doesn’t guarantee perfect results. Real-life chemistry is always a guessing game. What you think you might like (six-five, subscribes to the Criterion Channel, voted for Bernie in 2016) often turns out to have no bearing on connection. I remember from my own dating days when I’d get excited by the way someone looked, or the answers to prompts, only to find out in real life, I felt as magnetized to the person sitting across from me as I did to anyone else in the bar.

“Love is easy, dating is hard,” Dakota Johnson says at one point in the film. Dating is hard. It requires vulnerability, endurance, and a lot of rejection to get the desired results, whether that’s a short-term fling or a long-term love. Apps do work, for many people. They wouldn’t exist in perpetuity if they didn’t. But at the same time, the fatigue of superficial searching does beat many people down into submission, or settling. And I don’t mean settling in the sense that someone is less valuable, but settling into being treated like a math problem to be solved.

The problem I see with matchmaking is the illusion of control it gives the individual who wants to be matched. You select as many preferences as you wish until the preferences you select make up a person who probably will never exist. That illusion of control keeps the hopeful dater safe. The more that person is unattainable, the safer the dater will be from ever being hurt. It also propagates a somewhat dangerous superiority complex. Why should I settle for someone who doesn’t check my boxes when I know what I want and I’m amazing and men are shit? I’ve heard this too many times. It’s exhausting and it’s boring, and it prevents the possibility of serendipity.

Consenting to have someone matchmake on your behalf is an attempt to outrun loneliness. To speed up the process and skip to the part where you’re no longer alone. and as a result won’t die alone, per se, but rather, in Lucy’s words, have a grave buddy. But often in that hurry to find someone, settling does happen. Or, the hyper-focus on finding the perfect person risks the seeker gripping so tightly to their ideals that they miss the chance to find perfection in the imperfect. Time is the only method that works when it comes to finding love. Dating is about speed, love isn’t.

When I started dating following the dissolution of my years-long relationship, I didn’t have specific goals. I imagined that eventually, I would want a partner again, but I didn’t want one for the sake of having one. Vaguely, I could elucidate my ideal: someone who respected me and I respected them. Beyond that, I didn’t want to go about dating in the same way everyone else seemed to be in this city. Without commitment, without selecting anything other than figuring out my dating goals, when even that seemed like a misrepresentation of what I didn’t even know I wanted?

So of course, like everyone else, I used dating apps to figure it out. I swiped around, passively and at times too actively. I went on dates. I swooned, I cut my losses. All of my experiences, I figured, would add up to some greater knowledge about what I was looking for, but the longer I deleted and redownloaded ad nauseam, the more convinced I was that I would always be the matchmaker, never the matched. And that was fine. I didn’t want a prescribed person who I’d found only by exhausting myself.

Which was why, when I saw my big crush on the apps one night after I returned home from a disastrous trip with another crush, I realized what I’d been looking for was a chance encounter. There he was. And after I swiped right, there he was again, the app announcing we’d matched. I couldn’t believe my luck. He was someone I’d known from undergrad and reencountered in New York, and then had several run-ins with that summer that led me to the conclusion that I definitely had a big, stupid, shy crush on him.

Until I was seated across the table from him on a Friday the thirteenth, I knew nothing about what I wanted in a person. And even as we slowly got to know each other, I couldn’t pinpoint what I yet wanted from a relationship. How could I know unless I gave it time, however agonizing the not knowing was, wouldn’t it be worth the eventual arrival at an answer?

Recently, a friend introduced the concept of “slow burn summer” to me. He explained that slow burn summer represents a trend towards more measured romance. Here’s an anecdote: a friend of a friend has been seeing someone consistently every weekend for six months. Only recently did they mutually decide to take the plunge and call it a relationship. What’s the rush? How do you know someone is right for you without a crucial investment, which is your time?

The slow burn is different from the situationship. (Which, by the way, situationship is word that I feel extremely allergic to and, if I allow myself to be a true doomer for a second, it illustrates the ills of a society refusing any responsibility towards others, not only in interpersonal relationships but the very structures that rob individuals of the material resources we need to survive. But it’s a stupid term and I would encourage any adult romantically involved with another adult to find better language to describe what’s happening between them.) The slow burn is about embracing the concrete possibilities of what spending a considerable amount of time with someone communicates to the other party, without rushing into labels or avoiding them altogether. I thank God that I had the wisdom to know the difference between a situationship and a budding relationship was. I was clear-eyed about one thing—he was who I wanted more than anything, no matter what we called it. And I was who he wanted.

When I heard about slow burn summer, I returned to the romantic pragmatism that is the backbone of Materialists. The slow burn of realizing someone is the right person for you is much more gratifying than consulting a list of preferences you could see right from the start as to “not waste your time.” Both of Lucy’s major relationships in the film aren’t nosedives into disappointments. They are pragmatic appraisals of what one needs from a relationship to feel valuable and to not sacrifice one’s own values.

Time is critical. You can’t compile a finite list of reasons why you love someone. Don’t do yourself the disservice of being a detective too early on, trying to suss out through arbitrary reasons why someone may or may not be right for you. There won’t be a single reason one way or another. Give yourself the gift of letting those reasons emerge over time. Even if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to name the very reason I love Kabir, I couldn’t. I just do.

Just as much as it takes time to love someone, the time spent finding them is equally valuable. That serendipity is critical. To let go of a sense of control doesn’t mean you sit and wait for them without agency. Being sensitive to serendipity is also being aware of the necessary modern methods that will get you closer.

A song I love says this: Love will call when you have enough under your arms. At the end of Materialists, Lucy and John recognize, after years apart, what they have to offer each other is enough if it’s love that’s on the table.

Love comes when you see another person as enough, as a world unto themselves, every part of them inseparable from the whole. And that goes for recognizing that you aren’t a list of quantifiable qualities either. It’s possible to find that wholeness. It only takes time.

But don’t take it from me—I’m no matchmaker.

Materialists, dir. Celine Song (2025)