What does the toilet have to do with love?

Please join us Friday Feb 20 for our next BugHouse SPIN on Love & Dating at the KGB Bar Red Room, 7 PM (Save the date). We have a stellar line up of spinners to bare their lovely souls. Monet Hurst-Mendoza, playwright ; Mariah MacCarthy, playwright and performer; Jef Taylor, filmmaker; Monica Day, sensuality coach; and Emily Winter, comedian.

In preparation for the SPIN, we’ve been thinking, reading, and talking a lot about love & dating.

I’m Scarlet, by the way, the new BugHouse SPIN intern. Not Scarlett O’Hara, I have just one t, but I am similarly stubborn and a fool for love.

But what does a toilet have to do with love?

Well, let me tell you. At the ripe age of 23, I have been voluntarily escorted off the dating scene of NYC, after moving in with my boyfriend of a year, into a cozy 1.5 bedroom in Clinton Hill in the offensive heat of July. By no means has this natural hibernation that accompanies cohabitation spared me of the pain, and utter joy, of my single friends’ stories of love and dating. I have heard it all. One of my close friends hit it off with a seemingly normal, attractive guy on Tinder. After a few promising dates, he disappeared for weeks. He returned only to tell her he had his bi-monthly break out of boils that cover his entire body. Her pessimism about love continued to grow, as mine has slowly faded away.

My friends will ask me in all seriousness: “How did you find a boyfriend?”, as if I sought him out, or devised an intricate plan to lasso the”right” person for me. It seems, in my age group, it’s a phenomenon to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. At first, I attributed it to apps like Tinder or O.K. Cupid and a love movement grounded in the instant gratification of the digital age .

My only advice to them was to meet people in real life and to take it slow. Love is patient, love is kind… blah blah blah.

But truth is, I met my boyfriend at a bar in Brooklyn, walking simultaneously out of the opposite bathrooms where we recognized each other, perhaps from some past life. I smiled at him, he smiled at me.

I guess you can even find love at the lieu.

From the beginning, everything moved very fast. Within a month, we had become synonymous with each other. Inseparable…and almost two years later, thats still pretty much the case. How is that so much different than meeting someone on the metaphorical pathways of the internet?

I started researching love and dating and the internet, assuming that I morally disagreed with these methods of seeking sex or love. But who am I to comment on the ethicality of how two strangers meet? Is it weird to meet people online? What do these applications do to the dating world? Is an age of instant gratification changing the way people fall in love? What is falling in love? Is there a right or wrong process? Is true love familiar intimacy? Or is falling in love seeing the face of a stranger for the first time?