Swiping on Maps and Dating Territories
Anyone who has signed up for a dating app knows the struggle of trying to reduce themselves down to some number of pictures and prompts as they fill out their profile, in hopes that these will be hooks to invite a conversation and ultimately help them meet a partner.
Yet, as easy as it is for us to recognize how much signal gets compressed and nuance is lost about our lives, it feels as those many of us fail to extend others the grace that we so clearly hope they will extend to us.
We are, all too often, swiping on maps, then ultimately dating territories.
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
The idea that "the map is not the territory" is a helpful concept that articulates an abstraction of a thing often resembles that thing, but it is not the thing in itself.
When we see a dating profile, we have limited information. It's a map, not a territory, as it represents part of a person. The words and images create a frame through which we see a selection of their life, which, as Kenneth Burke points out, is both a reflection of reality and a deflection of reality.
But we engage with each others' maps because it's what is afforded to us. We look at the 35,000 foot view and imagine the territory below, often with an optimistic perspective. Yet if we end up matching with that person, the map starts to gain fidelity as we are able to engage with the territory itself — the person.
While maps (and some exposure) are the what leads to the first date, when we're on the date, it's all territory. We're in the wilderness for the first time, and we will become acutely aware of the degree to which the map in fact resembles the territory.