Review Mode: Law School + Tinder = :(
Or: how I outed my friend Katie to her colleagues as having a personal life
Welcome to Review Mode, a biweekly newsletter where I mark up my social interactions, mining my, like, medical-grade self-monitoring for your reading pleasure.
First of all, please note that I wanted to call this one Legally Boned, but evidently I do occasionally have some ability to censor myself. Contrary to what the following anecdote may suggest.
Last week, my friend Katie invited me to her wine-and-cheese-type party. I don’t wanna victim blame, but I do think her mistake here was inviting me to a wine and cheese party. That’s not really my vibe. I’m doing more of a prolonged adolescence thing where most of my social engagements are bar hangs and house parties. A lot of yelling. So, my manners are a little unpracticed.
For example, with potlucks, I’m mostly a napkins-and-cups guy. Last time I tried to cook for a potluck, I made lumpy mashed sweet potatoes for a friendsgiving hang (improvised, of course — recipes are for cowards). Then I put em in a deli container and promptly dropped the container, which shattered. I put the them in a new container, but what was left was full of spiky little shards of plastic. But like, I would argue that just made them more punk rock. 🤘 All to say, I don’t always know how to comport myself.
For example, Katie’s party.
So, Katie and I met on a Tinder date in 2018. We both had a great time, neither of us felt the vibe, friends ever since — tale as old as time. Both of us have multiple friends from dating apps, and before this party, Katie had jokingly mentioned to me that she only had two kinds of friends: law school and Tinder.
When I first got to Katie’s apartment, it was more of a Katie’s-law-school-friends crowd than a Katie’s-Tinder-friends crowd. You can tell by the haircuts. Ambiguously gay haircut? That’s one of her law school friends. Unambiguously gay haircut? Tinder.
In fact, of the eight of us, I was the only Tinder friend so far.
I was sitting next to Katie near the door when another person came in, her friend Mari. Mari’s haircut, unfortunately, was ambiguously ambiguous/unambiguous.
“Is Mari a law school friend or the other kind?” I asked Katie quietly as Mari sat down.
“The other kind,” Katie said, laughing embarrassedly, which in turn made me laugh.
Evidently, I didn’t ask quite quietly enough, given the cocktail party effect, that phenomenon where you can hear someone saying your name across a room even when there’s a bunch of other sound. (This phenomenon, incidentally, is also how I can always jump in when someone anywhere at a party brings up queer interpretations of Wicked. I have thoughts.)
So, from Mari’s perspective, she entered the room, heard a stranger quietly say something about her, and then Katie and that stranger were laughing — possibly at her.
Understandably, Mari asked loudly, “What did you say?”
“I was saying you’re not a law school friend,” Katie said.
Mari looked dissatisfied with that answer. Understandably.
“Oh, how did you two meet?” asked one of Katie’s law school friends.
“We went on a couple dates a while back,” Katie answered, a little uncomfortably.
I, however, didn’t pick up on Katie’s discomfort talking about this, because I was still focused on Mari. My only object was trying to alleviate her confusion/suspicion. I felt bad about having brought up an inside joke in a larger group, and I guessed that the way to ease the awkwardness was to make it an outside joke. Whoops.
“I was asking Katie whether you were one of her law school friends or her Tinder friends,” I told Mari (and by default, everyone else). “I’m the latter.”
I’ve been on the apps on and off since I was 19, so for me, there’s no more weirdness around Tinder than there is around, like, Instagram. It’s just another app on my phone making my life a little worse. So, I momentarily forgot that other people might not feel the most comfortable talking about their Tinder life around their colleagues. Duh, dumbass.
“Mari, can I get you something?” Katie asked quickly and loudly, getting up to go to the kitchen.
Shit.
But before you judge me for blurting out my first thought, please know that actually, no I didn’t. My first thought was “Wow, Mari’s hot.”
And by the way, since my intentions were good, and it was really just a failure to exercise caution that resulted in the social injury, I really think this should only be tried as a third-degree faux pas. Can’t be sure though — I may have just alienated my legal counsel.
The Lesson That I Should but Probably Won’t Learn from This: Consider for even just a moment that people may have varying levels of comfort talking about their personal life in mixed company. Not everyone’s like you, Carson — not everyone spends their evenings on stage telling a bunch of acquaintances and strangers about that time they went to an orgy.
Carson’s Life Updates
Two of my friends are becoming friends independent of me. That can’t be allowed, right? Is there someone I can report it to?
Here’s a W: I went to a holiday party full of cis gay men and didn’t cry once.
The Boilerplate
Carson Olshansky (still they/them, despite the haters) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and writer. If you don’t already, you can follow them at @carsonolshansky on Instagram and TikTok and at @carson-olshansky on YouTube.