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On a warm Thursday night in July, hundreds of New Yorkers — most of them single women — gathered at Littlefield in Gowanus to trauma bond over the horrors of modern dating.
They came to attend About Last Night, a nationwide event started in 2016 where people get up on stage to tell tales of terrible dates and lament the misery of looking for love.
The event aims to help singles feel less alone, but the stories of diaper fetishes and perverted coworkers actually showed just how much bad behavior singles — especially women — are letting their partners get away with.
One woman, Jesse, recounted having her first one night stand in New York City at age 22. The older man she was hooking up with got up, sat on his standing desk, and rode it up and down naked as she watched, baffled.
Another young woman, CJ, recalled hooking up during lockdown with a “Japanese cocaine dealing skater boy with a lisp,” only to realize that she was actually in love with another member of her 28-person cooperative housing living set up. After leaving his apartment high on cocaine, she spontaneously joined a nearby Black Lives Matter protest, where police tear-gassed her.
A guy named Jared recalled going on a date with a woman who admitted she was in a 24/7 dominant-submissive kink relationship with an older man who had been reading all of their texts and controlling whether or not she could see Jared or be intimate with him.
There were also quite a few appeals to bathroom humor.
Frankie recalled a budding romance with a coworker who admitted on their second date that he was sexually aroused by women farting.
Chase James, the Los Angeles-based founder of About Last Night, said the event was inspired by his friend group’s ritual of sharing their own terrible experiences from the night before over breakfast. He started the series in San Francisco a decade ago and has since expanded to Chicago, New York, Denver and Seattle. Soon, they will host events in Austin and DC, too.
“It was just this really special feeling of trust and camaraderie, and I was wondering how I could bring that on a grander scale,” he told The Post. “For a moment in time, it’s not the worst thing anymore. It’s kind of the best, because we’re all laughing about it together.”
To my ears, though, the stories all seemed to be oriented towards one conclusion: young people are treating one another like disposable sexual objects, and often ignoring their own values to keep up with a fast-paced dating scene.
I found myself asking, Why did you end up in bed with a man you promised yourself you wouldn’t hook up with? Why did you let your co-worker continue to send you porn for days before speaking up?
We talk so much about how horrific modern dating is — and rightfully so — but it’s only being made worse by our collective relinquishment of agency.
The final speaker, a New Yorker named Daisy, told the audience about a time when, after a handful of dates with a man she was interested in, she violated her own boundaries and allowed herself to be talked into sex before commitment.
She’d mustered up the courage to tell the man, “I really, really like you. I would love to maybe not have this be casual. I would love to maybe get in a relationship, what do you think?”
She was “devastated” when he rejected her proposition, but stifled her disappointment — and went along with casual sex hoping to gain his affection.
“I was like, yes, of course this 25-year-old man is saying I’m ready, so I must be ready . . . [and] I kept telling myself, ‘This is what it means to be 20,’ ” she said on stage.
The story crescendoed when Daisy, who received a triple organ transplant as a child, starts bleeding profusely during sex and needs to go to the hospital — only to be left by her hookup partner in the waiting room. She had to head into emergency surgery all alone.
It’s a dramatic ending, but with a relatable conclusion. “It made me realize how much we push ourselves to do things we think we should based on societal standards,” she told the crowd
If there’s any one takeaway from the messiness of About Last Night, it’s that: so much of the horror of modern dating is the result of us, as women, talking ourselves into participating in a system that doesn’t serve our own interests. We give in to avoid conflict, have casual sex when we don’t really want to and accept terrible behavior because “dating sucks.”
We can keep complaining about it . . . or we can start demanding better.
