Mindy Hung tells us about her experiences with an on-line date.   It is something completely alien to me. 

    I met my wife-to-be, face-to-face, when I was a freshman in college; we became a thing in my junior year; we were married a year after I graduated.  I never faced the twenty-something dating scene, especially one so daunting as New York City.  It strikes me as frustrating and depressing; so, Hung’s good humor is refreshing.  She seems resilient and positive.  I guess you have to be to keep at it, looking for someone who will perhaps offer a future instead of just a fling, the dichotomy she turns over in her head.

    So there is little a gray-beard (literally!) like me has to offer a young  person like her.  But there might be something Chuang Tzu would say.

    Dating, on-line or off, seems to have a hefty measure of randomness to it.  Who you meet depends upon whose path you cross, electronically of physically.  There may be ways to narrow the range of randomness (if you go to bowling alleys you are bound to meet people who like to bowl, etc.) but it is still close to a crap shoot.  And that randomness has a Taoist resonance.  Both Chuang Tzu and the Tao Te Ching suggest that there is little reason to try to plan out the course of our lives because life is beyond planning ("Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it… I’ve seen such dreams invariably fail.  TTC 29).

    So, a Taoist dating guide would say: don’t try to plan too much.  Just move with the situation as it unfolds.  Trust you instincts, which Hung seems to do as she realizes that the fellow she has met is not really right for her, and don’t try to create false impressions.

    Indeed, dating seems to also be about how we present ourselves to each other.  When meeting a person for the first time, a person who knows virtually nothing about you or your life, you have an unusual opportunity to present (not represent, because it is an initial presentation) your self, or, at least, the self you think you are.  And Hung is doing this; she is thinking about how she will shape the impression that will (she hopes) come across to her date.  At one point she feels the "plucky and game" persona she had created is starting to slip:

I recovered and held up for the rest of the date, but damage had been done and my poise, or my pose, didn’t last long.

    A good deal of our lives, I suspect, is wrapped up in one social pose or another.  It is the rare honest person who is just the same with everyone she meets.  And posing is something that Chuang Tzu pushes back against.  He sees in it only futility:

No other and no self, no self and no distinctions – that’s almost it.  But I don’t know what makes it this way.  Something true seems to govern, but I can’t find the least trace of it.  It acts, nothing could be more apparent, but we never see its form.  It has a nature, but no form. (19)

   Actually, Chuang Tzu is more radical than a simple admonition against social posing: he is saying that there is no genuine self down in there under all of the artifice – no self and no distinctions.  That is not to say that we should, therefore, give up being "true to ourselves".  Rather, I think he is saying that we should not obsess with either finding ourselves or posing for others.  We should just be.  We do not control the flux of your lives, Way (Tao) does (that is the "true" thing that "seems to govern").  Way has no form, so we will never apprehend its essence.  All we can do is drift along in the current of things…

    And maybe that would be Chuang Tzu’s dating advice: wander boundless and free.  You will meet who you will meet and if one turns out to be the person you will tie your future to, great.  If you don’t meet that person, that’s fine to.  Way is full of surprising twists and turn.  Enjoy the ride.