I woke up today with a very good feeling about my day. It was one of those mornings when you wake up and you know you’re going to crush it with your work. Halfway through the day, that feeling has evaporated. I had big plans on building several features for my app, but I found myself stuck due to some technical knowledge gaps. My buddy Claude couldn’t help either, so now I am just waiting for my tech-bro friend to finish his last day at his job today, and come help me. In my mind, this is how tomorrow morning is going to feel for me.

As I wait, I find myself with a host of thoughts and more importantly, the time to write them. (Side note, two articles in a week? Do I get a medal?) Last night, I was sharing my dating app woes with a friend who is also perennially stuck in the install / uninstall loop. For the fortunate, uninitiated people who have no idea what that is, here’s a short explanation that is pretty much correct. Anyway, we got to talking about filters, and how it is that we get down to choosing the people we date or go out with. Everyone has some sort of dating preferences, and having these preferences is perfectly natural — we have preferences for food, drinks, music, clothes and more — so why shouldn’t we have the same for dating? We should want the person we are dating to meet certain criteria, so we have filters. Depending on the channel, these filters can be fairly conscious decisions, or more subconscious ones. On dating apps, the filters are fairly in-your-face, like setting a height filter, but even out in the real world, these filters persist, perhaps less consciously. When I am approached by someone at a bar or a cafe, I will engage with them, but subconsciously, judgements are already forming in my head: “She’s too short” or “She made a grammatical mistake”.

For years, we’ve classified filters as “shallow” and “deep”, and made ourselves feel better for not having shallow filters. From the example above, the former is what we’d traditionally call a shallow filter, going along with other classic shallow filters such as weight, color of skin, shape of nose, etc. Are these filters really more shallow than any other filters, though? In my opinion, absolutely not. I have concluded that:

• There are very, very, very few filters that are not essentially shallow. You are about to see why that statement required three very’s.
• Dating filters are essentially privilege filters. All we are doing is trying to find people who have privileges that match our ideals.

The Classical Dichotomy

If you like someone for their looks, you’re shallow. The most common antithesis to classic shallowness is being a “sapiosexual” — someone who is attracted to intelligence. If you like someone for their mind, you are deep and discerning. Does this simple dichotomy really hold any weight? Neither looks nor intelligence are within anyone’s control. Both are products of the genetic lottery, or depending on your beliefs, divine grace. In both instances, we are filtering out individuals for circumstances beyond their control. Your height, your skin tone, your nose, your eyes — all these are factors that you are born with and have little control over. Likewise, facets of your intelligence — your memory, your comprehension, your problem solving etc. are factors you are born with and have little control over. So why is it considered shallow to reject a person for being “not good looking enough”, but deep when you reject them for being “not smart enough”? It is time we admit that a good brain, like good looks, is a privilege borne out of the genetic lottery. If you date only smart people, you are no different from someone who dates only pretty people.

What should the dichotomy then be? What makes someone’s preferences shallow, and someone else’s not? I decided to go with a control-based distinction: If you filter someone for something they cannot control, it is a shallow filter. Height? Shallow. Intelligence? Shallow. Perfect English? Deep (you can choose to learn better English). Same hobbies? Deep. At the surface level, this seems like a fair dichotomy. It still fails.

The Role of Privilege

We are quick to recognize others’ privileges but often overlook and fail to acknowledge our own. Oh, do you have perfect grammar and diction? You likely had the privilege of attending an English medium school since kindergarten. You had the privilege of parents who spoke English, or who recognized its importance and made sure you spoke it well. Did your English get even better because you started reading from a young age? Congratulations, you were raised in a household or school where the habit was encouraged, and your parents could afford to buy books. No one grows up deciding to speak imperfect English — they just had worse circumstances than yours, which is why their English is worse than yours. If you’re filtering people because they said “didn’t knew” in a sentence, you are no different from someone who is filtering people for being short. You are both filtering people for outcomes they had little control over; outcomes they did not willingly and consciously choose.

I am not against filtering people by their grammar. I have done it countless times, and I do not think I will be able to stop doing it. That’s okay. I just want us to be aware that filtering by the level of command someone has over their language is filtering by privilege, and it’s nothing to be proud of. It is nearly the same thing as filtering someone for “not having an iPhone growing up”. If their parents could have afforded an iPhone, they would have gotten one. If their parents were able to make sure their kids had perfect English growing up, they would have. So if having good grammar is largely out of your control, it fails the control-dichotomy test described above. It is in fact, shallow and not deep to filter out people based on their level of English.

Are any dating filters free of the privilege factor?

The next question naturally, is whether there are then any filters at all that can pass the control-dichotomy test? Or are they all outcomes of privilege? Whether it’s looks, intelligence, or lifestyle, most of these outcomes stem from privilege. I decided to deep-dive into these by checking a random sample. To get a completely random sample, I fed the following prompt into ChatGPT:

I am a 31 year old Indian male. Can you create a random persona of a girl I might find attractive? Make sure the persona includes at least 7 salient characteristics.

I got the following output:

Of course, the AI names her Ananya. Ugh.

Let’s see if there is anything at all in Ananya’s persona that I can find attractive and have it not be “shallow”, or an outcome of privilege, making it “shallow”.

• Age: Shallow. Obvious — one cannot control their age
• Profession: Privilege. Being born in a family that can afford school, college are privileges.
• Hobbies: Privilege. This one is tricky — there are quite a few different forces at work. The obvious one is of course, having parents who can afford to teach you art or send you on treks. The other one is having parents who accept your hobby, and allow you to have time away from the school-tuition-school homework-tuition homework cycle when you are growing up.
• Personality Traits: This was the only one I felt where an individual has a large degree of control over possessing these traits. Creativity and Imagination are largely god-given (yours truly lacks them both in equal measure). However, empathy, good listening skills, etc. are some things that you can build even if you start from point zero at any point in life. (There is an argument to be made that this is not true, and if so, it just strengthens my main point, so I have not included it here).
• Interests: Privilege. Having access to whatever source of music — TV, internet, radio — when growing up, is hardly something you can control, which is especially true for discovering niche genres. Books — we discussed this above.
• Values: Privilege. You can afford to worry about the environment and recycling when you don’t have to worry about your family’s survival. You can be a family-oriented person who cares about their familial relationships only if you’ve grown up with a family that wasn’t a humongous bag of dicks.
• Lifestyle: Privilege. This one is trivial and needs no explanation for why it is a privilege. Right. So we have one, maybe one and a half traits of an individual that are an outcome of something in their control, and not borne mostly from privilege. Everything else? S-H-A-L-L-O-W.

Conclusion

Are our dating preferences just privilege filters? Clearly, I believe so. This doesn’t mean we should abandon our preferences or that it is wrong of us to have them, but we should acknowledge the privilege inherent in them. We’re all shallow — whether it’s because you like pretty people, smart people, or people who have travelled X number of countries. That’s okay. Instead of judging others for their preferences, we can understand that everyone has their own set of filters shaped by their experiences and privileges. Embrace your preferences, but do so with the knowledge that they are part of the complex tapestry of who you are and the privileges you’ve had. Acknowledging that we all have privilege filters can lead to a more empathetic and honest approach to dating and interacting with people in general.