It's Dating Season in NYC

Are you back in town?

Listen to an audio recording of the following text if you’d like to enjoy it through your earbuds while you’re on a coffee date with someone you will never see again:

Author’s note: the hyperlinks take you to QL entries that are relevant to the text, not to the kind of kink-porn sites you can’t seem to scrub from your Google history.

One of the best things about being single in New York City is telling people that you live in New York City, spending $11,000 each month to have a home in New York City, but not actually living in New York City for most of the year because you are as untethered as a fresh helium balloon that has escaped the feeble clutches of a crying toddler. Other than an airline loyalty program, the bodega where you buy cheese sticks, and a tiny cactus, you are terrified of committing to anything despite how vocal you are at dinner parties about wanting to settle down so that your married friends will think you’re normal enough to set you up with someone you will probably immediately scare off. Summer is always a perfect time for single New Yorkers to shed any sort of accountability and contribute to the hostility that Europeans feel towards Americans by spending May through July in highkey French and Italian beach destinations, decompressing during the month of August in the Hamptons or in a lowkey northern European mountain towns (where you demand an extra key card so that you can leave your room for 12 hours with the air conditioning set to 18°C and your many Apple devices charging even though they’re already fully charged), and broadcasting on social media between August 25 and September 2 your temporary performative transformation from a materialistic social climber into an egalitarian vagabond with Playa dust on your skin and baggie dust on your nostrils. As gratifying as it was to decline Prospect Park picnic invitations from your nose-ringed Cobble Hill friends (who cannot work remotely because they have to work) at like 3:41am EST to underscore just how very not in town you are, now is the time for you and every other underdeveloped wandering adultoid to return to Nolita, Williamsburg, or the West Village to find, date, and ultimately alienate yet another member of your personal body count club. This time is called Dating Season.

You may be familiar with the term, Cuffing Season. This is no longer a thing. “Cuffing” (as in handcuffs) requires some form of even brief committed emotional and physical connection with the same person. Social media, polyamory, and an inexhaustible volume of options in the NYC dating ocean have conditioned you to go on an endless number of 45-minute coffee and 90-minute dinner dates with different people until you become too old to process caffeine and digest solid foods.   

To ensure that you understand and can optimally participate in Dating Season, I’ve compiled an FAQ for you:

What is Dating Season?

Dating Season is a 103-day stretch during which you resume your Wellbutrin prescription, stop sport-fucking the human bag of Doritos you met at Murph’s in Sag Harbor, in the backyard at Moby’s, or on line for pasty hummus in the Delta Lounge on your way to Nantucket or the Amalfi Coast, and entirely conceal all of your intrinsic imperfections, embarrassing ticks, and alarming kinks in order to present to the singles market a completely unsustainable version of yourself that you believe will be attractive to the people who you think you should be attracted to but are not, who are also trying to fit some sort of idealized standard in order to not die alone in the carnivorous embrace of a cat.   

When is Dating Season?

Dating Season launches in previews the week after Labor Day and officially opens on the second Friday of September when it the weather is cool enough to dress in layers, which allows you to showcase your ability to match contrasting earth tones and afford lightweight cashmere. Dating Season spans the entirety of Fall and includes the cheery early bit of Winter. This 3-month period gives you sufficient time to find someone to talk about but not actually go Apple picking with, send racy costume photos to on Halloween but not meet up with because of Uber surge pricing, to gush about to your family during Thanksgiving so that they don’t question your sanity or sexuality, to invite to that one holiday party in Fort Greene that probably won’t be stocked with better looking prospects, and then perform an emotional breakdown for on December 27^th when it’s time to abandon them and your tentative New Years plans and instead go party with your single friends in Aspen, Jackson Hole, or a part of the Caribbean that’s too expensive for cruise ship people from Northern New Jersey, like St Barths.

Where does Dating Season take place?

Dating Season takes place at independently owned coffee shops with pretentious names, the buzzy bar areas of overrated restaurants that charge $5 for a soda water (eg St Theos) and artificially create reservation scarcity (any Major Food Group venue), any membership club except for Soho House, any event organized on Partiful hosted by a minimum of two single people, literally any loft in Tribeca, the entirety of the West Village and Nolita, on certain New York City streets such as Bedford in Williamsburg, 5^th Avenue in Park Slope, and the entire length of Lafayette, which unifies the trust fund art kids who live south of Houston and the fund managers who live north of Houston.

Who is eligible for Dating Season?

Dating Season is ideal for anyone who has ever flirted with a professional photographer at a Spring wedding in Europe in order to ensure a wide selection of flattering, posed-candid portraits of yourself pretending to smile and listen attentively to whoever is standing closest to the photographer so that your Raya photos give the impression that you are warm, popular, and have enough money to spend a lot of time in Europe.

What are some activities offered during Dating Season?

Dating Season participants enjoy a wide range activities, such as getting a cup of coffee, going for a walk, and getting dinner. Going for a walk is typically a positive escalation of getting coffee, and in certain extreme cases of being 26 years old, prospective couples may participate in all of these activities in sequence over the course of one continuous date due to day drinking, which can be paired with any Dating Season activity. A byproduct activity of day drinking is sex, which typically indicates that the prospective couple will soon part ways and each attempt to find a new person who more closely aligns with the unattainable ideal in their imagination. Apple picking is a conceptual Dating Season activity, but apple picking requires a high degree of planning and follow-through, which only 3 out of 1,000 New York City men are capable of.

How much does it cost to participate in Dating Season?

Dating season is free for female identifying humans and costs an average of $17,289 for male identifying humans.

Is Dating Season right for you?

Are you a man who likes to think that you appear 10 years younger than your biological age who actually looks 40 years older than your emotional age who is seeking a 26- to 29-year-old Pilates instructor with a PhD in physics from Stanford who has daddy issues preferences and comes from generational wealth? If so, Dating Season is for you.

Are you a woman who will not go out on a date with a guy until your Google search has confirmed that he is either a big enough hedge fund manager to have an interview clip on Bloomberg News or a tech founder who has appeared in a TechCrunch article thanking the venture capitalists who believed in him, Morgan Stanley, and his labradoodle for his recent IPO? If so, Dating Season is for you.

Are people who enjoy same-sex relationships eligible for Dating Season?

Gay people do not participate in Dating Season, because through the adversity of having to create and define global culture and the trauma of seeing it ruined by straight people, they have achieved sufficient emotional maturity and depth to forge lasting, fulfilling romantic relationships.

How will you identify other participants in Dating Season?

Simply look for people in Dating Season locations (see above) who are standing in front of someone who is talking at them, but they are instead scanning the room from side to side like one of those vintage security cameras in a New Jersey mall food court. Be assured that they are looking for the unsustainable version of you, so you should go and introduce yourself and tell them about where you summered and where you will winter.

Are there any side effects of Dating Season?

Dating Season is positively correlated with anxiety across all genders. Scientists have identified a causal chain between drinking astonishing amounts of coffee due to multiple lets-get-coffee activities in a single day and staggering spikes in anxiety, which ensures the constant volume of single participants for Dating Season. As with literally any new endeavor in New York City, be sure to talk with your therapist before, during, and certainly after Dating Season. Talking with a therapist will help you quiet the anxiety you feel due to drinking 11 coffees over the course of 8 coffee dates in a single day, which causes the anxiety you feel on dates, which causes you to sabotage yourself, which causes you to talk with a therapist. Talking with a therapist also helps to provide ROI to the many therapist associations who pay dating app companies to tweak their algorithms to pair two people who are most likely to surface each other’s childhood trauma, which ensures peak billable hours for New York City therapists, who comprise 51.3% of New York City’s population and thus control the city’s economy.  

Enjoy Dating Season in NYC!