It’s been a gloomy girl summer, and the single men and women are not doing well. In fact, they’re at each other’s throats. A new movie takes the dating wars to new extremes, and a term to describe the mounting pessimism around looking for love has gone viral. Once you’re introduced, you’ll see it everywhere, in songs, on TV, laced through conversations with friends. I’m here to tell you that it doesn't have to be this way.
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Many hours after Iris had chained the arms and legs of the man she is dating to the bed in a cabin in the woods, she levels with him. “You know you can just say you’re sorry,” she tells the guy, Isaac, who is prone on the four-poster bed. Sorry? Iris, the protagonist of the new movie Oh, Hi!, has violated Isaac’s human rights. What started out as a romantic getaway has become a hostage situation, with her fork-feeding him, and helping him pee into a ceramic bowl. And she wants him to say sorry to her? Yes, and she deserves the apology.
The night before his imprisonment, Isaac had made her scallops for dinner. He had told his mom about her and the getaway. The couple danced outside under string lights. Then, later, he told her he’s just not looking for a relationship. He thought the past four months they had spent together was just them hanging out and “having fun.” Shudder. “You spent time wooing me and pursuing me,” protested Iris. His suggestion that they weren’t so serious provoked twin emotions in her, ones many modern single women will relate to: rage, and desire.
Iris now wants 12 hours to prove that he’s wrong and, in fact, they’d be perfect together, or at least that he was very wrong to string her along. So she holds him hostage. And insists that she’s simply giving him “a gift that can save you from self-sabotage.”
Later, she justifies all this to her female best friend: “You know how hard it is for me to meet people and connect.” The confidant is immediately supportive, even though Iris has lost her mind. The movie, a satire on modern dating dynamics (the girls turn to witchcraft to try and remedy the situation), frequently shows Iris with black mascara running from her eyes and down her cheeks, the universal symbol for a woman in a romantic crisis. And if you’re a straight, single woman in her late 20s or early 30s, sometimes it feels like those drooping mascara splotches are tattooed on you, visible everywhere you go.
Hopefully women are not going full-Iris en masse, taking their dates hostage to force marriages, but the tenor of the battle of the sexes has reached a fever pitch. The New York Times Magazine published a megillah on the idea that straight dating is worse than ever, and possibly doomed, because of (who else?) men. The concept has a fancy name: heterofatalism.
