Rachel Connolly is Online
How the internet shapes communication, dating, and death online. An interview with writer Rachel Connolly.
Today we’re sharing our conversation with Rachel Connolly, a writer. She is the kind of writer that makes you think about how you think, writing about subtle things she notices in culture. Her novel Lazy City is out later this year with Liveright.
This interview with Rachel Connolly, was conducted and condensed 5.11.23 by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
What have you found yourself thinking about lately?
I do a weekly sub where I basically write a short essay. The sub's kind of a space for stuff that might be hard to pitch because it's basically stuff that I've noticed, without a clear hook. Something I find myself writing about a lot is communication and how tricky that has gotten recently. I think people are finding it quite difficult to speak to each other in an open and direct way about things.
I think it manifests in a lot of ways. I notice it a lot in male-female dating contexts. I'm sure it happens in a queer dating context too, but heterosexual dating seems to be such a mess at the minute. It seems people can't really have honest conversations. They put so much presumption onto the other person of what they want or what they're looking for. I think it's a communication breakdown that has led to all this, and I find it really fascinating at the minute.
There are so many versions of communication too. Interpersonal communication, intrapersonal communication, and then how you communicate yourself to the world publicly, either on dating apps or on Twitter or Instagram. I feel like Twitter and Instagram are dating apps anyway.
Yeah, totally, totally. We've made good steps and inroads about teaching people broadly how to speak in a better, more nuanced way about lots of things — race, gender, and all that kind of stuff. But I also think that that's ended up in a slight caginess in terms of people not wanting to potentially say the wrong thing. I don't even mean a cancelable thing, something big — I think people are very, very, very overcautious about the idea of potentially getting something wrong publicly or in interpersonal interactions. And I think that's something that has not been a positive development broadly.
People are a bit afraid to be slightly funny or kind of gritty. Not that many people are doing that at the minute, which is a shame I think.
Do you feel like it’s self-policing in a sense? Self-regulation?
Yeah. I'm kind of interested in what's going on with men as well at the minute. I don’t know if this is specifically English and Irish men, but a lot of them just seem a bit all over the place. It seems like they're a little bit lost and directionless. I’ve been trying to speak to more of them about it. The conversations are so interesting. It'll be a party sort of situation and I'll say something like, “Oh, I'm writing more about men and dating and I just wonder what your thoughts on that at the minute” – and they're so cagey. They'll kind of be like, “Oh God, you can't have these conversations.”
I'm not looking to have a negative interaction. I'm not trying to set you up here. I'm trying to do the opposite of that. That level of friction and caginess has definitely become a big part of our culture and something that I am trying to get under the skin of a bit more.
Do you have a theory that’s working?
What's up with men? I've been conservatively trying to find out, to be honest. I've just started messaging men who I used to hang out with in a party sense, when I was at uni, just asking to chat. Half of them think you're chatting them up, which is really funny. Half of them send me a weird HR response. Once you start that conversation, and this is an example, they'll say something like, ‘I know stuff's really bad for women. I don't think it's not, but stuff's also bad for men.’ I totally agree with that and I think that's a reasonable thing to say. But, the next time I saw that person, he was like, “Oh God, I hope you don't think I'm one of those people.”
And I was like, what people? A man who cares about men? Why is that such a bad thing?
There's a bit of a culture within young people where people want to know more about progressive topics and want to demonstrate their knowledge about that. And that's a positive thing. But I think sometimes that can manifest as trying to “catch” people who are a bit behind. And I don’t think that that is a positive thing. I think that’s very self-aggrandizing. Some of this is the worry that if you say slightly the wrong thing about being a man or whatever, then someone will jump down your throat. And I just don’t know what good that has ever done for anybody.
It just all feels a bit serious.
Yes, totally. I feel like that as well in a dating context. I feel like ghosting comes from this seriousness. You can't just go on a couple of dates or have sex a couple of times and then feel like, this is not really going anywhere, but that's okay. The other person's not going to freak out and try and get married to you or whatever. But people are like, “We slept together twice, but I don't know where we're going, so ghost, ghost, ghost. Retreat, retreat!”
Like, that's not really normal. It's not normal to expect that if you have a casual thing with someone, they'll instantly try and make it serious. Which, I think a lot of men do actually.
I had this conversation with a female friend recently who was trying to set up a friend of hers on a blind date. She's an attractive woman. So my friend asked around a load of men she knew, and literally, every man she asked was like, “That's so weird.” When did that happen that a blind date isn’t a fun random thing to do on a Wednesday? I presume the weirdness is a function of thinking that you would then have to have a long-term relationship with this woman. There is definitely this seriousness where nothing can just be fun or a bit weird.
I think the weirdness comes from having too much access and information. When I’m dating I want to know nothing. I know myself well enough to know that something petty will dissuade me.
You can totally talk yourself out of the early stages of a relationship. You can totally wig yourself out over how the person puts their shorts on or something. You can totally give yourself the absolute willies over someone over a really small detail and build up this big bank of information before you've even interacted with them. I could sit and look at anybody's social media and find a reason to write them off instantly. Instead of just throwing yourself into a situation and seeing what it's like, you basically talk yourself out of it before it's even started. Instagram is also sort of a way of finding out something about their social status and that's quite an unpleasant impulse.
I also feel like there's a lot of advice where it's like, “If this guy is not super, super keen on you, ditch, ditch, move on. If you slept with them and he doesn't text you on Tuesday, then cut your losses”.
If you speak to people like our parents' generation about how they ended up with someone, they're often like, “Oh, I met them and they had a girlfriend and we slept together and I never thought I'd see them again, but they happened to be in town three months later and we bumped into each other again.” Very rarely is the story “They were my perfect match and I chased them down.” It is usually more along the lines of, “We were thrown together again and then it kind of turned out there was more to it.”
It really limits the potential for spontaneous interaction. I also feel like who you fall in love with is surprising, for me anyway.
I've had this before, when you meet someone and you feel strongly about them, you actually first read it as extreme dislike. You’re like, I hate that guy and it actually takes a while for you to be like, no, I felt uncomfortable because I felt strongly about that person. Or maybe I did just hate that guy, and then decided I didn't after a while. I think it's actually reasonably common. It’s even the premise of romcoms – you meet someone and you're like, I hate this person, but really it's because they have sort of unsettled you or got under your skin a bit. I think that's interesting. It doesn't fit within this rubric of this rule of like, the person will instantly be obsessed with you and chase you through the streets.
Yeah, I mean that version I haven’t felt since I was maybe 15.
When you meet someone as an adult, part of the relationship is that they fit in your life in various ways, so that might mean that they have similar friends or a similar job, but it also might mean that they are different from you and they bring stuff to your life that you didn't have before. I think that the lifestyle stuff is way less important when you're 15. When you're 15 you're just like, wow.
I feel like as a result of all the layers of difficulty in making and maintaining intimate relationships naturally, people have somehow become more guarded, even with themselves. What people are willing to admit they want or like or are curious about. The culture seems so square.
This is a bit of a madcap theory, but I've been thinking about this for a while. Over the past particularly 10 years we've really seen an explosion of text-based communication and text-based media. It was emails, and then it was texts, and then there was Twitter and Instagram. It's so normal to send so many written messages during the day at the minute, and it was not normal 10 years ago, and definitely not normal 20 years ago.
When you write something down, as opposed to speaking, it's such an unarguable record. A written message seems like it has a currency that something spoken does not. I do think it's created this sense of like, we can have definitiveness in our interactions and we can have a sense of sureness and a sense of objectivity almost because I wrote this. So, that means that, and I definitely said it, and I sent it to you and you read it. But it can of course still be the case that what I meant by that tonally and what you read from it tonally are two, totally different things.
There's still a huge level of subjectivity there. Everything is subjective. This explosion of text-based media has really fostered this culture of thinking you can have definitiveness in interactions and you really, really can't.
I'm old enough that the basis of my flirting or getting to know somebody was in person. My sister’s only 10 years younger than me and it’s so online.
I didn't have internet at my house when I was a teenager, so I never was on MSN or whatever. I interact with or think about the internet in a slightly outsider way because of that I think and I'm always late to take anything up.
The New York Times recently interviewed some teenagers about phones and computers. The piece’s framing of it was like, the kids are all right cause they were all like, “I feel happy when I sit on my phone all day texting.” It's like, right. Phone interactions are easier to manage than in-person interactions. But it's not normal to script a conversation, that really isn't normal. The whole point of in-person interaction is that I don't wait a minute before I respond and think about what I'm going to say and how I'm gonna present myself. I just say it and you know that I've just said it, so whatever.
Putting your every thought or opinion in writing is just – I feel like I act like a paranoid celebrity about my privacy but literally no one cares and no one is asking or looking.
Yeah… there's a thing where if there's a significant death, you're supposed to show that you care about the death by expressing a sentiment about it. I think it's actually all disrespectful, to be honest, but I think a lot of people feel that pressure strongly. I do think there's the pressure to curate a really specific kind of persona and even if they felt discomfort with it, they don't feel that it's appropriate to go with their discomfort and just say, “I as a rule, don't talk about dead people on here, because it's weird.” It’s not even that strange of a rule! I'm surprised that that's not more widespread or mainstream.
I use Twitter, and I decided a little while ago that I don't like the way people speak about death on the app. I don't like the way that people speak about murders and deaths. I think it's very casualized. Even Breonna Taylor. Yes, people were theoretically talking about it in a positive way trying to raise awareness around her, but it just became a meme. I just decided a while ago that I think it's disrespectful to speak about death on there. I don't like the way you get shoehorned discourse about a real person. I just think it's really grotesque – that's just my opinion on it.
I don't like the way that people talk about death and dead bodies. People evoke graves and dead bodies on that website in a really strange way. It's totally normalized on there. I think I posted about it once when Sarah Everard died in the UK. There was a lot of discourse about her before they actually even found the body. I posted something like, “I think if I was her family member, I would find a lot of this really disrespectful.” Someone actually messaged me saying, “Yeah, I'm her friend, and it's been really bizarre to see.”
I grew up Catholic, but for anyone who's religious or has a religious background, there's a really specific way of dealing with death. There's a whole series of processes around it and the idea that it's just this thing that you're on social media… I don’t know, the two things don't go together for me.
It is so odd.
It's so, so weird. It's so weird. Imagine being that person's mum or dad and you're sat there and people are literally making memes. The way any subject which is trending becomes this way to hook other discourse and other topics into it so the person becomes a thing onto which other things can be linked and connected. That's the nature of that website and social media in general.
I can only speak to the US politically and what it feels like here, but when it involves any political element, like the police for example, the “discourse” takes off.
That person's family is dealing with mourning. They might have a good or bad relationship with the police but say theoretically they trust the police and the police have murdered their relative. They're dealing with that state-sanctioned murder, which is such a weird and horrible thing to deal with anyway, and then they're also having this tragedy made into a spectacle and argued over. I find it extremely hard to get my head around and really hard to process. It’s just a really weird feature of modern life that I don't know if people sit back and think about. Maybe people do think it's weird, but they just are like, “Well you have to do it.” I actually don’t know.
I mean even recently when Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway by an American marine – the conversation really did quickly become about people's right to feel safe inside of public spaces.
Yes.
I just feel like it doesn't matter. And this probably reveals I’m sort of perennially online, but you see this fraction of young “leftists”, going back and forth over whether or not it’s a weak position to ignore crime in the city.
It’s hard to know if these people just sit on the computer so much that they lose all sense of reality and humanity or if they're just like, “Oh, the easiest way to get attention for this is to do some sort of shock jock take about this. And I don't care about anything else. All I want is attention.” It's very hard to tell if it's earnest or it's cynical. And I actually, frankly, don’t know which is worse to be honest. I don’t know if it's worse that your brain has just been melted by the computer or if it's worse that you are the most cynical operator ever.
I just cannot get my head around thinking that the appropriate response to ‘rule-breaking’ is death.
It's also the most severe thing possible. But online it doesn't feel like that. Everything just feels like this big mush, I think.
It’s all really tedious. But I don’t see people leaving this way of posting until they’ve exhausted themselves.
The problem with it is you can make yourself a good career just by basically sitting, doing stuff like that, and being the person who says stuff that no one should be saying. There's an incentive to do it, I suppose. It's an easy space to occupy because nobody else really wants to occupy it, so the standards or the bar is lower. It’s very grim.
The way you just described that is how I feel about politicians right now. No sane person wants to occupy that space. It’s so dirty now. That might have been true before but the resources weren’t there to dig everything up. I mean no one knew Bush had a DUI forever.
Yeah, that would never happen. I wonder as well, presidents now are all kind of ancient. I don’t know if that’s related, but it's not people's first choice or something anymore.
It’s not. The internet is too disqualifying. We’re going to have to shift our expectations of what we expect from our leaders.
Although I think maybe younger, say 10 years younger than we are, are a lot more savvy about it. I have a person I speak to who's 22 and very big on TikTok. He has a separate persona that is managed basically online. They're not just randomly sticking stuff up there. It's very, very thought through. I don't know if that's widespread or if that's a smaller sample of people who are really savvy about their online life, but I do think broadly younger people are more aware of the lifespan and the history of things, in a way that we probably weren't and aren't.
I think there's a strange thing about old stuff that people did online where it's treated to represent some inner depth and inner reality about a person. It's connected to what I was saying earlier about the definitiveness of communication. They said this when they were 15 or whatever, so that's what they definitely think and it's irrefutable because there they tweeted it and there's no argument to be made with that because that's their deep inner soul.
Why is that their inner soul? What truth is it meant to hold apart from the fact that it's text? You can't argue that they said the thing and they said it on that date, but the truth of the thing that they said is the thing that I find hard to kind of get my head around. Like, why is that true?
I think because it feels like a discovery into a person. It's like, look what we uncovered! It must be their diary, they must have been hiding this space where they put all their real emotions. But really it’s…
The opposite. It's the opposite of that.