I want to be seen, period.
You probably didn’t expect me to write this month’s newsletter as I am on a break from love matters. This wasn’t any regular break, it was filled with reflections, heartache, gratitude and tough decisions. I’ll tell you more about it a bit, so read on. I’d been deliberating this break for a long time, so it’s been really hard to break away even though I have.
Breaking away
I started my break by reading this book called The Book of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurthy - it is a refreshingly different take on life which doesn’t try to prescribe anything in particular. This book only nudges you to think, which is the greatest impact a book can have on someone anyway. So, this book combined with a vacation along the coast of Karnataka truly helped me break free.
But hey, despite being on a break, I did too many interesting things to not tell you about my discoveries from the last one month of “being away”.
Audio Dating for Bharat
Thanks to one of my readers, Giridhur Sriram, I was introduced to this app called FRND when I wrote this piece on YIDUI. When I researched the app on my own, it wasn’t very intuitive. It didn't look anything like any other dating app. So, I reached out to Bhanu Pratap, Co-founder and CEO of FRND to learn more about it.
Dating is a very challenging space to work in, especially in a country like India which presents several cultural barriers alongside those that exist for any start up that is building solutions for this space, and for any space in general. Bhanu told me that this social culture sits at the centre of their product rather than on the fringes.
They’re building an audio dating app for Bharat, or the not-so-urban India. FRND is a direct translation of the social culture of Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities where dating is still taboo and people are shy to mingle with the opposite gender. FRND is taking the offline behaviour of “mujhse dosti karoge” online and letting serendipity do its magic thereafter, mostly because people feel safer to do that here.
Regional apps have long been in scene thanks to Matrimony and their several regional and community sites. But more recently, more players have joined in to make social discovery apps more accessible to smaller towns and cities in India. For instance, earlier this year, Aisle launched a couple of vernacular dating apps that add a tinge of local sentiment to dating.
Overall, I had a brilliant conversation with Bhanu.
I also happened to have conversations with a few other dating app founders. Whether urban or not, the clear trend that emerged from my conversations is that enabling social discovery alone isn’t enough anymore. People want more. They want authenticity, a sense of community, belonging and they want it to be an experience. Tinder may be right after all, experiential dating may be future.
K-dramas
I usually avoid watching shows, mostly because I have a binging problem. So you’ll understand why I have tried to stay away from K-drama for the longest time. But I am on a break now, so I am allowed to indulge my binging problem little bit, no?
I first watched Crash Landing on You.
I mostly chose this show because it is set in North Korea and I had just finished reading a book on North Korea. It was super addictive, and I watched it all over two days. I didn’t sleep, obviously. I vowed to never watch another show. A week later, I watched Marriage Contract. Again, binge watched it.
It got me thinking if there are a handful of personas that these characters are modelled after which make these shows so gripping. Recently, I watched a Japanese movie called My long awaited love story. The protagonist is a game designer, who is building personas for a dating app, and she talks about specific types of men that women fancy.
It reminded me of the stereotypes in female characters portrayed in Indian media that Bharat Diwakar, an EP at Zee TV, spoke about in this NED Talks. So, I wondered about the influence of cultural nuances on these stereotypes and how they differ by countries or regions.
Sex, Love and Goop
This is a show hosted by Gweneth Paltrow, where real life American couples who have trouble in their relationships and bedrooms come together to explore their sexuality and eroticism with the help of professionals and experts in this space.
A lot of the stuff on the show is unfamiliar to me, and as with anything unfamiliar, it is subject to heavy judgement. I would still recommend that you watch it. I say this because there is so much in there that we almost never talk about in the open, especially in India.
There is a fine line between privacy and shame, sometimes, it’s really hard to tell what side of the line we’re on. If nothing, this show helps you in exploring that for yourself.
There were too many moments of epiphany for me in that show, some personal and some not so much. But one line that really stuck a chord for me was when this husband in a couple that have been navigating murky waters in their relationship for the last several years says,
I just want to be seen, period.
I think this is the single biggest point of frustration for people when they’re struggling in their relationships.
I once had a client who was troubled in their marriage, because his wife constantly complained about him not being a good enough husband. He wanted a better relationship with his wife and he wanted to be a better husband, so he wanted to sharpen his relationship skills. But deep down, he really just wanted to be seen for who he is, and not what he was failing to be.
It’s not just married people, even single people are constantly optimising to be in relationships where they can be seen. One of the common relationship values that people say they aspire for is mutual respect, which is a proxy for wanting to be seen.
Maid
I recently watched this show on Netflix called Maid.
It is based on a book about a true life story of someone who was in an emotional abusive relationship. It is so brilliantly made, and it’s a story that I am glad got told. Too many people die in emotionally abusive relationships everyday, but nobody ever realises because they still walk around in their hollow bodies.
While this is an issue that affects both men and women, I suppose women are more susceptible to being victims, pat our patriarchal society. A lot of men succumb to the pressure of the man being in control, and women, enduring everything that comes their way. The collateral damage, however, is beyond the couple itself - children in these relationships suffer from mental health issues well into their adulthood, which is really quite sad.
If any of you thought that this was a myth, and the Indian society has none of this, oh I have news. I meet people every single day who are suffering from PTSD of their past relationships and their parents’ relationships. Last year, I spoke to several Gen-Zs and young millennials about love. It was fascinating to learn how people’s upbringing and their parents’ relationship shapes their views of relationships. A few quotes from my conversations:
I have a lot of commitment issues because of my parents. I worry that I would never been able to give my husband as much as my mum gives my dad.
My father is not a nice person. He’s a bad husband, he treats my mother like shit. I don’t want to be like that. May be that’s why I get side-lined as the nice guy.
My parents are very much in love. They still go out on a weekly date. My family is so perfect, I want that too. But I’m afraid I won’t have it. His parents are not like that at all.
Love-Tech Hackathon
I’ve been having conversations with lots of dating app founders trying to sniff out trends underlying the next round of disruption. While products disrupt culture, VCs enable this disruption. So it only made sense to make my research more wholesome with a chat with some VCs. I spoke with Sajith Pai, Amal Vats and Diksha Lahoti from Blume to get their thoughts on where the next round of disruption in this space may emerge from.
My takeaways from this conversation was -
Just as in ed-tech, would innovation come from unbundling? For instance, Facebook/ Meta is better at building a social network and enabling discovery, than any other dating app. Netflix recommendation system is far more sophisticated to that of Tinders of the world. WhatsApp removes friction in interaction better than Bumble does. It would be interesting to think about what an unbundled ecosystem of online dating might look like.
For any product to really take off, the stars would need to align, as Sima aunty would also say. Basically it might be worth investigating what underlying conditions need to be place for a global dating app to emerge from India.
People are tired of mindlessly swiping through human catalogues in pursuit of love. They definitely want to continue engaging with dating apps, but they want to do so more productively. Activity based matching that focus of making people meet IRL is catching on some interest. One such app that was recently launched on Android is Mingout. Try it and tell me what you think. As someone recently said, activity-based matching could just be a new way of improving liquidity in the dating market without actually the size or mix of the user base that much.
I still don’t know where the next billion users are going to come from and who is going bring them, so my investigation continues. We toyed with the idea of organising a Love-Tech Hackathon and may be even seed a bunch of such ideas that come out of the sprint.
A peak into what else I’m reading/ watching/ listening to:
Marriage and Family in Canada - it’s a bit textbookish, but I found it interesting
How many friends do I need? - I stumbled upon this brilliant podcast called “Am I normal?” and this particular episode about how many friends we need was truly eye-opening. Did you know that you need to invest 200 hours over 3 months to make someone a “good friend”?
Little Things - this show on Netflix is about a couple who are living in. It is a slow and a great attempt at a raw rendition of real relationships. It lacks the infidelity and insanity that plagues Netflix shows in India these days, yet there is something so charming about it.
Shapely Gal song of the month: Mr.Saxobeat by Strange Fruits Music.
This is sad news!
Wish you all the best for whatever you decide to do.