Arts & Culture

This is how you dated before there were apps

Writer Simon Rich sketches life in satiric, post-climate-change dystopia through a great-​grandfather’s reminiscences

September 18, 2024

long read

“History Report” is excerpted from the collection “Glory Days” by Simon Rich ’07. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

I interviewed my great-​grandfather Simon because he is the oldest person in my family who is still alive. He was born in a country called America, on Earth. He said he used to be a writer. I asked him if he wrote “Spider-Man,” and he said no, he wrote other things that have all been lost.

My great-​grandfather was one of the only men to escape from Earth. The rest of the people who got seats on the Escape Pod were women and children. My great-grandfather says they let him on because “they needed one man to row the spaceship.” I’m not sure what he means, because there are no oars on a spaceship, but that is what he said.

My great-​grandfather told me how scary it was when Earth became too hot to live on. The skies burned with fire day and night, and you couldn’t walk across the street without collapsing. I asked him if he had had any kind of warning about climate change and he said yes, there’d been articles, movies, and books about how it was going to happen. I asked him if he tried to stop it from happening and he said yes, of course. I asked him how and he said that he had done something called recycling, which is where you throw your garbage into different-​colored boxes. I asked my mom what he was talking about, and she explained that when people become as old as my great-​grandfather, their brains start to break down and it is almost like they turn back into babies.

Photo by James Gallagher

Since my great-​grandfather is going to die soon, and he is one of the only survivors of Earth, I decided to ask him what his favorite memory of the planet was. I thought he might tell me about the end of World War IV or going to see “Spider-Man,” but instead he told me about the first date he went on with his wife, my great-grandmother Kathleen. They met in college, which is a place people used to go to after high school to drink alcohol. Some people drank so much there that they died.

My great-​grandfather said that when he was in college, online dating hadn’t been invented yet. Instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person before doing anything else. This meant that when my great-​grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked. At this point my mother, who was recording our interview, told my great-grandfather that he was being inappropriate because this was a project for school, and he apologized but said that the naked stuff was “crucial to the story” and that he was going to keep bringing it up whenever it was relevant.

My great-​grandfather explained that not only had they not seen each other naked, he wasn’t sure if my great-​grandmother wanted that to happen. Sometimes, in those days, when someone agreed to go out on a date with you, they were still undecided about the naked thing and wanted to learn more personal information about you before making up their mind. Since this was before social media, the only way to get this personal information was by asking people questions to their face, like as if their actual living, breathing face was their social media profile. Sometimes this would get embarrassing. Like you might say, “What do your parents do?” And they would say, “My parents are dead.” And then you would have to say something like, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that because I have no information about you. We are strangers.” And sometimes the other person would forgive you, but sometimes they would not. Also, sometimes the person you’d asked out on a date would not even know it was a date because they assumed that you were gay, or they found you so unattractive that it had not even occurred to them that you might be pursuing them romantically — like that notion was so sick to them that it had truly not even crossed their mind. And sometimes they would convey this information to you in the middle of dinner — that they considered you a friend and nothing more — and to make the situation less humiliating, you would have to pretend that you felt the same way, and keep on smiling all night, even though you’d just learned that this person you hoped you might see naked was so repulsed by you that even though you had invited them to a Spanish restaurant, it had legitimately never entered their mind that you were hoping for intimacy, because that would be as insane as being asked out by, like, a dog or a potato.

The point, my great-​grandfather said, is that he had no idea what my great-​grandmother thought about him. He had no idea what she thought about anything. He had zero information about her, other than what she looked like wearing clothes, and also how it sounded when she laughed, which she had done a couple of times on their long, slow walk through campus, with the cool fall breeze whipping through the scattered leaves.

My great-​grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the TV shows they liked. If they both liked the same show, they’d exchange memes from it. But here’s the thing: GIFs did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud, “Do you remember the part when …,” and then you would perform the meme yourself, using your face and body to imitate what an actor had said and done. Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text, because when you text someone a meme and they don’t respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it but just didn’t have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme with your body and the other person didn’t like it, you would be able to tell, because instead of laughing they would just kind of sadly look away and say, “Yeah, I remember that part.” And you would have to just keep on walking to the restaurant.

Luckily, though, my great-​grandfather’s meme performances went over well, or at least well enough to keep the conversation going. And while he still had no idea whether they would ever see each other naked, he knew it was at least technically still possible.

My great-​grandfather had invited my great-​grandmother to a Spanish restaurant because it was the only restaurant he knew that served wine to people under 21. But when they arrived, it was too crowded to get a table. They needed to find some other place to eat, but neither of them had internet access, so their only option was to physically search for food, by walking around and looking in random directions — like, truly the same process used by animals. Things grew tense. The sun had set, and my great-​grandfather was fearful that they would not be able to find alcohol. But after a few stressful minutes, they followed the scent of fried food around a corner and found a Chinese place that served beer, and they were so proud of themselves that they spontaneously high-​fived, and that was the first time that they touched.

My great-​grandfather told me they stayed at the restaurant so long that by the end they were the only customers left. Because they were strangers, they asked each other very basic questions, like “Who are you? Where did you come from? What kind of a person are you?” They ended up having a lot of things in common, which was exciting, because that didn’t usually happen on a first date. Often the other person would dislike things you liked, or love things that you hated, or things would seem to be going pretty well, and the person would seem really nice, but then out of the blue they would say, “What is your relationship with Jesus Christ?”

My great-​grandfather said that the main thing he talked to my great-​grandmother about was how nervous they both were about the future. I asked if he meant climate change, and he admitted that the imminent climate holocaust hadn’t come up much, and instead they’d mostly talked about their careers. It turned out they both had the same dream: to write stories down onto pieces of paper. In fact, they were both already trying to do that. Every day, they would each type out stories on computers and then print them with ink onto pieces of white paper. Their goal was to get better at making these paper stories, in the hopes that someday, they might be able to persuade someone to reprint their paper stories onto multiple pieces of paper, and then sell those pieces of paper for pieces of money, which were also made of paper. At this point, my mother whispered to me that it was time for my great-​grandfather to take a nap, and she gave him some medicine that made him sleep for about four hours. When he woke up, though, he was still insisting all this paper stuff was real, and that it was their actual shared ambition to write stories down on paper and then sell the paper for more paper. And my mother smiled and rubbed his hand and said she believed him, but while she was doing that she buzzed for the doctor, and he brought in this huge syringe that was almost like a gun, because it was made out of metal and it had this trigger on the bottom, and the doctor explained that he was going to shoot this thing into my great-​grandfather’s brain, to make him less confused. And my great-​grandfather laughed weirdly and said that he had been joking about “all that paper stuff,” and that really what he and his wife had talked about on their first date was climate change, because that’s what any sane person from that era would have prioritized: being a climate warrior. And the doctor looked into my great-​grandfather’s eyes with his finger on the trigger, and said, “Are you sure?” And my great-grandfather swallowed and said, “Yep!” And so the doctor left, but on his way out, he told my mom that he would stay nearby in case my great-​grandfather got confused again, in which case he would come back and give him that gunshot right in the middle of his brain.

My great-​grandfather was quiet for a while, almost like he was afraid to keep going with his story. But I pressed him for more information, and he said the main thing he had wanted me to know before was not what he and my great-​grandmother talked about; it was how they talked, because even though they were basically still strangers who had never even seen each other naked, they somehow believed in one another from the start.

My great-​grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-​“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round discs into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interests in becoming naked without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my great-​grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First you asked the other person if they had “seen ‘Arrested Development,’” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably did want to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it did not mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”

That’s why there was a third part of the custom. After walking back to your dorm room and putting one of the discs into the disc-​playing machine, you would sit side by side on a small couch. Your eyes would be facing the screen, but your attention would be focused entirely on each other. As “Arrested Development” played, you would physically move closer to the other person, inch by inch, without making any sudden movements. The idea was that if you both moved incrementally toward each other, eventually your hands would touch. If the other person pulled their hand away or laughed and said, “Sorry!,” that meant they had really, truly come to watch “Arrested Development.” But if they did not pull their hand away from yours, that meant it was time to start kissing, which is what my great-​grandparents did, even though they had never exchanged even the most rudimentary of nudes, and at this point my mother told my great-​grandfather to stop telling the story, and he had to admit that the next part was genuinely inappropriate.

My great-​grandfather said that their marriage wasn’t perfect. Sometimes they argued, and in the 2050s they both had full-​fledged affairs with sex robots. But they ultimately forgave each other, because nobody’s perfect, and also by the 2050s sex robots had become extremely advanced as well as incredibly persuasive — like if you refused to have sex with them, they would start making really high-​level philosophical arguments about “why it wasn’t wrong,” using logic that was essentially bulletproof, while their genitals lit up and spun and stuff, and eventually it got to the point where the UN had to regulate the Sex Robot Industry, because they needed people to leave their apartments again so we could go back to being a society.

The point is, my great-​grandparents rekindled their romance in the 2060s, and they even ended up renewing their vows while riding on the Escape Pod to New Earth, surrounded by their daughters and their grandchildren. And my great-​grandfather asked my mom if she could remember the ceremony, and she said she was only four at the time, but she did vaguely recall how weird it was to see him on the spaceship when it was supposed to be just for women and children, and my great-​grandfather said that they needed to bring one man to “help the women lift their bags into the overhead compartments,” and I reminded him that earlier he’d said he’d been on the ship to row an oar, and there was a long pause, and then he said that he was tired and had to go to sleep. And he closed his eyes, but it didn’t really look like he was sleeping, because every few seconds he would open his eyes to check if we were still there, and when he saw we were he would quickly close his eyes again.

And it was around this time that my great-​grandmother rolled up in her wheelchair. And my great-​grandfather stopped pretending to be asleep, and he sat up and smiled, and she smiled back, and then he lowered his voice and said, “Do you want to watch ‘Arrested Development’?” And my mom reminded my great-grandfather that “Arrested Development” had been lost, along with everything else on Earth, because of his generation’s crimes against humanity. But my great-grandfather ignored her and motioned for his wife to wheel next to him. And he flipped through random channels, while their hands inched slowly toward each other.

And that’s when I finally figured out what Earth was really like.

It was kind of like “Arrested Development.”

It was something people talked about, and praised, and maybe even tried to save, but the whole time, what everybody secretly, actually cared about was the person sitting next to them. That’s where all of mankind’s effort went, the sweat and the toil of billions, not to saving the world but to the frantic, desperate quest for love. And that’s why Earth is gone, because it was nothing more than a conversation starter. It wasn’t what we really, truly cared about. We never even really lived there. We lived in the presence of each other.

And when my mom read my first draft of this, she said that I shouldn’t end it this way, because it’s glib and defeatist and seems to absolve my great-​grandfather of his political inaction, but it’s not like anybody’s going to read this stupid essay anyway, and even if they do it’ll eventually be lost like everything else besides “Spider-Man,” so I’m just going to stop it right here, because I want to go out and the night’s still young.