It will be Valentine’s Day this week, and the latest buzzword from the arena of romance (and that a bullfighting ring leapt into my mind’s eye when I wrote the word “arena” is hardly non sequitur) has me sighing and shaking my head.
“Nanoship”, indicating infinitesimally brief interactions between people that bring joy in the immediate but carry no expectations, sounds kind of nice at the outset. Except if you think about it for ten seconds longer, you might frown. I did, anyway.
There have been plenty of useful, even illuminating, buzzwords in recent years when it comes to love and all its exquisite and inelegant facets. “Ghosting”, in particular, has widespread usage because the extremely hurtful act of withdrawing suddenly and without explanation is so common. It has less damaging cousins like “benching” and “breadcrumbing” (doing just enough to keep the other party attached without commitment), and is sometimes followed up by “orbiting” (a post-ghosting, blatant interest in one’s social media) or even “zombieing” (resurrection — or an attempt at it, anyway). There are fun, frivolous ones too, like “rizz” (sex appeal or charm).
Lately, more high-voltage vocabulary borrowed from therapy jargon, like “gaslighting” (convincing someone their sense of reality is inaccurate), “lovebombing” (excessive attention designed to get someone enmeshed, before dropping the mask) and “avoidant attachment” (the theory that hurtful people are wired differently, and those hurt by them need to calibrate their hopes) are getting a lot of traction. While a minority may misuse these terms, this is usually unintentional. Most of us are just trying to understand why we aren’t chosen.
To come back to “nanoship” –— my problem with it is exactly that. It enables more poor behaviour, including ghosting (or should that be micro-ghosting?), which can be finessed as a marvel better ephemerally experienced. It romanticises and glamorises not holding other people’s hearts, or our own, with kindness. It encourages, to use another really popular word right now, “delulu”.
Not the delulu of toxic positivity and denial, but the delulu that people treating one another without depth is alright. It slides right into the more dehumanising sides of attention-deficit and care-deficit hook-up culture, tossing sparkles on the concept that people are dispensable. “Nanoship” was coined by the app Tinder, naturally.
What the term appears to describe is already a part of the human experience. We do have fleeting moments of warmth with strangers. These are not necessarily romantic or develop into friendships. A kind smile in a waiting room, a helping hand at a station, a conversation on public transportation, a random and non-creepy compliment to a passerby given or received. Sometimes we make connections that feel meaningful in the moment, and leave us wistful later. Not all longings get translated into real life. Bittersweetness is beautiful. By specifically naming these exchanges as a dating trend, however, the risk of the word being used to justify disappointments is high. Players will interchange the word with “one night stand” or “fling”. The played will use it to fool ourselves, to soften the blow of limerence or rejection. How many more disguises do we need to diminish the force of our true desires?