1. Schemes
For decades, meeting and flirting and dating began in the wild. Loud music. Leaning
against the sticky counter of a house party in an attempt to feign nonchalance. Peripheral vision
working overtime while talking slightly too animatedly to show that you are fun and friendly
and probably quite interesting to talk to.
It’s much different now, especially during the pandemic. Everything has been sterilized
and coded into algorithms of pictures to swipe through, crude and/or grammatically incorrect
messages on apps, and texts ignored for hours until they’re opened while you’re bored in class
or lying in bed alone or stopped at a red light. Everything feels too low-stakes and too try-hard
at the same time.
Enter the scheme. A way to put the fun back in dating, to trivialize the anxiety of
looking for love, to incentivize being brave.
First, one must select a subject. For my friends and I, the best schemes are those
involving boys. The subject should be far enough removed to be mysterious, but close enough
to be at least theoretically attainable. For example: Harry Styles is a poor subject of a scheme—
way too unrealistic. But the cute cashier who works at Trader Joe’s in Orem, or the friend of a
friend who came over one time? Perfect.
Next, get to scheming. For probably two weeks in October and November, my friends
and I poured all of our time and energy into creating a flowchart plan for how to get a random
older boy from our friend Sophie’s hometown to fall for her while she was home for
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Zach [redacted], who has hardly ever even spoken to Sophie, has
no way of knowing the hours of entertainment and purpose he provided to us, and honestly, I
hope for all of our sakes that he never finds out.
The fact that we are in Utah and he is in Washington certainly added a layer of difficulty
to achieving our plans, but we were undeterred. Our scheme would have to take place online.
After combing through Zach’s social media accounts looking for clues for how to best
catch his eye, Sophie blocked every single one of her Instagram followers from viewing her
stories, except, of course, for Zach.
2. After carefully selecting the most obscure song on his most recently updated Spotify
playlist and posting it to her story as if she was casually recommending it to her followers, we
reached the climax of the entire scheme—a response from the man himself. I don’t think we
could have been more thrilled if he had asked for her hand in marriage. Her success was our
success, and her excitement our excitement. The living room of our house was NASA
headquarters, and our rocket had just beamed us a message—it was approaching the moon.
In the end, Sophie and Zach never connected. By the time Sophie was home,
Washington was on pretty strict lockdown, and we’d mostly lost interest anyway. In truth, most
of our schemes don’t play out as we hope they will. But that usually doesn’t even matter. As a
fairly reserved dater but decidedly skilled schemer, I can tell you confidently that the fun of a
scheme isn’t in the end result. It’s all in the journey—the joy of creating new inside jokes, of
having something entertaining to tell people when they ask about your dating life, of having a
project that won’t be graded, of mobilizing your friends into your own personal matchmakers
and surveillance agents, of forcing yourself out of your comfort zone and into the possibility of
finding love in a hopeless place.
![Schemes
For decades, meeting and flirting and dating began in the wild. Loud music. Leaning
against the sticky counter of a house party in an attempt to feign nonchalance. Peripheral vision
working overtime while talking slightly too animatedly to show that you are fun and friendly
and probably quite interesting to talk to.
It’s much different now, especially during the pandemic. Everything has been sterilized
and coded into algorithms of pictures to swipe through, crude and/or grammatically incorrect
messages on apps, and texts ignored for hours until they’re opened while you’re bored in class
or lying in bed alone or stopped at a red light. Everything feels too low-stakes and too try-hard
at the same time.
Enter the scheme. A way to put the fun back in dating, to trivialize the anxiety of
looking for love, to incentivize being brave.
First, one must select a subject. For my friends and I, the best schemes are those
involving boys. The subject should be far enough removed to be mysterious, but close enough
to be at least theoretically attainable. For example: Harry Styles is a poor subject of a scheme—
way too unrealistic. But the cute cashier who works at Trader Joe’s in Orem, or the friend of a
friend who came over one time? Perfect.
Next, get to scheming. For probably two weeks in October and November, my friends
and I poured all of our time and energy into creating a flowchart plan for how to get a random
older boy from our friend Sophie’s hometown to fall for her while she was home for
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Zach [redacted], who has hardly ever even spoken to Sophie, has
no way of knowing the hours of entertainment and purpose he provided to us, and honestly, I
hope for all of our sakes that he never finds out.
The fact that we are in Utah and he is in Washington certainly added a layer of difficulty
to achieving our plans, but we were undeterred. Our scheme would have to take place online.
After combing through Zach’s social media accounts looking for clues for how to best
catch his eye, Sophie blocked every single one of her Instagram followers from viewing her
stories, except, of course, for Zach.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/scheming-211209193825/85/Scheming-1-320.jpg)
