Our Longing for Inconvenience

My dear friend sighs, slides her phone across the table between us so that it’s just beyond her reach, and insists that she wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way. She has said this many times within the past year—at parties, at group dinners, at a nearly pitch-black dive bar in Brooklyn while a singer performed a serviceable cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which slotted seamlessly into our own feelings of loneliness and longing. My dear friend is saying it again today, over a lunch that neither of us wants to end just yet, because we don’t see each other often enough, because she simply cannot look at the face of another person on a screen and decide, in a split second, whether that person can motivate her to the point of romantic pursuit.