photo: Rowena Waack / CC
A random Saturday at a random party in Berlin. I am dancing around with a friend having fun as I get approached by a girl. She smiles and asks me: Is she your girlfriend? pointing to my friend, I say no. Then she ask: Do you have a girlfriend? – Me: No. – She: A boyfriend? Me: No. – She: Would you prefer a girlfriend or a boyfriend? Me: Maybe a boyfriend. She smiles at me bowing her head and goes away. Still a little perplex about her inquisitional approach to partyt smalltalk I say: Wait a moment, what’s your name? (With the weak hope, this conversation could maybe get a little bit more human if I would know that she has at least a name, and is not a robot or computer) She answer, smiles again and says: You are not from Berlin right? With that, she walked away from me, probably to somebody more fitting to her agenda. I feel scanned and i start thinking: Maybe I was not born but I lived in Berlin for nearly 10 years and I refuse to think that this is how human interaction between strangers should be in this city. Some ideas what we should do against it, after the jump.
First of all, I don’t want to criticize this girl in particular. I didn’t feel that she was rude or disrespectful. She asked nicely and maybe she has her reasons to be so direct ( a lot of bad experience with boys with girlfriends or gay guys). Anyway, I just want to take this experience as an example to present to you a broader discussion about something I noticed in the last couple of years: Human interaction has become way more intention driven and standardized in Berlin. A couple of years ago I wrote how much I love the coincidental high quality small talk with strangers. Now I realized that I didn’t have any of that for a very long time.
photo: Rowena Waack / CC
Maybe it’s because of the new digital era of facebook, twitter, social dating platforms, apps that show you who is available for sex or date in a couple of meters. Maybe it’s the big city we are living in with its broadness of different impressions we consume here everyday. Maybe it’s the German sense for target-oriented behaviour. Maybe it’s a combination of all those things. But I see a lot of people only wanting to spend time with others if it fits to their agenda. When meeting new people there is somehow this invisible question driving everybody’s action: Does knowing you has an advantage for me? If yes, I like you, if no, you can just as well go to hell. This way of urban networking not only is very inhuman but also not very well thought through in my opinion. At least from my point of view I know that human interaction that caused me the most pleasure in my life where results of coincidence and intuition.
I don’t need an online questionnaire to know which kind of person I want in my live. And I refuse to meet people I don’t like because they might be helpful one day. What makes this city so special is that there are all kind of different individuals here. So let’s stop to put each other in the categories of useful, useless but fuckable and unfuckable and let’s try to get back to just meet each other – without any specific reason but only with the little hope that this crazy coincidental meeting in such a big city can result into something unexpectedly amazing.
