My favourite colour is violet

When you’re a child, people like to ask you what your favourite something is. Your favourite colours, your favourite food, your favourite subject in primary school. Growing up with the early 2000’s internet meant putting my favourite somethings all over my online profiles, MySpace then Facebook.

Now, we put our favourite somethings onto dating apps, hoping to find someone who approves of them or is impressed, even. ‘Wow, your favourite song is the same song I keep hearing at the supermarket when I buy my sad one-person dinners’ or ‘Wow, your favourite film does not pass the Bechdel test, what a surprise’.

The internet has made us define ourselves by the things we enjoy, or don’t enjoy by extension. More accurately, the internet has made us define ourselves over and over, reinvent ourselves every time we change our profile photo or reinstall the dating app we thought we’d given up on after that guy sent another dickpic.

Sometimes, scrolling through a dating app makes me forget about the edges of my personhood, so much does everyone blend into one big person. Everyone makes the same lame jokes, everyone chooses the same pictures from the same holiday, everyone likes travelling and pints and is looking for someone who ‘doesn’t take themselves too seriously’ (which seems tricky considering you have to spend some time perfecting your dating profile to make it look like you don’t take yourself too seriously). Even when my bisexual self scrolls through both men and women, I see only a marginal difference (women wear more glitter in their festival photos).

I know I’m not being original when I make fun of dating apps, I know we all get how stupid they are by now. But something I feel people don’t talk about is our need to let everyone know what our favourite somethings are. Is this because we are still children? Do we all still need to shout over each other about which ice-lolly flavour is actually better? Do we still think we have some sort of individuality simply because we like green instead of pink?

In a world where we keep talking about what divides us, I find it fascinating that really, deep down, we enjoy the same things. We want the same things. We are on these stupid dating apps, dealing with idiots, hoping to come across that one person who’s favourite film is also our favourite film. That’s what it really comes down to. And who doesn’t deserve that?