Le Petit Mort
What modern dating taught me about loss, and hope
In 2025, I decided I was going to meet the love of my life, settle down, and live happily ever after. I was serious about it.
The plan was simple. They say dating is a game of numbers (Not necessarily my opinion, but that is what is often said), so I went on a dating app to maximize my options and make sure the “hello” to “let’s meet in person” phase was efficient, to reduce time wasted.
Shocker! It’s February 2026, and I’m still single.
The bigger shocker is that I deleted the dating app I was on.
Let me explain why.
Recently, I came across the phrase Le Petit Mort while watching Emily in Paris.
In the show and in common usage, the phrase describes the post-orgasmic sensation, a moment likened to a kind of emotional death. That is not how I am using it here.
For me, it names the many small heartbreaks that come from hoping. Hoping that the next connection might be meaningful. Hoping that this time it could last. Hoping that you might finally meet the right person.
Dating apps intensify this experience. While they are designed to connect people, they also make loss more frequent, faster, and more disposable. You can meet someone today and feel genuine excitement, only for them to disappear tomorrow. The emotional whiplash is subtle but cumulative.
From personal experience, it feels like going to an African parent’s sweet-treat closet. You see a tin of cookies and feel glee. You open it, only to find a sewing kit. Needles. Thread. Buttons.
Side note. This has been a source of trust issues and trauma for a lot of immigrant kids.
I sometimes think of it like muscle growth. Muscles are built through tiny tears that heal and return stronger. The heart, after all, is a muscle too. Maybe these small emotional fractures are not signs of failure, but evidence of use. Evidence that you are still open, still hoping, still choosing connection, even when it costs something.
I also wonder what happens when enough of these small emotional deaths start to pile up. At some point, they can turn into fear. Fear that you will never meet the right one. Or a quiet decision to preserve your heart so tightly that nothing new really gets in. It makes sense, but it is also strange. The more you protect yourself from these small losses, the harder it becomes to stay open. The harder it becomes to hope at all.
I’ll end with this beautiful poem by Emily Dickinson:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all
And sweetest in the Gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm
I’ve heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest Sea
Yet never in Extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.