On banter as a filtering mechanism
this essay isn't about you, but maybe it is
Note: I will be writing exactly one (1) essay about dating and that is it.
People love to talk about the experience of being single in New York and the topic has immense potential for virality. I believe that there are diminishing marginal returns1 for the amount of mindshare you dedicate to dating, so the cutoff for me will be after this piece.
Let’s play a game. Tell me – if you had to define the top 3 qualities you were looking for in a partner, what would they be?
Mia asked me this question last week. I said I was looking for [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted].
She then said – okay. Let’s assume you meet two people and they both have the same amount of X, Y, and Z.
What’s the fourth quality that makes you like Person A more than Person B?
I didn’t need time to think. “Banter, obviously.”
She leaned back, looking a little too smug.2 “The point of this game is that the first three qualities are what you say you want, but the fourth quality is the one you’re actually filtering for.”
My best friend3 likes to shit on me for how much I overweight banter as a sign of compatibility + a prerequisite to attraction.
Maybe it sounds like a shallow filter – when you think of what you want out of a life partner, most people probably default to citing shared values. Kindness, ambition, emotional intelligence, shared importance of friends and family, etc.
Of course, dating is often a totally irrational, emotionally-driven process (and it’s not socially appropriate to ask people to define their values as an opener on Hinge) – so the people who stand out to me most are the ones with whom I have banter! These are the people I want to go out with, the first dates I enjoy the most, and the situationships who live on in my memory long after they’ve disappeared from my notifications.4
The more I reflect on the people I’ve had exceptional banter with, the more I’m convinced that banter is actually built off the foundation of some things that are very important for long-term relationships.
So let’s talk about why I think banter is a defensible filtering mechanism.
Shared social context.
The majority of my friends haven’t been single since the Obama administration. For them, I’ll start by defining banter.5
The broadest definition of banter is conversational chemistry: do you find it easy to talk to and connect with a person? My personal definition includes a connotation of wit/humor (I think I’m funny so you better be too!).
Obviously chemistry is deeply individualized and hard to quantify, but if you’re a words girl™ like me, one key contributor to good banter is a shared vocabulary. Do we understand each other’s slang, do we use the same colloquialisms, do we recognize each other’s niche allusions?
In the Internet age, shared vocabulary is an especially load-bearing component of banter because every colloquialism encompasses so much cultural context. A single word might be a reference to a much broader social phenomenon.
Let’s take the phrase “cooked”, for example.
“Cooked” originated from a TikTok trend where women would post videos showcasing “evidence” that someone else had been in their boyfriends’ lives before them.
Examples:
“He has Aesop soap in his bathroom? Who cooked here?!”
“He’s seen all of New Girl ... who cooked here?!”
I use “cooked” (adj.) as shorthand for “you got this from a girl you dated and I would like you to know that I noticed”.
The additional subtext of the “cooked” phrase revolves around the conversation in modern dating that women are “fixing” men – that many men learn their “adult” behaviors from the women in their lives. I had a conversation recently with a friend who reflected on how she left every one of her exes better than she found them –taught them fundamental life skills (e.g., how to make an egg, how to do their laundry, how to dress, how to talk about their feelings <3).
My single friends often joke that we assume previous female influence when men are (suspiciously) high-functioning in some area. You have a skincare routine? Tell me which ex put you onto that. You wear a Byredo cologne? I know you didn’t pick that out yourself.
So if you tell me you’ve “been to Reformer Pilates” and I immediately respond with “cooked” – and you laugh? I appreciate this doubly not only because we have this shared vocabulary, but also because it shows you understand the social commentary I’m making. You have the self-awareness to understand why Reformer Pilates is an obvious reference to a former female in your life, and broader awareness on the cultural context that so much of my generation’s6 vernacular is wrapped in.
This might hold outsize weight for me specifically because I love thinking/talking about social dynamics (see: this Substack…), but generally, I think shared vocabulary makes communication feel faster, more seamless, more natural. Knowing that you know what I’m thinking – while still leaving it unsaid – creates an inside joke that we’re both laughing at, and that’s chemistry.
Shared interests and experiences.
I also filter on banter because I find that conversational chemistry is outsize dependent on having shared interests and experiences.
I was chatting with someone recently about how nice it is to feel understood (we work in same industry) and it made me think of how much of my banter is referential.
Maybe I’m quoting a TV show, maybe I’m repurposing a meme phrase, maybe I’m alluding to a phenomenon that only people on tech Twitter would recognize7 – but people recognizing your niche references is an indicator that they’re paying attention to and interested in the same things. And I think if there’s overlap between what you two spend your time thinking about, that’s a pretty solid indicator for long-term relationship potential.
As a (shallow) example, I love to read and I love a literary joke. So if you get the Dune reference on my Hinge8, of course I’m more inclined to go out with you. Is it the most important thing? Of course not. But does it make it more likely that we’ll have shared interests downstream? Probably.
Plus, content reveals itself the more time you spend in any niche, so there’s both a directional and a depth measurement to your interests. It’s one thing to recognize “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”, but the ability to rattle off the cultural connotations of various authors in the zeitgeist reflects another level of knowledge entirely. So banter can indicate not only what the shared interests are, but to what depth we share this interest.
Lastly, as you get to know someone, what you know about that person becomes part of the pool of shared knowledge that you can pull references from. This is an especially intimate subset of banter – there’s something so special about being known, something so charming about your inside jokes being about each other.
We’ve all heard that saying: if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying experience of being known. And I don’t know about you, but a good joke makes being known feel a lot less mortifying.
Banter as shared humor.
The last (and maybe most obvious) reason I index on good banter is because it’s indicative of a shared sense of humor.
Part of the female experience is sending screenshots of what men say in our groupchat. Even though we all have some shared humor as a byproduct of being friends, I’m always struck by how different “banter” looks for all of my friends and their entanglements9.
Humor is so individualized – what people find funny takes so many forms, so finding someone with whom you have the chemistry of shared humor feels meaningful.
A smattering for your perusal10:
Referential. Mentioned above, allusions to shared cultural knowledge.
Recall. Let me reference something you mentioned earlier, showing that I remember something you talked about and can repurpose it at the appropriate time (my favorite variation of this is: let me take something you said and quote it back to you in a scathing context 😍).
Told someone that my friends joke I have two modes: smug and nefarious. He threw it back at me. Wordplay. Puns fall into this category, which I’m not a huge fan of, but the rest of it is great.
I don’t feel like I have to explain further why shared humor contributes to a good relationship foundation, but I will say there are million other things that feed into good banter: shared cultural contexts, communication cadence, temperament, preference on flirt to roast ratio, earnestness to skepticism ratio, etc.
Humor is just one example of how chemistry manifests – so really, maybe this essay is just a defense of how chemistry manifests for me.
I’ve administered variations of our little “choose three qualities” game to several friends since. What’s funny to me is that the pattern holds – the first three qualities they list are values-oriented, and the last one is always a chemistry factor (the absence of which I’ve heard several friends cite as reasons for not seeing someone again!).
We want to believe that we’re looking for deeper things, but in a busy life where attention is a scarce resource – banter is what cuts through the noise. Everyone’s looking for joy, everyone’s looking for a spark, everyone wants something that feels easy even if they won’t admit it.
I saw some platitude on how “marriage is a 50-year conversation, so marry someone you want to talk to for the rest of your life.” And god, wouldn’t you hope that you have banter with the person you spend your life talking to?
So anyway. If you want to date me, please have good banter.
Thank you to my friends for reading initial drafts and to my situationships for providing good content. If any of you are reading this, sorry I haven’t texted you back – I was working on this essay.
I’m so sorry, I couldn’t think of anything better
Nefarious?
Most of my essays are a defense against Ben. Hey Ben!
Pass
I think of Judge Potter Stewart’s description of obscenity – “you know it when you see it”.
Gen Z by “definition” but I’ve been told I’m millennial-coded (derogatory). Under duress I plead zillennial.
It’s a picture of me in a black hood captioned “Bene Gesserit chic”
Situationship? Inveiglement? Dalliance?
Alt caption: a masterclass on how to win my love