Never Let Your Children Know You Have This

In some ways I think this merits a more in-depth discussion, but I’ll leave that for another, less busy day. I have a friend who has released a new iPhone app called DateMate, which—and I’m not entirely certain what this means—purports to help you “plan, track and report on your relationships.”

I’ll leave it to you folks out there with enough bread to waste on a good phone (mine has a little weasel running on a rubber band and cooing smoke signals) to test this product. I hope, for my buddy’s sake, that it does well.

The DadWagon question would be not so much dating-related, but about your past. Would you want to create a technological record of the stuff you’ve done that children shouldn’t know about you? Let’s say, for example, you were the sort of person who attended college and may have smoked some marijuana (present company excluded, of course).

Would you want an app that tracks your weed enjoyment? Or, if like me, you went through a divorce and were for a time single, would you want your child—and all children are thieves, folks—to burglarize your phone and find out how your taste in women trends?

I’m not saying this is a bad idea, necessarily—I’m just sayin’.

Published by Theodore

Theodore Ross is an editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Saveur, Tin House, the Mississippi Review, and (of course), the Vietnam News. He grew up in New York City by way of Gulfport, MS, and as a teen played the evil Nazi, Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He lives with his son, J.P. in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a book about Crypto-Jews.

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3 Comments

  1. Quick answer is no. Even if I were still in the game, I don’t think I’d want or need some record tracking my feelings for particular women. Sounds like a bad sitcom trope where the current girlfriends finds the plus/minus scorecard ranking her and her rival then gets all huffy as the gals tend to get about such stuff.

    Pot is a trickier subject requiring trust, open dialogue, and nuance. I plan to finesse that minefield by lying through my teeth and being a raging hypocrite.

  2. I think this is a cool app if you have another look on its functions!
    Your children never need to know that you have this, you can lock it easily!

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