Forget nudes, show me your playlist
There are things people consider intimate that, frankly, don't hold up to scrutiny. A nude selfie, to use as an example. I have thought about this far more than is probably healthy, and I have arrived at a conclusion that I will now defend until death: a photo of your body tells me almost nothing about you. It may show me a tattoo you have. What I actually want, if we're doing the “getting to know each other” thing properly, is your playlist. Specifically, the one you think nobody is ever going to see and the one you most recently made.
Let me back up a bit, since the beginning was punchy enough. No nudes were used in writing or researching this article. I do not condone them, nor do I think they are that appealing. I am absolutely not inviting anyone reading this to send any, and as loud as I can be, I am still quite conservative and will not be participating either. Back to the program.
A playlist tells me almost everything. A nude just tells me you own a phone.
A nude just tells me you own a phone, you know your angles and, once, briefly, maybe, understood lighting, maybe even a filter. But so does a (rolls eyes) selfie. A playlist, in my humble opinion, tells me almost everything. Your grief, the bad decisions, the precise shape of a heartbreak you insist you're over, but you’re so obviously not, even as you try to convince yourself you are. There is no angle, no filter, no strategic pose for a listening history. It just sits there, quietly telling on you.
I say this as someone who has, at 48, made peace with the never-ending, unmentionable embarrassing things about herself, and yet will absolutely stand behind a 1997 pop song I have played more times than is dignified to admit. It explained my heartbreak at the time, and it was just so damn painful. (The song is Kiss The Rain by Billie Myers, by the way.) That's the thing about a playlist, or what I originally knew as a mixtape: you cannot curate your way out of your own history. The algorithm doesn't care that you'd prefer to be perceived as a person of taste. It just quietly logs the fact that you cried to a song in the back of a Grab on a random Tuesday, and it will never, ever let that go.
A nude is rehearsed. Nobody sends the first take—there is angling involved, strategy, a folder somewhere with a name too unserious to say out loud. A playlist is what happens when nobody is watching. It's the difference between a photo booth and a hidden camera, and only one of those tells you anything useful about the person you're about to fall for.
The playlist is curated enough that there can be a plain message there to be seen by the listener about the maker, but at the same time, because music and words and the whole act is a nuanced balance of double and triple entendres, even one track can mean five different things to two people. And voila! Ain’t that the best conversation starter ever? “Hey, that third track, was that a French horn in the bridge?” “Oh, wow, that 10th track, what were they writing about?”
Bam! The art of conversation is now sparked.
We have, somewhere along the way, confused exposure with intimacy. Exposure is easy. Anyone with a working camera and a lapse in judgment can manage it. Intimacy is handing someone something that can actually be used against you emotionally; although, to be fair, playlists get weaponized, too, just differently. “Since when do you listen to Coldplay?” or “OMG, you listen to BTS?! Why??” is its own quiet act of violence, and we all know it.
Real vulnerability sounds more like: here is exactly what I listen to when I think no one is checking on me. That's someone letting you see the operating system, not the screensaver. And I don't know why we've collectively decided the body is the more sacred artifact, when the body doesn't actually reveal character. It just reveals that you have one.
Taste, what one likes, on the other hand, reveals everything. You can tell almost the entire story of a person by how their playlist is organized, or isn't. Some people have 900 songs thrown in with no order, no mood, no chronology (calling myself out here unabashedly). Those people contain multitudes and possibly some unprocessed feelings they haven't gotten around to yet. Other people have 40 mood-specific playlists with names like “sad girl autumn” and “villain era, but make it admin work.” Those people have a system for everything, including their sadness, and will alphabetize your bookshelf without asking permission.
Neither is wrong. But both tell you more about compatibility than a body ever could, because bodies don't argue about whether the aux cord is a democracy or a dictatorship. Playlists absolutely do. And that argument, as far as I'm concerned, is basically a marriage in miniature, and you find out very quickly who's willing to compromise and who is not.
Here's a thing I actually believe, not just as a bit: think about the last time you truly connected with someone. Not swiped on. Not smiled politely at across a room. Actually leaned in. I would bet good money it wasn't over a physique. It was over a song. “Wait, you know this one?” might be one of the most electric sentences available to us in the English language. It's two people discovering they've been quietly carrying around the same small joy without knowing anyone else had it, too.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever bonded with a stranger over abs. Plenty of people have bonded for life over the mutual, unprompted discovery of the exact same deep-cut B-side on repeat.
So here is my actual proposal, only slightly tongue-in-cheek: retire the nude as the reigning currency of intimacy. It is overvalued, oversaturated, and does remarkably little due diligence on whether you're actually compatible with someone. Replace it with the playlist reveal instead—a genuinely riskier, far more telling act, because it says, here is my taste, my history, my 3 a.m. spiral, and my unwavering, unembarrassed commitment to a boy band I will not apologize for, now or ever.
Anyone can be desired for a body. Bodies are, statistically, the least interesting thing about a person, and everybody's got one; it's the default install. It takes actual nerve to be desired for your Discover Weekly, or even that dreaded Yearly Wrap-up.
So next time, skip the strategic lighting. Just hand over the Bluetooth or cable, unlock the phone, and brace yourself. It's a far more naked thing to do.
