Dating in Ushuaia as a Woman: What Brought You Down

At five on a July afternoon in Ushuaia it is already dark, and the woman leaving her shift on Avenida San Martín puts her hood up against wind that comes off the Beagle Channel with nothing to slow it down. The four blocks home are a matter of footing, the packed snow polished to glass at the corners, and she walks them the way everyone here walks in winter, short steps, weight forward, one gloved hand free for the fall that eventually comes for everybody. That is the honest shape of the street question in this city. Ushuaia’s night, the longest in the country, is a problem of ice and temperature long before it is a problem of anyone in it, and the habits women keep here are winter habits first.

A town with no aunts

What Ushuaia lacks, and every woman who moves here notices it within a month, is the web. In the cities of the north a stranger arrives pre-vetted: somebody knows his family, his barrio, the way his last relationship ended. Here almost everyone is from somewhere else and the web has to be built by hand, so the vetting runs through the structures the city actually has, workplaces and crews, the hotel and guiding companies, the plant shifts, the gym. A man is vouched for by the people he works with or he is not vouched for at all. The compensation is that the town is small and word moves through it at wind speed. A bad actor is known within a season. So, less usefully, is everyone’s business, and a woman’s dating life in Ushuaia is conducted in a room that is anonymous on arrival and fully transparent within a year, an inversion of the usual order that takes some getting used to.

The arithmetic of arrivals

The work that built the city, the assembly plants, the construction, the port, drew men in greater numbers than women for decades, and women who arrived in the boom years describe the experience of being conspicuously outnumbered, courted at a volume that was flattering for a fortnight and tiresome by the second month. Tourism and the public sector have evened the ledger considerably, since the guiding companies and the hotels and the schools and the hospital all hire women in numbers, and the summer season adds a rotating population of crew and staff of every origin. What persists from the frontier arithmetic is less the ratio than the manner it produced. Approaches here are direct to a degree that startles women from the mainland, and the directness runs both ways. A woman asking a man out in Ushuaia is not making a statement, she is saving everyone a winter, and the city’s standard opening, what brought you down, belongs equally to whoever asks it first.

The season, from her side

Summer complicates the scene pleasantly. The cruise ships and the trekking season fill the town with visitors, and among them travelling women, often alone, running the fin del mundo leg of a long South American route. The local reading of a visiting woman is friendly and unpossessive: she is here for the channel and the glacier, her time is short, and any romance that happens is understood by both sides to have a boarding pass attached. Guides and seasonal staff conduct a parallel circuit of their own, worked out in hostels and crew bars, with its own etiquette and its own end date in April. Local women watch the summer traffic with mild amusement and largely sit it out, holding to the town’s standing wisdom that the year is decided in winter, when the boats are gone and the person across the table has chosen, twice, to be here in the dark.

Cold, not fear

The street after dark, the question women get asked about every city, has an unusual answer here. The town is compact, the centre is lit, and the streets empty early not from wariness but because twenty degrees of frost discourages loitering in every gender equally. Women walk home in Ushuaia. The taxi is for distance and windchill rather than for escort, and the stories women trade about the night here are about ice, about the wind at the exposed corners, about the time the snow erased the block between the bar and the front door. A woman alone at a bar is a regular, not a spectacle; the Irish pub everyone simply calls the Dublin has served two decades of them, guides and teachers and plant workers drinking among people who will all know their names by the second winter. The scale that makes the town gossipy is the same scale that makes it, in the plain physical sense, one of the easier places in Argentina to be a woman on a street at night.

Her own contract

Women do not come to Ushuaia attached to someone else’s plan as often as the frontier cliché assumes; they come the way everyone comes, with a contract, a posting, a season’s work that quietly became a life. The wages that pull people south pull women too, and the city is full of women whose economic story needs no second signature, teachers on the southern salary scale, plant workers on shifts, guides who spend January on the trails and July on the ski mountain. Single motherhood here is ordinary and organised around the shift calendar, with neighbours and friends standing in for the grandmothers who are all two thousand kilometres north, an improvised extended family the city builds because the real ones are far away. Nobody comments on a divorced woman in Ushuaia, partly out of southern indifference and partly because a good share of the town’s adults are on some second chapter or other. People do not usually move to the end of the world because chapter one went to plan.

Staying, asked twice

The question every serious couple here eventually faces, are we staying, is not gender-neutral in practice, because the answer prices two careers and two distant families rather than one. Women weigh the mother in Córdoba, the profession that may not exist at this latitude, the question of where a child would grow up and who would ever babysit. Plenty decide the isolation is the point and say so without romance: the mountains at the end of the street, the wage, the absence of the aunt network being, for some women, precisely the amenity. Plenty leave, and the leaving is amicable more often than elsewhere, because nobody here mistakes geography for failure. What the city will not let anyone do is drift. The distances are too real and the winters too long for an undecided couple to stay undecided, and women who have dated here tend to speak of it afterwards with a respect they do not extend to easier cities.

Words against the dark

A town without aunts needs some other way for a stranger to become a known quantity, and what Ushuaia uses is talk, the long indoor evenings doing the work the plaza does in the north. An app that runs on the same principle, conversation first and the face later, fits this latitude better than a photo grid ever did, and that is the premise L’Amore Vince is built on: text, then voice, then video, a person assembled from words before anyone is asked to be a picture. The city throws a festival at its longest night rather than waiting it out. Its women, on the whole, run their romances on the same principle, deliberately, with the lights on.