Swipe left: are dating apps taking the magic out of dating?
Valentine’s day is almost here and for those who are single, it can bring up a lot of negative emotions about the state of dating. Let’s face it dating is tough and has been for a while. No matter where or who you are, it’s something you’ve had to face at some point in your life. We talk and complain about it with our friends. There are scripted and reality shows about it. It’s a part of life that we can’t avoid nor should we. We all deserve to find a partner and have a meaningful relationship. Unfortunately, if you ask any person in their 20s or 30s, dating seems to be getting tougher. But what if it’s not the dating itself that’s harder? What if it’s the way we’re going about it? Sitting down and getting to know someone hasn’t changed, but getting there has. We’ve entrusted our relationships to algorithms, and in the process, we’ve sapped the magic out of them.
Before the pandemic, online dating was slowly growing in popularity, but it wasn’t a serious endeavor. When we all became confined to our houses, things changed. Usage of the apps drastically increased because it was the only way to meet new people. Not only was that how you had to meet people, but we had to find creative solutions to get to know people through our screens. Which we all know by now is next to impossible. Despite that harsh truth we forged ahead endlessly swiping in the hopes that we’d meet our soulmate. Just like the other aspects of our lives we became prisoners of the moment. We never stopped to think whether it was a good idea or not to offload all this to an app.
The goal of these apps isn’t for us to meet people, like every modern platform its engagement or in this case swiping. They employed the same casino mechanics as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to get us to do just that. That’s why people stayed on them even after the world reopened. We were hooked. In this case, the “content” we were hooked on was people. The vast majority of which we weren’t actually interested in but kept swiping through them because dating had been gamified. We hoped that we’d hit it big with the next swipe. Even when there was a match it would usually go nowhere but that made it so you’d want to swipe more. You hoped that with each swipe maybe your soulmate would be on the next card. The whole process was and is even more addictive than traditional social media. With those traditional apps it’s just a post or meme that’s trying to get your attention, on dating apps it’s someone you could date. That’s some incredibly powerful shit because it’s taking advantage of core human needs for love and relationships.
Even beyond the gamification of dating, there are issues with the way these apps go about “finding love”. One is the paradox of choice, you’d think that having all of these options at your fingertips would lead to more dates, but it doesn’t. There are just too many people and they all start blending together. You can’t decide who’s actually a good fit or even worse you think there’s always a better option right around the corner. I believe this is especially true for girls because the gender balance skews heavily towards guys. So girls get bombarded with a constant stream of dudes trying to shoot their shot. It’s why you shouldn’t blame them for not responding. Most guys probably wouldn’t respond either if we were dealing with that. There’s just too much noise. It’s why ghosting has become such a norm. The whole online dating process is mentally exhausting. Imagine what it would look like in real life if you just had people coming up all day hitting on you and then trying to maintain conversations with all of them. You couldn’t. We barely have the time for the people we care about but yet we think we can talk to all of these potential partners at once.
The apps also reduce us all to content. We’re cards in a deck for someone to swipe through like they’re shopping on Amazon or browsing TikTok. Somehow we’re supposed to find a way to market ourselves so that people swipe on our card and give us a chance to woo them. That’s not how human connection works. There’s so much more that goes into it. Three prompts and six pictures can’t tell the story of who you are. As much as people claim to care about bios, looks are going to have much greater weight, especially given how the apps are designed for us to rapidly swipe through all the available options. Also, whether you believe in energy or not, people do give off a certain vibe in the real world. Something you can’t get from the apps. Even if you’re the coolest person in the world your profile is going to come off corny because it’s being forced. When we meet people in the real world we don’t have the same three canned prompts that we say to everyone, we just allow the person to get to know us naturally. If there’s chemistry, something will come up organically.
It’s not just how the apps work that feels forced, but how they claim to find people who are compatible with you. The algorithms do a good job at pairing you up with someone who you may have similar interests with but they have zero ability to predict chemistry. Just because you like the same TV shows or both do yoga on the weekends doesn’t mean you’re compatible. Sure common interests are important but there are a lot more things that go into the foundation of a good relationship.
The forced nature of online dating is why I think the apps are so unsuccessful at creating meaningful relationships. It’s robbing us of the spontaneity of love. Love is not supposed to be forced. It’s not supposed to be a frictionless experience. It’s supposed to be hard it’s supposed to be a surprise. That’s not what the apps do. There you just go through all of these options and find the best or least bad one and then settle for someone who was picked by code written by some dude in San Fransisco. There’s more to life than just spending your time swiping away trying to find the perfect partner. The way to find your perfect partner is by living your life and seeing who shows up in it. You open yourself up to all sorts of possibilities by putting yourself out there, trying new things, going to events, or just being out in the world alone or with friends. Dating isn’t meant to be so in your face all the time. You don’t think that every single person at the concert is going to be your soulmate, and you don’t act like it. You might meet someone, or you might not. It’s all about letting things happen organically. When you least expect it, you’ll meet someone that changes your life. It’s a much more meaningful way to meet someone and create something than just sifting through thousands of cards and then just settling on the one who gave you the time of day.
Now I know people who have met amazing people on the apps and have great relationships. I’m not saying that their relationships are a fraud or meaningless because they met online. At the end of the day we need different avenues to meet people. What I do believe though is that we need to fundamentally rethink how we approach dating and what we want out of it. Dating is not something that can be optimized or maximized. Our relationships aren’t meant to be reduced to 0s and 1s. The universe is the best matchmaker there is, not some algorithm. The beauty of being human is the spontaneity of our experiences and the organic unfolding of our lives. Moving off the apps and putting trust in the universe is just one more way we can reclaim that beauty.