Why I stopped swiping for love
Reflections on the flaws of online dating and dating apps
A lot has been made of the dating apocalypse and the end of romance. It’s a view I sympathize with. Apps like Tinder make it so easy to hook up for casual sex that more people are preferring regular one-night stands to committed relationships.
But there are plenty of women and men out there who are still looking for love. I am one of them. But even with a platform of people all looking for that same thing, online dating actually hinders that quest. Here are the 3 big reasons I gave up on it.
1. Supermarket mindset
It starts with the profiles. Thousands of them. All a little sales pitch for their owner, showing off their best side. It is so enticing. And an opportunity for us to judge, based on the little and superficial information available, filling in the gaps with our own hopes, or prejudices. Inevitably, some of the people seem wonderful. So these endless profiles create a supermarket mindset:
“If I keep looking, I’ll find the perfect match.”
Our expectations are ratcheted up to the max. As if our generation needed higher expectations! We get told endlessly that the perfect job, the perfect partner, the perfect life is out there; we just need to keep working at it. Online dating feeds on and reflects those aspirations, and gives us exactly what we want: choice, and opportunity. It feeds the ego, but doesn’t satisfy the soul. It can’t; the perfect relationship doesn’t exist. So what does a supermarket mindset have to say about this? “If it’s not perfect, I’ll just go back for a new one.”
The reality is that relationships require a lot of work, compromise and commitment; just ask anyone in one. But the promise of online dating deludes us into thinking that needn’t be the case. Today, more than ever, we treat our relationships as disposable. If something’s not working, why bother to fix it when finding a new partner is so easy. Online dating encourages us to keep looking for the unattainable — a perfect, untested love — rather than working at achieving something even greater — a committed, forgiving love.
2. Effort to encounter
So we’ve swiped or searched our way to a few plausible matches. What’s next? Messaging! The opportunity to impress, reassure, amuse, all to persuade someone we’re actually worth meeting. And to determine the same of them. For many the least enjoyable part of the process, messaging can reassure us, but comes at the cost of time and effort — messaging 700 women per long term relationship for the average online dating man, if a Channel 4 documentary is to be believed. This is the part that can feel like a chore, rather than something enjoyable, the thing we fall back on when we’re feeling lonely on a Sunday evening, wishing we had a companion in our lives.
All this work that goes into persuading another user to actually meet you face-to-face is what I call effort to encounter. If it feels worthwhile, it’s because, as with the profiles, we tend to project an image of the person we’d like to meet onto the messages we get. Which leads me nicely on to the final flaw with dating.
3. Date expectations
Eventually we meet someone face-to-face. In the olden days this used to be step one! Now online dating is all about whittling down the huge number of possibilities out there to that special someone, and the dates themselves are no different.
Dating is an interview process. The aim of the process is to decide whether or not we want to start a relationship with that person. Romance is the thing at stake from the moment you meet. There is no agenda-free socializing beforehand. That’s some pressure to put on them, and ourselves. If you can keep it casual, great, but there’s always the temptation to ask a lot of questions, or worse, simply talk about yourself in the hope of impressing them.
Add to the mix the requirement of our companion to match up to the impression we formed of them from their profile and messages, and what happens? Date expectations kill chemistry. You know that feeling you get when you unexpectedly meet someone you find attractive — a little stomach flutter. While this can happen with online dating and apps, all the expectations built up by a profile and messaging, combined with our agenda to find a great partner, mean that we’re far more likely to leave an encounter disappointed.
There’s also the expectation that we’ll feel some chemistry fast. This creates what I call Third Date Syndrome — that feeling that, even though we haven’t ruled someone out, if we were to see them again that would essentially rule them in, which isn’t something we’re ready to do. But many people fall in love with partners they’ve known for a long time beforehand, and these relationships tend to be stronger and more committed from the off, because there are fewer unknowns. By insisting on pursuing romance in a kind of fake-it-’til-you-make-it way, rather than simply creating the conditions for it to happen naturally, we miss out on a whole segment of potential partners — the slow burners.
In summary, online dating sites have us on a hamster wheel of high expectations, searching, messaging, and disappointing dates. The end result of all of this is one of the greatest ironies of our time:
Online dating sucks the romance out of life.
Of course, when you realize that dating services make more money the longer you’re single, this starts to make sense.
So a few months back I decided to stop betting my romantic future on a process optimized to keep me single, and gave up on apps and online dating. I dumped all the profiles, messaging, and agenda-laden one-on-one dating. I unswiped my life.
Instead, I decided to meet more people socially — to meet them without any preconceptions of who they are, nor any agenda for why we’re meeting. My goal is simply to forge meaningful connections. Who knows where they might lead. More than that, I am creating a platform, Zojul, whose mission is to foster exactly that — meaningful offline connections, through tailored invitations to small social events with people you’ll get on with. Which means that if you’re looking for romance, you’re left with the easy job of working out who you fancy, instead of starting with it.
This approach has been a freeing and hugely enjoyable experience for me. I’m not wasting my time swiping, messaging or feeling lonely. I’m going out, having fun, and meeting tons of great new people.
Please clap if you enjoyed reading this. And if you’d like to read more from me on this subject, check out The Dating Racket.
