Why Does Everyone Hate Dating Apps Now?

Dating apps were supposed to make dating easier.

In one sense, they obviously did. You can open your phone and find hundreds of single people nearby without leaving your sofa. You can filter by age, location and interests. You can talk before deciding whether someone is worth meeting.

Twenty years ago, that would have sounded almost impossibly convenient.

So why does everyone seem so tired of it?

Too much choice doesn't always feel like choice

Dating apps give us access to more potential partners than almost any generation before us.

That sounds like an advantage. But scrolling through hundreds of profiles can subtly change the way we evaluate people.

Someone interesting appears. Then someone slightly more attractive appears. Then someone who lives closer. Then someone with a better bio.

There is always another profile.

Eventually, choosing someone can start to feel like closing all the other doors.

Everyone becomes a profile

Real attraction is messy.

Someone's voice matters. Their timing matters. The way they laugh matters. Sometimes a person who looks completely ordinary in a photograph becomes extremely attractive after five minutes of conversation.

Apps have to compress all of that into a handful of pictures and a few lines of text.

We become very good at rejecting profiles.

Whether that makes us any better at finding people is another question.

The conversation starts to feel like work

There's also a peculiar repetition to app dating.

Where are you from?

What do you do?

What are you looking for?

How was your weekend?

Repeat that conversation often enough and even genuinely interesting people can begin to feel interchangeable.

The problem isn't necessarily that nobody has anything interesting to say. It's that the format encourages thousands of conversations to begin in almost exactly the same way.

Matching isn't the same as meeting

A match feels like progress.

So does a message. So does exchanging numbers.

But none of those things are actually dates.

It's surprisingly easy to spend weeks participating in dating without spending much time actually dating.

For some people, the app itself eventually becomes the activity: swipe, match, chat, lose interest, repeat.

Ghosting is incredibly easy

Ending an interaction used to require at least a little discomfort.

You had to decline another date, stop returning someone's calls or explain that you weren't interested.

Apps make disappearing almost frictionless.

Sometimes that's useful. Nobody owes a stranger continued access to them, particularly when someone is behaving badly.

But when disappearing becomes the default response to ordinary loss of interest, everyone starts expecting everyone else to disappear.

That doesn't exactly encourage emotional investment.

We're probably using them too much

Dating apps work best as introductions.

They become considerably stranger when they start replacing the social world they're supposed to connect us to.

A profile can tell you whether someone might be interesting.

A drink tells you much more.

If you've exchanged a few messages and the conversation is easy, there often isn't much benefit in spending another two weeks interviewing each other through a screen.

Meet somewhere public. Have a coffee or a drink. Give it an hour.

Chemistry is remarkably efficient.

Dating apps aren't going anywhere

For all the complaints, dating apps solve a real problem.

People work long hours. Social circles shrink. Approaching strangers can be awkward. And not everyone wants to spend three nights a week hoping to accidentally meet somebody.

Apps make introductions possible that otherwise wouldn't happen.

That's valuable.

Perhaps the mistake was expecting them to do much more than that.

They can show you who's out there.

They can make the introduction.

But eventually you have to put the phone down and find out whether there's actually anything between you.

And that part still happens offline.