dating apps make worse my neuroses

(and yet i just can't seem to quit them)

Amanda came back from Miami with a story about a man she met on a dating app. They’d gone on a few average dates, she’d made a somewhat reluctant venture to his bedroom, and he’d shown her the massive collection of Funko Pop figurines lining his wall.

“When I tell you TOP to BOTTOM,” she started but never finished because Angela and I were laughing too hard before she could get another word out.

Oddly enough, it was this that made me want to get back out there more than anything.

Over the past year or five, I’ve rotated between swearing off dating and getting sucked back in more times than I can count. I’ve never been one to deny myself a proximity crush (an office hot coworker is a highly effective way to disrupt the otherwise painfully dull hours between nine and five), but sooner or later it gets boring and I get curious.

The cycle goes as follows: I decide I want to start seeing people again, I look around, I get disappointed, I take a vow of celibacy. And again and again and again. My most recent round ran faster than usual. I went on four dates with a fine enough guy over the course of eight days, and on the ninth our affair dissolved in a mutual ghosting.

This episode was particularly crushing. Not because we liked each other or anything, but because it felt like I’d lost out on something sincere before it even began. We’d met out in the real world, rather than on one of those godforsaken apps.

I’ve had a fair amount of experience in the digital dating scene, subjecting myself to several first dates, a few failed talking stages, one and a half unfulfilling situationships, and a collection of off-putting memories featuring the likes of a fashion douchebag, an aimless waiter with a weed dependency, and a long-haired Deadhead. The waiter was by far my favorite.

Since then, I’d made the decision to swear off the apps. I suspected they might’ve been hindering my quest for self actualization. Constant defeat can be frustrating.

Although failure seems to be the defining experience of online dating, it has been proven to be possible by the very lucky few. Angela found her boyfriend on one of the apps, a girl from high school announced her engagement by crediting another, and I’d once talked with a couple at a party who’d told me they’d met on yet another.

“How the hell did you manage that?” I asked.

Realizing it isn’t acceptable to accost perfectly nice people who you’ve only just met, I attempted to soften the outburst by adding, “I always think I’ll meet the love of my life and I don’t.”

“If you’re trying to meet the love of your life on the app then you’re doing it wrong,” they responded.

It’s a shame that I’ve never quite learned how to be normal about these things.

I yearn because I’m human, because I’m a young woman, because I crave comfort in companionship, and because having a person to spend the days with, hold close, understand and feel understood by is an earthly pleasure unmatched by most anything. Not that my first choice would be to meet my partner through a dating app. Or anyone’s, for that matter.

“Well yeah, if I had it my way I’d meet the love of my life in a bookstore,” my coworker said to me, “but it’s 2025, and that’s where people are meeting each other nowadays.”

Fair enough, I thought. And then a friend advised me that going on dates is a great way to practice Spanish, and I listened to some Dean Martin songs, and it rained for seven days in a row, and so I was basically left without a choice. Like a pathological gambler keeps spinning the wheel expecting to win, I decided to re-download the app.

I was promptly and overwhelmingly disgusted. I think I must’ve developed some sort of allergy after having consumed it in excess over the past year and then going on a cold-turkey detox.

There was nothing I didn’t find repulsive: a timestamp marking someone using the app at 9 o’clock in the morning (is that really how you start your day?), a photo of someone else with a four-year-old family member on their account (did you ask the mother if it was okay to put her child’s face up there?), the fear that my friends would match with the same account and vice versa (just recently, my best friend updated me on Fashion Douchebag, whose profile had popped up for her).

These unreasonable turnoffs plus my growing aversion to simulated experience in all its forms equally colored my attitude. Maybe it’s true that this is the way things are done now. But the human race has persisted for the last 300,000 years before anyone gave a witty answer to a pre-written prompt.

A friend of a friend told me that she doesn’t have time to meet people out and about, and that it’s just so much easier to find dates through the app.

And it is easy to sit on your couch and look at your phone.

Our generation’s dating experience has been gamified. We swipe through profiles as if they’re virtual products on digital shelves. We get lulled into a false sense of accessibility to people and forget that they are people. Likewise we separate personhood from ourselves, curating our profiles to be as marketable as possible to the average shopper. We create “rosters” of consistently rotating avatars that represent people who don’t actually exist. We chase the dopamine hit of playing hot or not, the external validation of receiving likes, and most times any expression of mutual interest via “matches” die without either party having made a first move.

Talking all of this over with Amanda, she told me that on the apps, “nine times out of ten it’s a rejection experience.” I’d say that’s true of real-life dating as well. Dating apps have desensitized us. We forget that, at one time, there used to be such a thing as introducing yourself to someone you thought was attractive. This too, was a gamble.

It’s a lot less scary to send a like than to approach someone at a café. The difference is that when we connect with people who we meet in the virtual world, and our relationships ultimately fail, they often remain in our lives on the most superficial of levels.

I was sitting with a few friends on the patio of a French bar, one of them telling the story of her past two situationships via dating apps that seemed promising at first, but ultimately went nowhere.

“Now they’re just people who like my Instagram stories sometimes,” she said.

That’s what we are to each other now: Instagram followers. People we’ve met a few times and have no intention of seeing again, but who still exist in our online social circles.

To be fair, my lousy dating history can’t solely be attributed to the apps. The first dates, talking stages, and situationships who I met In Real Life didn’t amount to much either, even if I met them through friends of friends, or at school, or at work. But I do remain friends (or friendly) with a lot of them to this day.

When you meet someone on an app, it’s because the algorithm serves you to each other. When you meet someone out in the world, it’s more likely that a common thread ties your lives together in some way. You’re more real to each other.

Amanda ultimately cut things off with Funko Pop, for different reasons than because we named him Funko Pop.

All this to say, I’m still swiping. It’s fun to flirt, it’s fun to date, it’s nice to feel wanted, and shit, it is just so much easier. If I don’t find the love of my life, at least I can make my friends laugh. I’ll let the former happen as it’s meant to.