Originally published in February 2021.
Something didn’t sit right. When I first heard that Bumble’s big selling point was that women on the platform had to message men first to open lines of communication, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was bothered. Now I can. Bumble made online dating even easier for straight men, a cohort of humans who were already flipping through women like vinyl records in a vintage shop. Just browsing, no intention to purchase. Dating apps were now making it effortless — for them. Of course I’m just picking on Bumble because I find this trait particularly abhorrent, but there’s no dating app out there that’s any better. They’re all for-profit businesses that make more money the longer their users remain single. They are not on your team, they don’t give a shit if you ever “find love,” and in fact the further they keep you from it, the more money they make. A month on Bumble costs $22.99. My book is seven dollars cheaper.
I started using dating apps with sincerity in the very early 00s, back when they were still seen as weird and sketchy and “omg why would you go meet a stranger what if he kills you” was the concern of the day. Funny how just a couple years later those same concerned friends who just “can’t believe you’re still single!” would suggest I give dating apps a try. As with anyone born in the early 80s, I’ve been at the crest of the wave. I was among the first teens to ever use the internet, and the first young adults to ever use dating apps. I don’t know about you but I’m tired of this guinea pig shit.
One thing I’ve noticed, as someone who has witnessed the birth and maturation of dating apps over time, is that initially, they were asking for a lot of information regarding our preferences. They were actually putting effort into “matching” people. Now, all you have to do is upload photos and indicate where you physically are in this moment and suddenly everyone within a 25 mile radius could potentially be your fucking husband. They stopped putting effort into actually matching people based on compatibilities because that results in fewer people needing their services. Dating apps are now a giant ocean of humans floating around and you’re here trying to catch a grain of sand in the water with every swipe.
When horror stories are the norm, and success stories are legends, we have a fucking problem.
I never say these things to insult you, because I am you. I did what you’re doing, I did it for a decade. A blind, tunnel-visioned decade that ignored all the negative incoming that was pouring into my mental health and just kept on swiping because he must be in there somewhere. Instead, I say these things to shake the snow globe of us, to knock loose a digital dating dependency that has us so narrowly focused on find someone find someone find someone that we’ll put up with any tiny trauma the dating space serves us and write it off as another “horror story” to talk about at brunch. When horror stories are the norm, and success stories are legends, we have a fucking problem. I’m not trying to insult the single community. I’m trying to remind us of how much more of life there is to live than what’s accessible inside an app that we hate, that we voluntarily give our money to, and that we can’t stop using.
There’s a reason you always re-download the dating apps after you delete them. There’s a reason you keep going back. Actually it’s more of a formula. It’s your hope, plus the shame of being single, multiplied by the false belief that your future partner is actually find-able inside the dating apps. Because dating apps have the best free advertising ever: love. You know someone who did meet a partner on an app, therefore these things must work, right? But how many years worth of chances have you already given dating apps to work for you the way they worked for someone else?
We’ve allowed things that happened to other people to keep us voluntarily walking back into hell every time. Dating apps work for other people, so they’ll work for me eventually, right? I can suffer a little more of this because I’ve seen them work for other people!
Or is it maybe time to acknowledge that what happened to someone else was not the goal or the promise of the dating apps, and instead just a fucking accident.
Ask yourself this: What matters more, what happened to someone else, or what’s currently happening to you? How long are you going to let an algorithmic anomaly that paired up two people who aren’t you influence how much more punishment you think you have to endure in the dating space? That couple you know that met via dating app? All they are to the dating app industry is lost profits.
I spent ten years and heaven knows how much money on dating apps, without getting even one relationship back on the dollar. Sure, sometimes people meet on dating apps. Sometimes. But there’s no requirement that sometimes ever has to include you, and dating apps will continue to thrive all the same. They get to take all the money you give them, for however long you want to keep coughing it up, and they never owe you a fucking thing. The only other industry that operates this way is in Vegas.
It’s not just about the hope that’s been coded into you by our society’s fairy tale narratives, a lot of the reason we can’t delete the dating apps for good is that we still think of singlehood as a negative — because that’s been coded into us, too. Single is a shameful, wrong, lower life status that is in need of correction via a relationship. The default setting for singlehood is dating. If we’re single, we assume we have to be dating. We assume we have to be trying, we assume we have to be searching. Have you ever asked why we assume that love has to come at the cost of a punishing grind first? We love the stories of people who met on dating apps, but what about the motherfuckers who weren’t lifting a finger and met the loves of their lives anyway? Why aren’t they the role models? Their methods are certainly cheaper.
Dating is not required of you. Digital dating is most certainly not required of you. It is a toy, a novelty, and in the grand scheme of human history it is a brand new toy that we don’t actually know how to use properly yet. Wait 100 years, and we’ll have plenty of studies of how harmful dating apps were to the mental and emotional health of their users, but we were so blinded by the tech-ification of everything that we were too dazzled to give a shit. Dating apps don’t come with warning labels, but how many other things that harm us do? Cigarettes didn’t come with warning labels in the beginning, either.
On January 26th, 2019, I deleted all of my dating apps, and I haven’t re-downloaded them since. Better still, I haven’t wanted to. Not even once. Because I broke the spell. I stopped letting the shame of being single force me to only see dating apps as a potential path to partnership, even though they’d never once delivered on that belief, and instead I saw them for what they really were, for what I was actually experiencing: They were abusive, disappointing, exhausting spaces that turned dating into something so much fucking harder than it needs to be. Ironic, when you think about how they were first invented to take advantage of technology and make things easier.
You get to choose how you spend your time and money, but please know that your singlehood is nothing so wrong that you should feel obligated to pump more money into an app whose own worst case scenario is you not being single anymore. You’ve already tried everything to “find someone,” and it hasn’t worked. You are allowed to give something different, something that doesn’t center dating, a try — and that doesn’t mean you’re “giving up” or “choosing singlehood.” It just means you’re finished falling for this shit.
Okay, that was free. If you want the rest, if you want to stop seeing your singlehood as a disease to cure and start living it as the gift it is before it’s gone, I literally wrote the book on that. How you spend the spare $7 is up to you.
