Death to Dating apps
There was a time when meeting someone felt almost cinematic.
Allow me to set the scene: You’d lock eyes across a bar. Reach for the same book in a bookstore. Fall in love with someone’s laugh before you even knew their last name. Human connection used to arrive with a sense of mystery attached to it.
Now it arrives with a push notification.
Modern dating has somehow turned romance into a part-time administrative job. We are no longer people casually finding one another; we are curated profiles performing market research.
Swipe. Assess. Reject. Repeat until emotionally numb.
Dating apps have managed to convince us that love is both urgently important and infinitely replaceable at the exact same time. Which honestly deserves some kind of psychological achievement award.
Because how are we simultaneously treating human beings like soulmates and clearance rack inventory?
Maybe that’s why everyone seems exhausted. Not heartbroken necessarily. Just tired.
Tired of asking strangers what they do for work before they ask anything about who you are. Tired of conversations that begin with “What are you looking for?” Tired of pretending a person can be summarized in six photos, three prompts, and a strategically casual picture holding a fish. (Please, I beg you, don’t post the damn fish.)
And listen, I understand why dating apps exist.
People are busy. We work too much. We socialize less (thank you COVID) and half of us leave the house only for groceries and emotional support iced coffee. The apps filled a gap.
But somewhere along the way, convenience started replacing connection.
The abundance of choice created this strange illusion that someone better is always one swipe away. So instead of learning people slowly, we consume them quickly. One minor flaw? Next. Slight inconvenience? Next. Human complexity? Absolutely not.
And I don’t even think it’s made us pickier in the way people assume. I think it’s made us more disposable.
The weirdest part is how dating apps make everyone feel simultaneously overexposed and deeply unseen. You can talk to twenty people at once and still feel empty.
Because attention is not intimacy.
And maybe this is controversial, but I think dating apps have quietly turned vulnerability into branding. Everyone is trying to appear emotionally available without actually risking anything real.
We’ve all become tiny PR teams managing our own romantic campaigns.
God forbid anyone simply arrive as a flawed human being with baggage and a nervous system. And the irony is, beneath all of this performance, I think most people want the same thing.
To feel chosen without needing to audition for it. To experience a connection that doesn’t feel optimized or strategically timed between other conversations. I don’t think dating apps ruined love, but I do think they’ve made us forget that love was never supposed to feel like shopping.
Some of the best things in life happen slowly. Accidentally. Maybe romance was never meant to exist inside an interface designed to keep us swiping. Really think about it, if apps actually succeeded at creating lasting connections consistently, we’d all delete them. And that’s terrible for business.
So yes.
Death to dating apps.
xoxo,
