All swiped out

Are dating apps just the first inartful attempt to solve a modern issue whose roots are deeper than whatever the business community is dreaming up?

Ending of the dating app era
By Matthew Fraser, Editor in Chief

The news reports that people are leaving dating apps in droves. First, there was a boom during the pandemic when everyone was cooped up and there were nearly zero opportunities to mingle. But now, with the face masks off people are running away. Gen Z is said to be leading the charge and the millennials who aren’t shacked up yet apparently aren’t far behind.

I guess it’s not surprising. Every app makes less money the sooner you leave whether you subscrribe to it or not and no one ever is truly themselves online. Instead, people do their best acting through the messaging stage (provided you don’t get sick of it) and pray that their match isn’t horrendously weird when they meet. Hell, some people are just there to swipe and a meeting was never in the cards to begin with.

Maybe worst of all though is the way that the internet encourages everyone to be the most superficial version of themselves. When you swipe based on pictures you commit yourself to the idea that personality and someone’s humanity is secondary at best. For far too many men, you look for curves and the right face with little thought beyond that.  Many women are inundated with matches to the point of sickness and then inundated with creeps to confirm and worsen the disease.

It seems that everything that technology revolutionizes backslides and makes us worse off. Now, some feel unhappy and alone with 100 matches in their pocket; others, feel the desperate heartache of rejection before they even meet someone.

I’m sure that humanity will right itself, it certainly doesn’t seem like anyone wants to be in a relationship. Rather, we (the singles) may all just be waiting for the new way to meet or for the old ways to become popular again. We may have to reinvent meeting someone through church just to get people back together. Oddly enough, speed dating is making a comeback. Maybe the issue at hand is that we commercialized the introduction of couples and didn’t much care for making a relationship start.

Maybe we should bring back the folk wisdom of community matchmaking. All the uncles and aunts in the area formed a network to pair off their nieces and nephews with suitable matches. It might be worthwhile for society to remember that we are all connected and interdependent again.

Of course, none of this will work in our society given that nothing happens unless someone makes a profit. How could we ever monetize the “aunty match” network? Maybe we can make it a subscription service; you tell your uncle and if they both sign up they get two free months. $5 back for each referral.

But this is all happening during what is being called a loneliness epidemic, and on the back of falling birth rates. Are dating apps just the first inartful attempt to solve a modern issue whose roots are deeper than whatever the business community is dreaming up?

Then again, the fall of dating apps is certainly making life better for some people. Every article or podcast discussing it features someone saying that swiping and talking to each match felt like a full-time job (more like a strenuous extracurricular activity if you ask me but that’s neither here nor there).

Regardless, dating apps are falling out of fashion. All the morality pearl clutchers will be breathing sighs of relief and people will have to find actual hobbies, develop a personality, and leave the house if they want to find a date. Oh, the humanity.