It’s no secret that dating apps have been around for quite a few years now, you may have used one or two yourself.
On the surface they sound kind of handy: In a busy world like ours, dating apps allow you to multitask things like sitting on the toilet and finding the love of your life. I’m not saying it’s romantic, but it’s possible, at least in theory.
So given how convenient they are, why have 1.4 million UK users ‘broken up’ (sorry, I had to) with dating apps between 2023 – 2024?
Before I elaborate on why I don’t like dating apps, I think it’s important to say that I do know several happy couples who’ve met through them: I even know of a happily married couple who met on Tinder, so it’s not all bad.
Among the reasons cited for the drop off in use by a study undertaken by the University of Leeds’ Centre for Love, Sex, and Relationship (CLSR), user fatigue, a sense of the process being a chore, and a feeling of being detached from reality were some of the core icks.
Natasha McKeever of the CLSR, says many users have come to see dating app use as akin to “doing admin”.
When you think about it, it makes sense. You have to ‘check your mail’ and then decide which messages to prioritise and which to ignore. Could anything be less romantic?
McKeever told the Guardian, “It becomes tedious, and just feels like you’re doing admin, like you’re not connecting with anyone and you’re just trying to get through people,” she says. “You see it less like talking to real, individual people and you start seeing it like they’re all just cards in a deck.
While I’m no aficionado of dating apps myself, I think I can take a guess from vicariously analysing the experience of friends as to some of the other reasons so many people are saying goodbye to the world of swiping right, or left as the case may be.
If you’ve heard of people ‘doom-scrolling’ on apps like Instagram and Tiktok, I’m sure you can imagine that it’s also highly possible to doom-scroll on dating apps, what with all their endless potential – you could be only one swipe away from the person of your dreams and all that.
They make it sound so easy, but as we are finding out, this is far from the truth. Only a select few experience ‘success’ on dating apps, and what that success means can be different depending on one’s motivation for using them in the first place.
There has been some interesting research done into the different behavior and success rates among male and female users.
According to author and academic Robert Henderson, this research says that women like only 4% of the male profiles they see while men swipe right, or the equivalent action, on over 60% of female profiles.
One could guess that this may have something to do with female use of makeup and filters, but you can’t deny that that is quite a difference! Of course there are more complicated factors at play.
Basically, that suggests that a large number of women are all interested in a small number of guys, while the other 96% of lads (if the figures are accurate) barely get a look in.
For women being swiped right on may provide a pleasant ego stroke – the value of which is questionable- but for men who get very few matches, it sounds rather depressing.
Perhaps it’s because dating apps are an inherently visual medium. While male attraction may be more focused initially on looks, women’s initial judgments tend to be less based on looks and more overall presentation such as confidence, dress sense, humour, height ect.
Needless to say many of these attributes can’t be properly assessed from a few photos.
It seems as though women are therefore being forced to make judgments on guys without all the relevant information. So only the top 4% in looks are SO impressive as to garner all the attention.
This may in turn create a feedback loop where women are chasing a small subset of men. Who are incentivised by market factors to behave like – excuse the academic term – absolute twats..
Somewhat worryingly, Henderson also said those in control of dating app algorithms, “never want you to leave.”
If you’re going in with the intention to find someone special, your goal should be to leave as soon as possible, but what if those making money from the apps don’t want you to, as Henderson suggests?
If you use Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that people have a much easier time being nasty to you online than in real life, and according to our friends at the University of Leeds, this is also the case on dating apps.
McKeever says that the feeling of disconnection from real face-to-face human interaction has led people to become more comfortable with sending abusive messages because of a lack of real world consequences for this behaviour.
“I think a lot of people see it like a game, they interact in ways that they would never interact with people in real life, because they’re behind a screen they don’t have to deal with the consequence of shitty behaviour.”
It shouldn’t take a detective to realise that a person you match with online is far less likely to have any social connections to you (mutual friends, colleagues, etc.) and therefore may not feel as disinclined to treat you poorly.
Given all that we’ve learned from what Prof. Jordan Peterson called the “social experiment” that is dating apps, and the emerging data that shows relatively large numbers of users ‘swiping left’ on the idea, is it time to put the phones away and bring back cheesy, in person chat up lines?