I first joined Tinder when I was 18. I was lonely towards the end of my first year of university and couldn’t believe that everyone was spending their summer revising in a library. I wanted to meet normal people – which seemed to irk my friends, who didn’t understand why I wanted to “date randos”.
Their scepticism spurred me on. Deep down, they were surely jealous of the freedom Tinder granted. It wasn’t shameful – it was validating. There really were hot singles in my area, who, best of all, thought I was attractive and were kind enough to identify themselves. Since then I’ve been an evangelist for dating apps, constantly haranguing my friends to broaden their horizons and have a spin of the digital roulette wheel.
Consider the alternatives. When Tinder was born a decade ago, I was 15. I’d never had a girlfriend and I already vaguely resented the fact that finding “the one” seemed to involve getting exceptionally lucky, or else waging a targeted campaign on a woman at her workplace, gym, cafe, or independent bookshop. The Inbetweeners and Seth Rogen movies had made it clear you didn’t have to be toned, sophisticated, or even washed to get the girl, but it still seemed like a relentless tide of hard graft and rejection. Sure, dating sites existed but they were for weirdos and divorcees – and according to late 2000s tabloid hysteria were inundated with “child predators” and “Thai brides”.
Despite what you may have been led to believe, people on dating apps are just like you and me. They just don’t know you yet, which for me, is a key part of their appeal. Who doesn’t want to begin a romance as the mysterious stranger, someone who gradually reveals their flaws rather than feeling the need to explain them away at the outset?
This year, I’ve been on 20 first dates, the majority of them with women I met on apps. Some went badly but most went well – it’s fun pretending you have your life together for a few hours, and regularly scrubbing up and trying to put my best foot forward has been a form of immersion therapy after the lethargy and agoraphobia of the final months of the pandemic.
But what of handing my romantic prospects over to an algorithm? Shouldn’t some things be done the old-fashioned way? Call me a cynic, but I long ago accepted that algorithms dictated my fashion sense and music taste (I’ve had Spotify since I was 11). Worrying about which partner the algorithm will deliver seems almost quaint now that lines of code determine where people live, whether they go to university and who lives and who dies. And hasn’t there always been an algorithm? We just called it fate or luck, while feigning ignorance of the role that race, class and geography have always played in romance. Really, marrying the boy you lived opposite in the first year of university should seem bizarre, not marrying the boy you carefully selected after considering 299 others.
For all that dating apps enable the racist, misogynistic and superficial tendencies prevalent in society at large, my main reservation is that apps have given us too much choice. In the same way that I spend most evenings helplessly scrolling through Netflix (and Prime, Apple, iPlayer and Now TV) looking for something decent to watch, I am unable to commit to women, in the knowledge that there are so many to choose from. It’s overwhelming and exhausting. And as with the Netflix menu, the more time goes by, the less certain I feel about what I’m looking for. Meeting people has become the easy part – but there’s no app for building a lasting connection with someone.
There’s nothing wrong with being indecisive, but it’s important to be honest with people – and yourself. Just because you can get someone else doesn’t mean you haven’t found someone great. And there’s a fine line between having the confidence not to settle and ghosting, flaking, benching, breadcrumbing and just plain old treating people like shit because you can.
I left Tinder a couple of years ago, when it seemed like the people I wanted to date were gravitating towards other apps. Now, you can find me on Hinge (another app under the Match Group umbrella), just one of the literally hundreds of apps promising to connect people according to their stated preferences. On a recent trip to the US I was bombarded with ads for BLK, an app tailored to “Black singles”, and I suspect my invitation to Raya, the dating app for celebs, is somewhere in my spam folder.
By giving people agency and expanding their circle, apps have made it easier than ever to find love. But I hope people don’t become blind to chance meetings and spontaneous connections just because they have half a dozen matches waiting for them at home. We may have spent a decade getting pissed, going home and settling down with strangers but just because there’s nothing wrong with meeting “the one” on your phone, it doesn’t mean you have to either.
Alex Mistlin is a commissioning editor on Guardian Saturday
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
