Are dating apps ruining dating? I've got a more irritating answer than yes or no: they fixed the hard problem and created an easier, worse one.
The hard problem used to be meeting anyone at all. If you weren't at the right party, the right office or the right friend's wedding, the pool was zero. Apps blew that open. Millions of people who would never have crossed paths now can, and anyone who sneers at that has forgotten how many good relationships depend on two people ending up in the same place by sheer luck.
So the meeting problem is solved. What replaced it is the choosing problem, and that one is nastier.
Abundance changes what a person is. When you meet someone at a friend's wedding, they arrive as a whole human being: a voice, a laugh, a way of holding a glass. You can't compare them against forty other options because there aren't any. On an app, a person arrives as a thumbnail and four sentences, standing in a queue. Of course you treat them as provisional. The format asks you to.
The cost of moving on drops to zero. This is the real damage, and it cuts both ways. If walking away costs you nothing, so does being walked away from. Everyone gets a little less patient, a little quicker to read a flat first message as a verdict. Relationships that might have grown on you in week three die in week one, because the next profile is already loaded.
You get high volume and low information. A profile tells you almost nothing about whether you'd enjoy a Sunday morning with someone. But it tells you enough to reject them, and rejection is fast and free, so rejection is what we practise. We get very good at the one skill that doesn't help.
And the whole thing starts to resemble shopping. Compare, filter, shortlist, defer. That's a fine way to buy a toaster. It's a terrible way to find out whether a particular human being makes your life better, because that only gets measured by spending time with them when it's inconvenient, and no filter does that for you.
None of which means you should delete the app. It means you should know what it's for. It's an introduction service, nothing more. It can put two people in a room. It cannot tell you whether they should stay in it.
The sensible approach is boring. Spend less time messaging and more time meeting. Give a person more than one flat evening before you decide. Remember that the profile is a pitch, not a person, and that you wrote one too.
A novel about this
That whole tension, optimising for the perfect match versus turning up for an imperfect person, is the engine of The Twin Flame Game. Keith Myatt is a wealthy, restless hotel-empire shareholder who has spent years treating dating apps as a supply chain. Then he decides he's done with the open market and wants one cosmically correct partner, and he sets off across two continents to find her.
His methods are questionable. His hotels are worse. But it's a lad-lit romcom that's quietly more interested in what the search does to the man conducting it than in whether he finds the answer.
Which, now I think about it, is the better question to ask about the apps too.
FAQ
Are dating apps ruining dating?
Not outright. They've made meeting people dramatically easier, which is a real good. What they've damaged is the cost of moving on: when the next option is one swipe away, it's tempting to treat every person as provisional. The tool isn't the problem. The habit it encourages is.
Why does app dating feel so exhausting?
Because you're running a high-volume process with low-volume information. Dozens of near-identical conversations, most of which fizzle, with each one asking you to perform interest from scratch. Any system that makes you repeat the same opening forty times will feel like work.
Do dating apps actually work?
Plenty of people meet partners through them, so yes, as a way of getting two strangers into the same room. What they can't do is tell you whether the two of you are any good together. That part still happens the old way: in person, slowly, with some risk.
How do you use dating apps without burning out?
Treat them as an introduction service, not a verdict. Cap the time you spend, move conversations to a real meeting quickly, and stop rating people on a profile's worth of evidence. The less you treat it like shopping, the less it feels like a shop.
Is there a funny novel about modern dating?
The Twin Flame Game is a lad-lit romcom about a restless, wealthy man who has swiped his way through the options and decides to go looking for something more like destiny. It's about the thing the apps can't supply, wrapped in a lot of bad hotels.