Dating : Online Dating is Dead, Long Live Online Dating

It’s through parties that I’ve met most of the women I got intimate with. I’ve never been a big player, but during the times I was single I’d go out on the week-end with my friends and meet girls in clubs. Occasionally, I’d click with someone and if things went well we would continue to spend the night together. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a Casanova and more than a few times things didn’t work out and I’d come back home on my own. But I was happy about this life style. I was in my early twenties and didn’t think about building something especially serious. I didn’t make false promises to the woman I’d see and enjoyed my life as it came, focusing on progressing in my career as a software developer and partying with my friends.

I used Tinder and Bumble in periods of one to three months, but never put much effort into it. I’d spend too much time brainlessly swiping and would rarely engage in real conversations (“How are you?”, “How’s your day going”, “What do you do in life?”… I wasn’t what you’d call an interesting interlocutor). At the end, I’d decide I wasted too much time and would delete the app from my phone, before coming back to it a few months later.

As I matured, I progressively realised I’ve had my share of this game. It wasn’t much and I didn’t have tons of hook-ups, but it was enough to make me feel lonely and miss having someone I truly felt something for. Clubs are fun and even today I still enjoy partying with my friends just as much, but it’s not the ideal environment to meet a woman I’d connect with on a deeper level than physical attraction.

Since I never put real efforts in dating apps, I decided I’d give it a shot again. This time I’d put up a profile that would reflect my personality as much as possible and with proper photos (luckily a friend of mine just started getting into photography!).
I set up an account on Tinder and Hinge and spent about an hour every day swiping/reviewing profiles. I’m average looking, but having good quality photos and a personalised description definitely made a difference and I was getting two to three matches/likes a day, up to six on a good Sunday evening.

I was thrilled to receive this attention and spent time trying to engage in real conversations. I’d react about something my match would have put in her profile, or an interesting photo of her in some exotic location. But most of the time the chats would fall short, or I wouldn’t receive any response at all. I wanted to talk about programming, how fascinating I found that field because it gave me the opportunity to build something with my brain. I wanted to talk about her passions, what she enjoyed in life and what fun places we could go to together in the city. But more often than not, it would simply not happen. The conversations quickly became boring and repetitive. My matches would barely respond, most of the time coldly and leaving little room for an actual interesting conversation. I grew tired of it and stopped trying. I had a speech in my head and would use it to respond to the usual “How is your day going?”, “What do you do in life?”.

But getting to know a person for who she really is is essential to build something serious. While before I was seeking nice short times, where matching on physical appearance was 90% of all that mattered, now that I wanted to connect on deeper levels I was struggling way more. I asked the women I got the chance to talk with about their situation and wasn’t surprised to learn they had the same feeling, amplified! For most of them the issue isn’t matching with guys, but the overwhelming feeling of receiving too much solicitation. A study ran by Gareth Tyson, Vasile C. Perta, Hamed Haddadi and Michael C Seto showed that on average a female profile on Tinder has roughly 18 times more chances than a male profile to match on every right swipe (10.5% chances to match against 0.6% respectively. That means potentially 18 times more matches! It is just unfeasible for a human being to have a meaningful conversation with that many people on a daily basis.

I’ve now realised that the issue isn’t with online dating itself, but with the model Tinder created years back and that current apps keep using. The amount of solicitation a user receives ranges from none at all, to way too much. During this whole article, I’ve talked about receiving too many matches/likes to actually care about the people who send them, but don’t think you’re a reject if your experience is that you don’t receive much solicitation. The system simply isn’t balanced and you live in a sea of profiles; getting noticed online is currently far harder than in real life.

While it’s good for the ego, regularly receiving matches makes us needy for them. We’re never satisfied with the ones we have, assuming the next ones could just be better. We focus on receiving approval from strangers that our profile is decent, instead of focusing on having great conversations with a few people and actually getting to know them. As a result we pay little attention to the matches we have and don’t really go beyond small repetitive small talks, scared that we might be wasting our time on a match while the next one could be even better.

A report by the Imperial College London has projected that by 2031 online dating would be the most popular way to meet potential partners (it currently is through friends). In an age where we are more and more connected, it is natural that dating keeps growing online. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the current system needs an update.

For me, the main advantage of dating apps is the opportunity to meet potential partners I’d normally have little chance to encounter in a big city. But the system needs to be rethought. The game shouldn’t be about obtaining as many matches as possible, but about talking with a few people who correspond to you and connect on a deeper level with the goal of meeting offline. The amount of solicitation received by users needs to be rebalanced in order to encourage men and women to entertain meaningful conversations without the feeling of missing out.

What’s your opinion on the subject? What’s your experience with dating apps and what would you change about them?

P.S.: A close friend and I are very interested in the subject and decided to materialise our vision. We are working on building an app that rebalances the amount of solicitation received by users and encourages them to entertain a couple meaningful conversations, rather than dozens of boring ones.
We’ll first launch in Toronto, Canada, so if you’d like to know more you can give us your email at https://peel.dating and we’ll contact you when the app is on the stores!