Love Is Missing From Dating Apps

The most popular dating apps emphasize safety, convenience, and efficiency in finding compatible matches, but not love.

Recently, I stumbled upon this Substack post, which brings up how we talk about dating and sex endlessly but so much less about romantic love, something “much more interesting than sex; more interesting than the endgame of not having to date again.” 

It made me think of some of the most popular dating apps among people my age and how, glancing at their website copy and mission statements, there’s almost no mention of “love” or “romance” or “desire.” There is “Nobel prize winning algorithm” and “dating preferences.” Apps can make you feel “empowered” and “safe,” “get you noticed for who you are,” and “create meaningful connections.” Love, when it’s mentioned, is at the very bottom of the page in a quick lineup of other things Tinder could be used for. 

I can think of a few reasons for these branding strategies, some of which I genuinely find to be creative ad work. Free dating apps need to emphasize some ability to swiftly sift through potential matches, all of whom have varying reasons for signing up or the kinds of relationships they’re looking for. Safety, especially for women, is a huge concern, both from physical harm and unwanted messages. Apps also need to feel sleek and as cool as they could possibly feel to combat the stigma of online dating. 

All of these attributes make using a dating app a smoother and more convenient experience than it would be otherwise. They just don’t make it any easier to actually practice love, which I think is more a muscle that needs to be regularly flexed than a feeling or definitive state of being.

You can absolutely find someone to love on an app — many couples I know have. But I’m talking about the now-second-nature impulse to comb through a match’s Twitter or Instagram or decade-old college track photos. I’m talking about that cycle of another date fizzling out, when you upload new photos and fully rewrite your profile, rewarded with a fresh batch of right swipes you’re disappointed in immediately. I’m talking about the narrowing list of acceptable traits in a partner, tweaking and changing with each disappointment, the continuous refinement of the machine. I’m talking about feeling more like a processing machine than person, always on the hunt for subtext. 

There is so much pressure to curate yourself while scanning for workable traits in others while analyzing if you’re tolerating too much or perhaps too little. Then, when you get to the first date stage, you have to regulate the right balance between optimism and pragmatic caution. And when the other person can’t even break things off with a simple text and instead opts to silently recede back into the flatlands of their respective digital device, you have to do some deeper recalibration: Do you tell them it hurt you, even if you only had sex once? Will you run a diagnostic with the group chat, questioning if it was something you said, or something they said, or both? Will you delete your profile? Will you reboot next week?

I don’t know what the solution to making dating apps more humanizing is; I just don’t think the problem has been fully grasped. I don’t think we talk enough about how normal it is to compulsively flick through the thinnest-possible renderings of potential love interests — and how closely it resembles an overdone fictional rendering of the future.

But there’s a reason pretty much every dystopian universe involves steely skies and formless jumpsuits and dwindling greenery in a world so sanitized, it makes you vaguely nauseous at all times. Deep down, we’ve always known we are more agricultural than automated. Our growth can be inconsistent and even inconvenient to others; it can brighten a room or demand too much space or prick someone along the way or take people utterly by surprise. 

And love is so much about growth, but in our culture, it often feels confused with optimization. Dating apps distinctly feel built to help you rapidly cut through the clutter — inevitably also making you question if you’re the clutter, too. But how do you open yourself up to good-faith arguments, to the most charitable views of another person, to bone-deep forgiveness, if the daily ritual is rapid-fire judgment based on increasingly limited information? 

How can you, as Cheryl Strayed once recounted, have the emotional duel of your life with a partner when you could just find someone “more compatible” with you? How can you, in the words of Nayyirah Waheed, expand instead of contract around another person when you have to mentally auto-filter every profile you see? How can you feel the kind of love “that has nothing to do with learning” when you’re compelled to glean some meaning from the repeated micro-rejections of unanswered messages, so blunt and so flat at the same time? How can you be so hard on yourself and soften for someone else?

I haven’t been on dating apps in five years, but I feel like I never left. Maybe that’s the point – that finding love is supposed to seamlessly blend in with all our other methods of boundlessly evaluating strangers online. I peer into peers’ profiles even though I logically know no photo, no unfunny joke, no sprawlingly earnest caption in all lowercase could come close to uncovering the magnitude of that person. My assumptions of people’s characters based on their elusive digital trails have been so frequently, embarrassingly wrong. Some of the most self-serving and unwelcoming people I’ve met in real life have the most empathic, beautifully worded online presences; some of the kindest, most profound people I know don’t post at all, or if they do, publish the sorts of saccharine content that could make them easy fodder for screenshot ridicule. The glitches compound.

It makes me look back and remember the feeling of deleting and retyping my dating app bio, always convinced it wasn’t authentic or funny enough. My fingers would hover indefinitely. I knew the right combination of words would start the right conversation with the right person, only I had no idea how to find them. I used to think it meant that I didn’t really know myself, but now I realize that it was an impossible task, to sift through my personality and determine the objects that would make me more lovable at first sight, and how that felt so counterintuitive to loving and being loved.

I think now, of how I never quite strung those correct words together on dating apps or online, but love still found me, somehow. I think of how imperfect I’ve been, how ungrateful of love, sometimes, and yet deserving all the same. I think of the simple, beautiful, frustrating, stunningly human truth that no one can quickly know me, any more than I can expedite the process of knowing anyone else, no matter what new algorithms or question prompts are at my disposal. 

I think of what I gain when I give up the dream of conveniently zooming through online identities, when I confess that I know so little about people, possibly less than I’ve ever known. I think of the obviousness of not judging anyone before I take time to know them, of extending the same patience and forgiveness that transformed me so many times, of making a sincere effort to be less cynical. It makes me feel corny and earnest and hopefully romantic. Maybe that’s the point.