The other night I was with a close friend in a dimly lit bar of vaguely Irish extraction. It was the kind of place people go when they want to pay $14 and not $18 for a cocktail. Everyone looked like they were within a standard deviation of three years from their tenth college reunion. They were clustered in clumps, and if there was a signature food for the evening it would have been a truffle fry. There has been a persistent longing for life to go ‘back to normal’ during the past year and a half, and this was something like what success looks like.
In another world, this would have been a prime place to meet someone romantically. It felt like the proverbial bar, like we were sitting inside a cliche. But it struck us that it was impossible to imagine that actually happening. Looking around, I was struck by the self-enclosed shape of the groups, like phalanxes resisting invasion. It didn’t feel like a huge stretch to be single and sitting at the bar with a glass of wine, but it was almost unfathomable to imagine leaving in a different state than one entered, as two rather than one. It wasn’t simply a matter of awkwardness, of ransacking the brain for first line or a caught signal or twisted frequencies. It just seemed structurally impossible, like a desire to fly without wings.
This is what a paradigm shift feels like. What was once normal becomes foreclosed, and the most natural thing in the world is flipped to the most exotic: the banal tries on the clothing of the utterly remarkable. The once-upon-a-time hangs around as a story, swaddled in nostalgia. It takes up permanent residence in the past tense.
There is no doubt that our world at large is trending towards the digital and the virtual, with related drops in our sense of immersion in our physical settings. If you look up from your smartphone while sitting on the subway or crossing the street you’ll easily see that wherever people are, they’re mostly on their screens. Turbocharging this reality are the changes wrought by the global pandemic, where proximity to other bodies and breath became a source of danger and concern. If people needed an excuse to keep their distance, they now have it in spades. Rarely before has the serendipitous encounter fallen into such disrepute.
If this is true of life at large, it is the most true when it comes to dating, mostly because of the relentless rise of dating apps and online dating. Global users of these apps- Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc, and their foreign equivalents-has surged from 185 million in 2015 to 270 million in 2020, with revenue expected to approach $6 billion by 2025. In 2020, over 260 million people used a dating app. In the U.S., nearly half of all people between the ages of 18 and 29 have used them.
The specific bells and whistles vary between dating apps, and each has its own shtick and interface, but the basic concept is the same. You swipe through potential matches, each one an avatar of your potential bashert in the form of self curated pictures, scarce biographical information, and some gesture towards autobiography in the form of mostly inane questions and answers (Q: “what are you most competitive about?” A: “Everything”).
The pool of people feels functionally endless: like an astronaut nervously contemplating the journey to Mars, a dating app user quickly realizes that this could take years and years, and that success is by no means assured. A quick adjustment of one’s filters opens up whole new populations to the high honor of a ‘match.’ Most users have hundreds of matches, and sometimes dozens and dozens in a day.
If this sounds a bit jaded, it is because most dating app users seem to be that way. Ask around, and most people think of using them like going to the dentist: not fun, but something you have to do to be a responsible person in the world. Sixty three percent of users report a positive experience using dating apps, but I rarely encounter enthusiasm for them commensurate with the fact that never before in human history has it been so easy to find someone to ask out on a date. Apparently abundance can be its own kind of burden.
I remember when dating apps were weird, proof that you couldn’t make it happen in the real world. That was only a decade ago. They have become ubiquitous. This trend is part of a larger story, where we used to use the internet for the things we couldn’t do in the real world: dating, friends, shopping. Now, we use the real world for things we can’t do on the internet: dating, friends, shopping. The internet used to be for being anonymous, fun in the shadows. A quick scroll now reveals a digital world where most people want to be themselves, all the time. They want to see their own reflection, and catch a face they like in the background of their virtual selfie.
But the paradise they promise is paradoxical: fulfillment by way of infinite choice, serendipity produced by algorithm. They show us people we never would have met, even as insist that they are the path to the one we always were supposed to meet. They eliminate ambiguity, even as they generate their own confused protocols and weird etiquette. They are supposed to be the vehicle to a relationship, but often getting another match feels like its own kind of destination.
Back to the bar. I’ve become convinced that the regularity with which people my age look back at meeting people in bars, reciting it like the shopworn creed of an extinct religion, is less an accurate yearning for the past than an unarticulated complaint against the present. My hunch is that the number of people who actually met in bars was always relatively low: friend groups, classmates, and coworkers likely funded the majority of matches. Or maybe, as my friend suggested, human needs are forever but the way they are met is changeable, and back then bars just did better jobs. Perhaps the bars of the metaverse will have everything we desire on tap.
The case against dating apps is strange, because it boils down to wanting to be saved from our own excess, the bounty that our phones dispense on the regular. A recent piece in New York Magazine was entitled “My Mingle with the Post-App Singles,” and it chronicled a night out with dating app dissenters. They are all mostly insufferable, and the chronicle ends with the author checking their online matches on the Uber ride home from Williamsburg.
When I told a writer I respect I was thinking about writing about dating apps, he urged me to adopt Odysseus’s twenty year journey home from the Trojan War as a model for my experience using them. If that proved difficult, he offered Dante’s Inferno as a template. This is usually the perspective of people who got married before the rise of the swipe: relief that they disembarked from the ship before it hit the dating app iceberg.
But I don’t think that’s quite right. There will always be incentives to run away from the full range of our choices, to make “E), All of the Above” vanish from the Scantron. We call crave the snugness of less exposure, fewer decisions, a shorter route home. But there is no going back to the bar, or if there is, it will look very, very different.
Coffee shops are better places to meet people, anyway.
Happy Halloween Weekend,
A