Are dating apps designed for dating?
By: Zhi Qun
Tags: Psychology, Startup Life, Dating, Authenticity, Conversations

When I first encountered the flame-shaped social dating app, I was beaming with hope. The onboarding experience is sleek, the list of prospects is eye-catching and I’m almost immediately hooked…

This is me beaming with hope/ opportunities when I first discovered dating apps.

Fast forward to 6 months later… I’ve reinstalled the app for the 8th time this month. It's still addictive but the frustration from the lack of progress is killing me. I know it's bad for me but I can’t rationalize why. Filled with guilt, I continued to mindlessly swipe-away at the toilet cubical during work hours.

Frustration for dating apps is akin to a random stranger lying on you on a long bus ride home — feels like you are getting some form of social connection only to realize it’s completely not.

Most of us already know dating apps are not the panacea of your social/ romantic life. Let’s explore why dating apps are so frustrating to use. It’s because they are not meant for dating.

Dating apps are not for dating.

Here are 3 reasons why:

It is tiring and inefficient to find real-life dates through dating apps

On average, a person spends 13 hours on an app to get to a non-virtual, real-life date. That’s 588 swipes, 26 matches, 8 virtual conversations and invaluable emotional energy spent. This conversion funnel is the reason why dating apps are deemed as a numbers game. It kills off all if any, moments of magic where you’d imagined there to be. The law of statistics and probability ruthlessly takes over. Your profile becomes just another number on the conversion board.

Some people call it a full-time job (Source: imgur)

Not to mention, each of these micro-decisions spent judging fellow insecure human beings during each swipe; those are precious mental energy taken away from important tasks such as deciding what to eat for lunch (Now you know why Mark Zuckerburg has a closet full of boring clothes).

In short, you don't have to kill your brain cells or waste 3 months of precious (meme viewing) toilet time just to find an actual date.

2. Dating apps are overly superficial and unrealistic

This should sound familiar: Putting up a spectrum of your most attractive (photoshopped) photos, brainstorming hours for the wittiest tagline and judging other profiles similarly based on their selection. Similar to Instagram, there’s a standard formula for success in most dating apps — To be like how the other best-performing profiles are.

But is that the real you? Are you really that confident, yacht-sailing socialite that is perpetually cheerful or are you basically following the archetype of the 21st-century definition of cool?

On The Surface — A satirically creative zine on the superficiality of Dating Apps, created by Kopi Date cofounder Jing Lin.

Find me someone who actually portrays themselves truthfully on Tinder / Social media (synonym) in photos.

Example: I’m actually an insecure, sensitive guy who has no idea what I’m writing about but I blabber on because my intuition says so — in photos.

Chances are, its rare. Because the nature of Dating Apps is to conform to societal’s notion of attractiveness. To win the game (and increase your chances of successful matches), you have to play the game.

Even during the off-chance where your match meets you, he/she is bound to get disappointed because you upsell your personality online so much that you need way more than a Tony Robbins boot-camp to match your date’s expectation.

3. Fundamental human interaction rules are ignored in the virtual world

Great! Now I can further divide my attention among 285 of the matches and talk even more sparingly to each of them…

Hey, we’ve got a match! Great! Now I can further divide my attention among 285 of the matches and talk sparingly to them…

Imagine a situation during lunch where an entire group of people is talking to you all at once and is expecting your response or they will have their egos bruised.

You can’t because that’s not real life. Dating apps are not real life and as such, they ignore all social conditions that we naturally follow.

People tend to forget that the person at the receiving end of the screen is also a human with real emotions. Just like how manners get diluted at a call center/ customer support counter, people tend to treat others poorly over the virtual world because they can’t see or empathize with the other party. Ghosting is a commonplace, feelings get hurt and egos bruised. The vicious cycle continues as it transforms into a socially accepted behavior (online).

The internet is probably a good place for easy communication between friends and family but it’s way too commitment-free for anonymous interactions.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love dating apps as a tool for entertainment and that’s what it should be. Like Instagram, its meant for people to fantasize about ideal versions of themselves, show it off to others and have fun doing so long the way.

It’s a winner(s) takes all popularity contest and people shouldn’t go in looking for authentic connections.

Let’s use dating apps how it should be used — without the expectations of getting a date / genuine connection. There are other tools for that ;)

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The author used to work in a dating app start-up in San Francisco and is currently running a social project called Kopi Date in Singapore.

Kopi Date is a project that aims to inspire genuine conversations by connecting (single) strangers over coffee at unique spaces.