Dating Apps: Digital Storefront, Empty Heart

Technology has made everything accessible, available, and fast. We see it in everyday life. Just think of social media, for example, where everyone can see, write, and post whatever they want, where news is reported the very moment it happens, and the rise to stardom (as well as the fall) occurs literally over the course of a few days, if not a few hours. Not to mention robotics, which is aggressively taking control of practically everything.

It is not just the social aspect of our lives that has become accessible, fast, and immediate. Relationships, too, have undergone a radical change. With technology, you can stay in touch with your loved ones and friends, wherever you are. Between free chat services, video calling apps, and social media itself, the feeling of staying close, even when far apart, has never been so strong. Today, you can literally carry whoever you want with you; all it takes is a charged phone and a good internet connection.

Even in love, everything has become accessible, fast, and immediate. Although, in this case, technology has certainly helped on one hand, but it has also brought negative sides. I know it’s not a trending topic on social media, but it is certainly a piece of our lives with which we struggle to find balance and peaceful coexistence.

Yes, indeed, today I am here to talk about dating apps. In what way have technology and dating apps changed the art of seduction and conquest? I really want to talk about it, because there are too many conflicting voices that drive me crazy.

My Personal Story.

I’ve been single for practically as long as I can remember. Perhaps even in my previous life—about which I know nothing—I am almost certain I was single. In this existence, I have never had a relationship, whether short or long-term. No woman has ever found me decent enough to say, "You know, maybe this male human being isn't so bad after all?"

Honestly, I’ve never understood this rejection from an entire sex toward me. Probably women consider me too ugly (or too stupid) to be true. Apparently, I am so ugly and dumb that I have a magnetic field that automatically repels women. I knew I wasn't a marvel of beauty and intelligence, but I didn't think I was repellent either. I was convinced I would eventually get an opportunity. Instead, nothing.

However, I’ve had success with gay men. For some reason, more than one gay man would have gladly opened his legs in the presence of my royal python (which isn't actually that much of a python). Too bad I’m straight, and I don’t know what to do with attention from gay men. Don't get me wrong, it's always nice to be appreciated, but I’d be happier if the ladies appreciated me. Instead, from that side of the world: total silence.

It took me a while to accept my ugliness and my stupidity. The biggest obstacle was clearing my mind of all those comments from other moms who always said, "What a handsome boy you are!" Perhaps I could have had a future with MILFs... unfortunately, I will never know.

At 35 years old, my ugliness and stupidity are part of me. I know I am aesthetically ugly and I know I will never have the chance to be with someone.

However, seeing how the world of relationships is going, my lack of beauty and intelligence are actually saving me, considering how many divorces, betrayals, and toxicities are present in many relationships. I am at a point in my life where I almost thank my ugliness and my brain for keeping me away from probable drama, massive trauma, huge loss of money, and months (if not years) of therapy.

But it wasn't always like this; for at least ten good years, from 2015 until shortly after the pandemic, I tried to find a girl for a serious relationship. The weapon I often used was social media (Instagram and Facebook primarily) and then dating apps. Why not try in person? Well, in the beginning, I was stupid... then I was just trying to avoid a stalking charge or public humiliation.

My experience with social media and dating apps was as follows: terrible. I never played a fun game with dating apps. The sequence of events is borderline grotesque: I would like, I would receive a like, I would write, and game over. For years I beat my head against the wall trying to understand the reason for this behavior. I know one might say to me, "Well, you said it yourself that you're ugly and stupid! What do you expect?" And that’s a great observation. That would be true if I were the only one in the world with this problem and all other men were coupled up or had a long list of women to call.

Then, however, I noticed how people of both sexes—even those objectively more beautiful than me—testified to the same difficulty and outcome. At that point, I told myself, "Then this thing is systematic!"

The question arises spontaneously: why are dating apps so damn complicated? Well, the apps are not complicated in themselves; the way they work is easy. It’s the people who use them who have turned everything into a foretold drama.

Access to the World.

Dating apps have one merit, which very quickly becomes a very powerful curse: access to the world. Let’s talk about the merit first and the curses later.

Dating from the Couch.

I’m not necessarily talking about the entire world—which is possible with apps like Tinder, though you have to pay—but about the personal world of every single person using these apps.

If we take, for example, our parents or our grandparents, the stories passed down are the same: you meet in person by chance, love at first sight, and two years later, marriage with children.

If you look at the moment of that first crossing of eyes, the meeting itself is pure chance. You couldn't have known that person would be there at that moment. So one could say, "That was destiny!" Not exactly.

Think about the "before." Before that meeting, our grandparents didn't have a large margin of choice. If you lived in a city and didn't move from there, it was unlikely you would meet people from other cities. Moreover, even if you moved elsewhere, the choice was always and in any case limited to the place where you were. If you were in a square, you could only "have access" to the people in that square, while those in other squares at that moment were not physically accessible to you.

Now, that leaving the house is no longer necessary. What you need is a smartphone, an app, a subscription. On that screen, you not only have access to your own square, but to other squares in your city, as well as in other cities. Once inside the app, you just have to move the profile on the screen to the right or left based on your feelings. Since we are talking about apps used worldwide, thousands if not millions of people use them. Which means you potentially have millions of matches.

The even better thing is that you don't have to go through that awkward phase where you don't know what to say. Before, you approached a person and hoped for the best. There was always the panic about looks, breath, what to say, how to stand, and what to do. In short, a psychodrama. Moreover, in those circumstances, there was always the danger of being attacked or pestered aggressively, as some people don't accept "no" as an answer. Now, with an app, all that unknown disappears entirely. Once there is a match, you write comfortably from your own couch, and then the other user has the time to get to know or ignore (as horrible as that may be) the other user. That risk no longer exists. Dating is an affair protected by a screen, at least in the beginning.

This widening of the range of action has two damaging side effects.

Extremely High Standards.

Imagine being in the past and being limited by our analog existence. Let’s say you have to choose among ten people you can't actually "choose." If you go out, you can't know who you'll meet. In this case, if you aren't lucky enough to find Prince Charming, you choose the "least worst" and live with your choice.

It happened like this until the advent of social media. A man or a woman, having a choice limited by location and lifestyle, could only choose from a certain number of people. Sure, they could wait until the right person arrived. Good observation, too bad society almost forced you to marry early, otherwise you had problems. Secondly, no one knew where that perfect person was. The risk of waiting forever was very high, so you took the least worst and it was fine that way, trying to change to suit the partner's tastes.

Now imagine being able to choose from a hundred thousand people. Here the music changes, and a lot. Now the choice is much wider and you can make an almost manic selection, going on a fastidious search for something that approaches our ideal of outward beauty. It is clear that the choice is certainly better than the previous one and you manage to live better with what you've decided.

Dating apps are allowing people to choose not between ten, not between a hundred, but between thousands of possible candidates. Consequently, with so much choice, the selection will be ruthless, because in our heads there is the idea that "among these people is the one I have always dreamed of!" At this point, you no longer look for the least worst, but truly for the princess in the tower or the Prince Charming.

No One Will Come.

We all know the beauty standards of the princesses to be saved and the Prince Charmings who save. Both can be defined with one word: impossible. Not a flaw, not a spot, not a smudge.

In the modern era, a woman must have extremely high physical standards and men must have extremely high economic standards. That’s it. We can deny it as much as we want, but in a man's head, the perfect woman is a physically attractive woman, and a woman almost always desires a man who provides financially and has a statuesque physique.

Quick question: how many on this planet are like this? No one, I’ll say it right now. Even the most beautiful person in the world burps, farts, sweats, and uses the toilet. Just these four habits bring the whole idea of perfection down to a human level. Unfortunately, this reasoning doesn't happen in our brains. When you are on dating apps, you only look at one thing: the images. Those perfect images of perfect people drive us crazy and make us scream, "Oh my God, this person is the one I've always wanted!" And we leave a like with great hopes.

What happens to the rest of the people, those who are close to or far from perfection, but are not perfect? Those are discarded, precisely because they are not perfect. Why settle for near-perfection when I can have the full package?

Just one wrong haircut, a less-than-perfect face, or a body that isn't completely lean, and you are discarded regardless. You have no idea how much this "race for perfection" can destroy a person. It goes without saying that if we aren't perfect, no one will see us, leaving us in that limbo where no one looks for us and no one sees us.

To Lie, Always and Anyway.

But we don’t want to remain in the shadows. We want to appear. We want to be that perfection, because that perfection is the only thing that works.

So we do the only thing we shouldn't do: search for perfection. Perfection is sought in two aspects: aesthetics and rhetoric.

Physical Appearance.

Dating apps are shop windows. What is judged is only the physical appearance of a person. So each of us does the only "sensible" thing—which isn't actually sensible—that we can do: correct the flaws.

Obviously, for both medical and logistical reasons, a touch-up from a plastic surgeon isn't possible. Also because it would be highly stupid to have your face cut up just to please someone who might not even return our sign of love (meaning the like). So we make the second most logical move: we retouch the photos.

At first, people used filters and apps to modify what they actually were. They changed the shape of the face, the body, the hands, and erased all those extra pounds with an eraser. Some photographic disasters appeared that made Alien look like Mr. Universe by comparison.

Or people chose to "play it safe" and hired a photographer. You hired someone expert in photography to create a portfolio of images worthy of dating apps, appearing the best you can possibly appear. And trust me, a good photographer really knows how to work miracles with a camera and a minimum of photo retouching with Photoshop. But it was expensive. A photographer asks for a lot, as they should, since they have to pay for a lot of stuff to live themselves.

Now, AI is used. With AI, you not only retouch photos for free and immediately, but you can create versions of yourself that do not exist. By now, AI is so evolved that it can create damn realistic versions of ourselves in unthinkable places. And so we have people who go skiing, do extreme sports, go to exotic places with the same frequency that Oliver Hutton scores, and eat in every possible restaurant. And these are the same people who, in real life, spend all day in front of the computer or lazing at home, and the only exotic thing they've seen is the Indian guy who delivered their food.

But this inventing a parallel life must not be too much. The aesthetic lie must enhance something that can be easily justified with a colossal lie that sounds truthful. It makes no sense to show yourself as an engineer or a lawyer when you know nothing about construction or law. But it’s easy to show yourself in Bali and then say you were there once years ago.

Character.

You can’t lie only halfway. If you do it, you have to do it well all the way. The photos are beautiful and catch the public's attention. But that is only the facade to attract flies into your web. When there is a match, people expect to talk. No one gives an opportunity to someone without having exchanged at least a couple of sentences. I’ve never heard of a person asking a match for a date with the first question and the other accepting. If you want a date—because at a certain point you also want eye contact—at that point, you must lie as if there were no tomorrow.

You must create a life for yourself that is appropriate to the image you give of yourself. But it must not be too much, to avoid being caught. The last thing you want is to create an image too distant from reality, perhaps incredibly phenomenal, and then get caught and lose all hope for a date. In the end, you want to get to know a person and maybe even go to bed with them.

Not only that, but you have to train in rhetoric. You must be able to say the right thing, at the right moment, in the right way. You must learn to flirt, be understanding, funny, charismatic, decisive, yet sweet and also romantic... all behind a screen, without non-verbal communication. It is truly a titanic undertaking.

Of course, you could be yourself, but to what end? It’s no use showing yourself for what you are. We are all boring. We want to be that perfect version not of ourselves, but of humanity in general. We want to make anyone fall at our feet with our words and make ourselves desired with our images.

Conclusion.

On dating apps, everyone lies. This is the ugly truth. Whether they retouch photos or create a non-existent life made of empty but damn well-chosen words. Is it sad? True, but it is the only thing that can be done, because having this or that flaw is not accepted. At least it is not accepted right away. Later it becomes something mandatory to accept if you want a relationship. At first, it is not accepted. The first exchange of words and the first date must be with someone perfect, who perfectly reflects our dreams of a Prince Charming or a princess in the castle. Then, in the long run, you necessarily have to compromise. Because the flaw will show up like taxes. Why it is accepted later, but not immediately, will remain a mystery to me.

Looking generally, dating apps aren't good for much: only for creating a fake image of oneself that, in the long run, will fall ruinously. Those sites are now used by people with the precise purpose of failing, because the trick and the deception will surely be unmasked. Every date you get already has the great handicap of being a date based on a lie, because both are conscious that the other has lied, whether with photos, with words, or both.

At this point, why use them? Because they are the safest way. Failure out there is horrible to endure. Too much responsibility, too little security, and too little personal ego. If you have to fail, better to do it in front of a screen. At least you don't humiliate yourself publicly. At that point, you just have to click on "unmatch" and everything is forgotten, as if it never happened. The same story goes for the breakup. There is a reason why it isn't dealt with face-to-face: too much responsibility, too little security, and too little personal ego.

Maybe now I understand why people in the past were happier in relationships: they were dealing with people with balls.

M.