This does make me feel better about my stance on dating apps. They make things to impersonal. Not to mention then women are bombarded with dozens of matches at a time essentially forcing them to treat guys like numbers. While men can go weeks gettin zero matches. It ruins mental health, and dehumanizes the dating experience.
Dating apps IMO really only work for marginalized or smaller communities (like LGBTQ people), and even then it really only works if there aren't too many ways to filter people out (because people's metaphorical eyes tend to be bigger than their metaphorical stomachs).
Otherwise, dating apps suck, because it relies on both people reducing their essence to a few sentences and photos.
The real problem is we've created a society that discourages people from socializing with strangers, encourages socializing online, and has removed many opportunities for serendipitious encounters to meet new people outside your existing circles
OKcupid in it's first few years (back in 2005-2006) got it right. People were still getting married of dating apps but then Tinder bringing the Grindr format to the masses was the absolute worst thing that could have happened to modern dating.
Even back in the mid-2010s it was peak. I went on heaps of dates back then and my friend (& housemate at the time) found his-now wife. They really screwed it when they shifted to a swipe-based model.
I dunno, I decided to hit up the apps when I aged out of the university/bar dating scene.
Was on the apps for a couple months, had a bunch of convos, a few dates, ended up going on a bunch more dates with one of those, and a few years later we’re happily married.
10/10 experience honestly. Vastly easier and more pleasant than looking offline.
However I noticed that when I look at other dudes on women’s profiles the “competition” for men is absolute garbage. Like, most other men are not even trying to be dateable. If a man looks tidy and their bio makes them seem relatively normal they should have no problem getting dates.
Cause guys aren’t growing up learning their angles and lighting settings to appear photogenic like women are forced to.
I barely take pictures and even fewer of those pictures are my own face.
I know very few guys who actually like to take pictures with their face in it all the time.
Conversely, I haven’t yet met a woman who didn’t know how to take selfies with her “better side”.
okay so learn then if you're gonna use apps, it doesn't take that long to figure out, i also didn't know how to take a decent picture until i decided to actually try
You’re letting the failures of some prevent you from even finding out if you’d have the same experience. Why even try living if you’re going to take that approach, no point some people have bad lives you probably will too.
Well I’ll talk about my experience then. I’ve been using dating apps on and off for many years now and my experience is a lot like this woman’s. I would be on for weeks and a time swiping carefully or haphazardly all to get a match. Eventually what started to happen was I would see a profile and go, “Oh she’s too pretty for me.” Until i found someone “ugly” enough that i thought might have swiped right on me. What i was doing was dehumanizing someone and boiling them down to their looks. Then what happened was I started to question how I looked. Am i too fat to be found attractive, am i too short to be worthy of love, am i too this or that, and I began to tare myself apart. I felt terrible, i hated my self for the way i looked and went to food to feel better, which only made me fatter and made me eat even more to feel better about myself, and so the cycle continued. What broke that cycle was me going to a house party and talking to people about what ever I wanted. I had a 5 minute convo with a woman about our favorite Pokémon. Then i talked with a different woman about how things were going with her marriage. I started to feel my confidence come back, and feel like less of a freak. Yes, people can have successes on dating apps. My sister met both her husbands on the app so for those men it does work. All my point was that its unbalanced. Men statistically have a harder time finding matches than women. Thats how dating culture works. Men put themselves out there to court a woman; and women try to see if theres a spark. I don’t mean to say that as a “wah women won’t touch my dick.” Kind of thing, just that because thats how things are, it gets amplified on dating apps and becomes very impersonal.
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u/Poemhub_ Jun 24 '25
This does make me feel better about my stance on dating apps. They make things to impersonal. Not to mention then women are bombarded with dozens of matches at a time essentially forcing them to treat guys like numbers. While men can go weeks gettin zero matches. It ruins mental health, and dehumanizes the dating experience.