Dating app fatigue and our rush to change what we don’t like

We have decided to tackle every ailment under the sun, and so now we have even coined the term ‘dating app fatigue’. We are witnessing the (exclusively heterosexual) collapse of dating apps. Tinder and its sister apps arrived at the dawn of the 2010s, and I honestly thought they were a good thing. We had already been introduced to the world as we know it today—one in which we live predominantly, or largely, online—and matchmaking apps were an interesting solution. They were supposed to set us free, and for a while they did. A free dating agency for everyone: four photos, a couple of lines, and the market was open. For many, it represented one of the greatest revolutions. For centuries, human pairing—setting aside the legendary mutual love at first sight (the unicorn) and serendipity that happen to zero-point-something per cent of us—depended heavily on how good a social manager you had been. To put it better: how good had you been at creating wide circles of good friends, acquaintances and mutually magnetic interests? How large a circle of people were you able to build around yourself? That was the magic formula; your chances of falling in love profitably depended on it (a prayer for me, living in the remote provinces of Benevento: nothing ever happened at the convent, and I was also a homebody and lazy).

It was always the same seven of us; if you wanted to meet new people, you had to get in the car, drive to Naples and hope very hard that you’d find a parking space. So when social media focused on relationships came along, I gave that new form of matchmaking a big thumbs-up. Research by Michael Rosenfeld, based on a national US sample, showed that among heterosexual couples, meeting online had overtaken meeting through friends around 2013 and had become the most common way of getting to know one another. Users could open Tinder and encounter individuals they would otherwise never have met; the pool of potential partners expanded; the stigma attached to these ‘matchmaking’ apps diminished; and marginalised groups gained opportunities that had previously been unthinkable. Fifteen years after that shift, however, dating apps have fallen out of use, and the few who still employ them often express regret: the platforms have become havens for what users term “animals,” “human cases,” “misfits,” and assorted aberrations. Complaints are widespread—enough is enough, many argue—and the services are now deemed unfit for civilized interaction.

One might well ask what happened – probably nothing much; it was just the usual contemporary nagging doubt: the idea that if an obstacle is removed, we assume all the difficulty has vanished. Those apps were merely an interruption in the logistical cycle of the whole process. They remove one part, but the human troubles of relationships remain; falling in love is exactly the same as it was before. It mostly goes wrong, whether it’s the 1980s or the 1990s, with or without the internet; the endeavour is a gruelling struggle. And so they’ve called it – shirking responsibility – ‘dating-app fatigue’. Research studies (sic!) describe exhaustion, a sense of ineffectiveness, saturation, chronic disappointment and overload. Users progress from an initial phase of enthusiasm to a routine that feels like a second, unpaid job: choosing, evaluating, messaging, replying, disappearing, and then starting all over again. Given the increased possibilities, did we really expect the right choice to be handed to us on a plate, to never make a blunder and never be disappointed?

There is little value in reiterating the familiar litany about generational traits – that they are either ‘poor things!’ or ‘too fragile’; both assessments are true, and the issue is not going to be resolved. Instead, another persistent concern is taking hold, one that seeks to model expectations in relationships on those of consumerism: ‘Give me what I want straight away, exactly as I ask for it.’ If I do not like a film, I switch to another one in thirty seconds. I send the trousers back to the online retailer; if the taxi takes too long, I cancel the journey. Ours is an environment built entirely on instant reversibility, yet people do not work like that – even if you run them through the ‘red flag’ metal detector, as is the fashion these days, you will still get it wrong. Love takes time; it can often be dreadful, and mediocre too. Our love stories will depend on how much time we decide to spend waiting patiently for them to unfold. And the places where chance encounters used to happen have dwindled. Meeting someone naturally has become an enormous favour to ask of fate: friends of friends have better things to do, and we hardly ever go out. Today, part of that twentieth-century social network has evaporated because we work from home; the cinema is on the sofa, and so is the WhatsApp ‘café’. We need to face up to the fact that the ‘chance encounter’ we love so much has become the least realistic possibility of all.