Swipeout

Afew weeks after a recent breakup, I hesitantly opened up the App Store and started the renewal ritual of modern dating: reinstalling the apps. This was once exciting, the start of an adventure. But this time, seeing progress bars slowly load, I was filled with dread. I knew I wanted to date again — just on a version of the apps that no longer existed.

Lately, nearly every conversation with single friends and strangers and those in open relationships descends into collective mourning about the abysmal state of the apps. When I'm out at dinner, getting my hair cut, or even taping a recent podcast for work, the same complaints come back: They're expensive, exhausting, manipulative, and overrun with scams.

I feel betrayed. I've been on dating sites and apps for the past 17 years. Online dating not only allowed me to meet some of the most important people in my life but also let me learn that I could truly find love, something I long doubted was possible. When they first worked, they made it effortless, even thrilling, to find people I thought I'd never be able to find. Now, trudging through the apps feels draining.

Online dating always had its toxic side, especially for women dating men. When I share dating horror stories with my female friends, as a straight guy, there's no comparison. Even on my worst day — like the night I ended up in a not-so-romantic Uber with a white supremacist whose comments were so appalling I left a 200% tip for the driver forced to overhear them — it's never as bad as the abuse women routinely face. Still, as fortunate as I feel with most aspects of dating, the apps I and tens of millions of us rely on to find dates increasingly leave me feeling invisible, exploited, and ripped off.

When I first stumbled onto the dating white pages that were Match.com in 2007, I had spent most of my life feeling undateable. I felt awkward, overly cerebral, offtrack, underperforming, out of shape — entirely undesirable. I didn't date in high school, and my one try in college ended in disaster.

But when I was 23, a nerdy meet-cute changed my thinking. It was my first summer in DC, when I was trying and failing to live out some sort of "West Wing" fantasy of working in politics. That June, I found myself at that annual festival of Beltway wonkery, the Congressional Baseball Game. An overheard comment about constitutional law led to a conversation with a congressional intern in front of me. It was love at First Amendment. What followed was a summer of word games, Washington adventures, and clumsily learning how to date. Our relationship was wonderful, but it didn't outlive the internship. This brief romance, however, taught me that, as unlikely as it felt, there were people interested in dating me.

But where to find them? I was too shy to ever ask out strangers at a bar, my self-esteem was too low to think colleagues or friends were interested, and I was terrified that I'd make an unwanted advance in a social setting, at work, or at school that would make someone feel uncomfortable around me forever. Online dating gave me the clarity to feel comfortable finally asking women out, a meeting place where there was no ambiguity about what we sought.

And I wasn't alone in craving that clarity, even if dating platforms still had a patina of ick. A 2003 New York Times headline read "Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com" before damning internet romantics with dim praise like, "Online dating, once viewed as a refuge for the socially inept and as a faintly disrespectable way to meet other people, is rapidly becoming a fixture of single life." By 2007, Match had more than 42 million users. Out of countless dating sites, Match was the only one with the scale to run TV ads with celebrities like Dr. Phil (which, shockingly, wasn't a red flag at the time).

Logging in to mid-aughts-era Match, I saw a world of pixelated possibilities, so many women so close by. It was electrifying, and I felt my mind mired in infinite possibilities.

I turned to the filters, crudely defining who met my criteria, and who didn't. And I saw how wildly those criteria shifted with how I felt about myself. On days I brimmed with self-confidence, say after a win at work, I messaged the women who excited me most. I still messaged them expecting rejection but hoping rejection from afar would hurt less. More often, I filtered them out, caving to the doubt they were too good to settle for me.

Filtering was frustrating. As I looked for matches, the list seemed both too broad and too narrow. Take religion. I didn't care which faith they listed. What I cared about was their empathy and openness to my own strange mix of secularism, Judaism, and ambivalent agnosticism. But there's no checkbox for curiosity and kindness. Often, what mattered most to me (intellect, humor, and nerdiness) fell outside Match's categories. Still, I begrudgingly accepted the crude factors that did matter to me (education level, proximity, and body type), and I dove into the novellas that were Match.com dating profiles.

It's incredible just how much we all wrote. Beyond the basics — relationship status, politics, education, smoking, and drinking — profiles detailed everything from income to preferred industries. And that was before the lengthy biographical essays. I look back at my own bio in horror. Perhaps it's my failed nonchalance: "I enjoy traveling, but my trips have generally been confined to Western Europe. I want to explore the Middle East and Asia in the coming years." Or my not-so-suave show of culture: "I play guitar and a couple other instruments, and I'm trying to figure out the DC art scene." I tried so hard to show I was interesting that I never thought about how off-putting my pretension was.

This early online matchmaking flooded users with possibilities and gave us the tools to at least try to make sense of it. And in many ways, for a young, awkward nerd like me, it was perfect. How I handled the dates themselves, less so. My early efforts fit what I called "the rule of threes": Three messages averaged one response, three responses averaged one date, three dates averaged one second date, and three second dates averaged a third. It wasn't an exact pattern, but in my three years of DC dating, I had only one third date. She politely declined a fourth.

Those early dates were as awkward as they were indispensable. Even as I felt stuck professionally and doubted I could ever reach the future I wanted, I found the reservoir of confidence to comfortably talk to strangers. I learned a whole set of social skills that it felt like other people just magically knew. Still, the sting of serial rejection took its toll, telling me that my self-hatred and despair were right all along. When friends tried to cheer me up, I'd respond that I had the dataset to prove them wrong.

When I left DC for law school, I abandoned online dating. The first year, it was for school itself. I started in 2010, at the nadir of the post-financial-crisis legal market, and I was terrified I'd end up unemployable. For the first time in my life, I took school seriously, and shut everything else out. With no shortage of luck, I aced my exams and even transferred to Harvard Law. After all those years adrift in DC, I felt like I was back on track.

My second year, I stayed offline for a very different reason: I fell in love with one of my classmates.

It was a tumultuous time. She was way smarter than me, indescribably cool, and somehow in love with me. But she was also unstable, unfaithful, and self-destructive. When I ended our relationship in 2012, she attempted suicide. After I rushed her unconscious body to the ER, I spent the first week of our breakup ferrying care packages to her locked hospital ward. (We hadn't spoken for a few years when I found out in 2020 that she had taken her own life, leaving this world a deeply diminished place. The news gutted me.)

I spent some time alone after things ended, but by the end of 2012, I was ready to re-embrace online dating. Partly it was my law-school success and fancy-schmancy job offer. Those pretentious labels let me see beneath the self-loathing and believe in the best of myself. But it was also the intense validation that a second person — against all my expectations — fell in love with me. I began to believe I could find more than fleeting connection on the apps. I actually hoped for love.

But the dating world I was tiptoeing back into was not the same. Tinder had arrived, the swipe era had been born, and dating would never be the same. After years of stagnation, the dating-app market went into a frenzy of growth, and by 2013, online dating was the most common way for straight couples to meet. It wasn't just popular; it was cool.

Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist and the author of "Tell Me What You Want" (and, full disclosure, my cousin), said, "The past decade has transformed our attitudes towards online dating." Weber added that her clients often "compare it to online shopping — no store hours, endless possibilities, a sense of potential." She said that "though the apps claim to promote transparency, this is often performative, driving deception that strains trust and undermines genuine connection."

With Tinder, my shift in dating psychology was almost immediate. Instead of laboring over lengthy replies to thoughtful profiles, I swiped on a whim. After the traumatic intensity of my relationship, it was a relief to connect with such low stakes. It started as a fun game, a parade of pings bombarding my brain with dopamine. Dating went from a deliberative and often taxing task to the background noise of my life.

These early Tinder days were deeply imperfect. Appification meant even less intentionality, and constant interaction meant constant potential for disappointment. Still, Tinder made it just as easy to disconnect as it was to connect. Swiping became Tinder's brand, but leveraging Facebook logins was just as important to its success. Connecting profiles to our existing digital lives dramatically eased fears about meeting a stranger online. Within a few years, my fellow millennials and I were reportedly spending 10 hours a week on dating apps. But for me, that time felt well spent.

Sure, not every date was life-changing, but I connected with some of the most incredible people I've known. On Match, I went on a date every week or two. On Tinder, every night or two.

Tinder and the other apps let me authentically navigate the dating world as my best self, and even find love. Occasionally, I would try to look at how unrecognizable my life had become from the awkward young man floundering and filtering profiles on his laptop with ever-fading hopes. Despite its dysfunction, despite its dangers, that was a gift online dating gave me and millions of others.

At times, though, the breeziness of swiping let me be too thoughtless with my date's wants and needs. We all crave to be the hero of our own narrative, but I'm sure there are times when I've played villain, avoiding hard conversations, ignoring incompatibilities, and ending serious relationships all too abruptly. After I'd spent so many years craving affection, it was easy for me to front-load my vulnerability, to dive in heart-first, even when I doubted our long-term potential. I recreated the same failed cycle over and over again: falling too quickly, denying the problem, and running away more quickly still. The apps control so much of how we meet new people, but they don't control whether we let ourselves fall short with those we already know.

As the app experience changed, the online dating industry remained surprisingly stagnant. When I switched to Tinder, I thought I was leaving Match behind, but the company was quietly orchestrating its merger-based metastasization into the matchmaking monopoly known today as the Match Group. This multi-billion dollar behemoth not only owns match.com and Tinder, but OKCupid, Meetic, Hinge, Pairs, Plenty of Fish, BLK, The League, and a total of more than 45 dating brands. It feels like there are constantly more apps, but fewer choices and those choices are getting worse.

Ironically, as the apps get more common, they're getting less popular. A growing number ofAmericans dislike the apps, with the ratings notably lower for women — but a majority of single people still use them. And while dating companies have been raking in billions, more than $5 billion in 2023 alone, the growth is slowing.

It turns out dating apps face a unique barrier to success: The more effective your app is, the less profitable it becomes. People pay to find a partner, and once you find one, the app loses your business. Sure, many seek ethical nonmonogamy or to cheat, but that's a niche market. The leading nonmonogamous, kink-positive dating app, Feeld, reached $35 million in annual revenue this summer. Match Group earns 100 times as much.

"Dating apps are designed to be a miserable experience," Stephanie Rodgers, the founder of the forthcoming dating app Verb, said. They "have little incentive to make dating more efficient — they need people to fail in order to get them to spend more money (and time) on the apps," she added. Rodgers seeks to avoid her competitors' fate of constant customer churn with a platform for planning both dates when single and date nights when partnered.

This is what my friends and I feel: manipulation by software whose goal is to keep you just interested enough to swipe but make it hard to find a lasting partner. That's the painful paradox of online dating. I've met so many of the people I love there, but the app draws out that process as long as it can to boost Match Group's profits.

Increasingly, it feels like dating apps make things more monotonous and cumbersome to incentivize us to pay for upgrades. They're like an airline that makes basic economy as awful as possible to twist our arms so we buy business class. Some apps, like Raya, cloak themselves in an air of exclusivity, screening applicants with unspecified criteria that are adjudicated by an anonymous review committee. The effect helps make members feel like it's a privilege to pay the high monthly membership fee. (Full disclosure: My own Raya application languished on their waitlist.)

The most visible gamification comes from Hinge, which markets itself as "designed to be deleted." But Hinge's reality varies widely from the sales pitch. Hinge lets you swipe on your algorithmically generated list of "compatible" users. But it also markets a second tab of "standout" profiles the algorithm thinks you'll like even more. But swiping on these locked profiles requires sending a digital "rose" that Hinge sells for up to $5 apiece. Frustrated users nickname this tab "Rose Jail," complaining that you'll never delete the app if you're walled off from the people you really want to run away from digital dating with. And even worse, often those in "Rose Jail" don't actively use the app, meaning that Hinge makes you pay to send a message it knows will likely never be seen.

And while dating apps' cost in terms of harassment, threats, and violence is paid disproportionately by women, its financial cost is disproportionately paid by men. Increasingly, we're left feeling invisible if we don't pay. It can be both demoralizing and expensive. I found my own dating-app budget swinging wildly with my mood. Feeling lonely or sad, I might pay $5 or $10 to "boost" my profile, looking for added visibility and validation.

I found myself boosting my self-esteem after a dismal date in September. After briefly bantering with an Upper East Side writer on Tinder, we planned for cocktails in midtown. Something was off when we texted to confirm the day of, especially the curt "Ok" when I texted I was running five minutes late. I sprinted from Grand Central, hoping I wouldn't overheat in my cream-colored sweater, arriving exactly at 6 after all. Our entire date was this: I said it was nice to see her. She stared at me blankly. I joked, "It's been one of those chaotic workdays where I could use a cocktail, if you know what I mean?" Visibly upset, she said, "No, I don't, and I'm not going to waste either of our time." She left me stunned on the couch, next to her $13 sparkling water. When I paid for her bottle, the check said 6:03. I honestly will never understand what happened. On the train retreating back to Brooklyn bruised and bemused, I paid for every boost I saw.

Most dating-app subscriptions aren't that much on their own, but add $10 to $30 a month for unlimited swipes, a litany of gamified add-ons, and it all adds up. In one month, altogether, the cost could easily be hundreds of dollars — not the cost of going on dates, not the cost of getting to know someone, but the cost of simply bribing the app to let me be seen. In the end, I'm just a boy, swiping on a girl, bribing the algorithm to like me.

I expect this vicious business cycle to be a dating-app disaster in the long run. The more these platforms charge, the more people will leave, and the more people leave, the more desperate dating sites will be to charge even more. In its most recent annual report, Match Group highlighted that it boosted profits in the Americas by 7%. But the company actually lost 7% of its paying customers at the same time, and it made up for that only by charging the remaining users more.

With more and more singles getting increasingly fed up with the apps, there's a surge of interest in alternatives. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, I constantly see ads taped to streetlights and buildings for dating meetups. Singles running clubs saw huge turnouts for runs where single runners wore a designated color. I've even tried speed dating.

Analog alternatives are a wonderful change of pace from the apps' cold efficiency. Still, it's hard to go back after swiping. Apps give us so many options that we often build up a laundry list of what we need for compatibility. "Dating apps invite idealizations," as Weber puts it. "Real life is messier." Meeting in person, we learn so much that can't be captured in a dating profile, but I still find it so much harder.

Soul-sucking as the apps are, I still love my love life and I'm still swiping. Even if I feel at war with the algorithms trying to shake me down, I'm amazed at the incredible people I meet. It's costly and exhausting, but it's still my best way to connect. And as I've grown older and my focus has progressed from casual dating to love, to building lasting partnership and family, I still find myself swiping the same apps.

A week ago, I woke up grumpy from a bad date and the misguided swiping afterward and went for a run to try to shake it off. About a mile in, a vision of my younger self looking at my life today appeared, and it nearly stopped me cold. Navigating the dating world comfortably as myself, feeling confident in my own skin, finding love and connection — it would have felt delusional to the young me on Match all those years ago.

I want to hold on to that feeling, that appreciation, as long as I'm searching in the digital wilderness for partnership. It's so easy to burn out on the apps, become jaded, even treat people as disposable. Dating apps can bring that out in me, too, but I hope that the memory of everything I've felt in the past will let me be ever more intentional when dating in the future.

Albert Fox Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP, a New York-based civil-rights and privacy group.