Numb Out With Me Forever

Online dating is depressing for a lot of people.

For some, I imagine, online dating is depressing because it makes their low social value immediately and objectively apparent. Men often complain that the most attractive women on these sites don’t want anything to do with them and ignore their messages, making them feel undesirable, invisible, and worthless. This obviously makes them very sad, as though they felt owed something. Oh well.

But there’s this whole other problem with online dating that I don’t think gets talked about very much and it has to do with the sheer inhumanity of it. While I’ve never been a fan of Tinder, I’ve been using Bumble off and on since its inception not because I like it but because, truthfully, there is no alternative. People give you all kinds of terrible dating advice, but after two decades of volunteering, I have never met a single man my age doing it. I have never “met cute” a single guy at a blood drive. And going to a bar alone as a young woman, as anyone will remind you, ranks up there with perms and cutting your own bangs on the list of bad ideas.

So back to online dating. There really is a monopoly in the online dating market. The only apps that can even function as servicable dating apps are the ones that can amass a large pool of users. So no matter how much better or more humanely the alternatives may be designed, they can’t compete with Bumble’s userbase, making them functionally useless to anyone.

I’ve also, as I’ve written before, used Hinge, which has in recent years tried to “slow down” the dehumanizing swipe-reject reflex by requiring that its users answer three reflective prompts that lend their profiles greater dimensionality than would just a handful of photos.

This sounds great in theory but in practice makes the whole experience ironically all the more depressing. You’d think, as I’m sure Hinge’s UI design team did, that such prompts would work to humanize and individualize the users, providing the profile with just a few personal details that could transform a photo into a real person. It is, after all, why so many people prefer using OKCupid despite its shallower userpool: detail in a profile is of critical importance to anyone who isn’t a purely superficial asshole. If attraction is determined by more than physical arousal then, yeah, you’re going to need more than a photo to want to go on a date with this person, especially if you’ve found that most first dates off made of dating apps are boring and often even dangerous.

But none of the apps, not even OKCupid, can really get men to invest more than a few thoughtless seconds in answering these prompts, if they even try at all. This is, I’m sure, because most men fail to see the utility of it since their tacit objective on these apps is, actually, to be very superficial. The apps succeed in large part not because they help people meet each other but because they provide men with lots of visually stimulating pictures of ostensibly sexually available women to look at. Neat.

Anyway, so my point is that being on these apps bursts any optimistic delusions you might have about the population of single men your age within a fifty-mile radius. Even if these men are truthfully delightful in real life, their impression made on their neighbors (who happen to be single women using these apps) is generally poor, even at times alarmingly so. The low level of effort imparted not just in the messages sent but in the construction of profiles, their presentation of self to others, leaves the viewer wondering, “is this it?”

Oh, reader, it’s bleak. My experience with online dating has—I’ll absolutely admit it—driven me to despair. Flicking through so many men’s profiles, observing the emergent themes, noting the basic tropes and repeated clichés, it kills every creative, expansive part of your soul a little more each day.

That online dating is so geographically specific now, so largely determined by your actual GPS coordinates, raises in my mind the questions of what it means to be neighborly in a world going to complete shit. After all, I was raised by Mister Rogers’ flavorwave of Christian punk to seek out in my neighbors the love of God. And wow, holy of holies, here’s now this app that shows me all the young, ostensibly Christian men who live and work within a ten-mile radius of me. What luck! What an excellent time to be alive and in search of a likeminded partner.

Or so you’d think, if you lived in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.

Online dating makes it apparent that proximity only weakly corresponds to compatability. We have gradually and then all at once become unmoored as individuals, each of us living in our own privatized bubbles of consumption and choice, unanchored to any community that might give our lives cohesiveness and coherence.

And so we’re left to guess at what we’d have in common with strangers our own age and for most people it’s syndicated comedies, like Seinfeld and The Office. For lack of anything else more meaningful to hold us together, these have become the cultural touchstones of our modern way of life.

Like I said, bleak AF.

But you can only really have these thoughts in private. This is, after all, our new democracy, the freedom to watch whatever you want until you die. No one has time to read books, you elitist cunt, how dare you expect anything else. No wonder you’re single. Who could stand you.