Gemma Spake

I remember one of my friends looking through my hinge once and being like, every single one of these photos, you're only showing the left side of your face.

And like, you don't have a single body photo.

These photos all look the same.

And they genuinely were like the exact same photo, just in a different font.

And I hadn't even realized.

This is called, in psychology, unconscious impression management.

And it's the ways we try to control how we're perceived without even realizing it, mainly due to our own self-objectification and our own self-monitoring.

It's like the same principle behind why people body check or people always gravitate towards certain colors or types of clothes or they don't smile with all their teeth displayed, weird things like that.

We all do them, by the way, we all do them.

Dating apps, this is like one of the only times in life where we really get to choose how we're going to be perceived.

That sounds like great news, but also at times it can mean projecting someone

we're not and actually projecting a version of us that is worse than who we actually are because we're trying to hide insecurities that other people don't even notice other people love about us so get your friends to choose your dating app photos get them to arrange them even just give them like a selection of like 30 or 40 and you just see the difference it's it's insane

Okay, tip number five, probably my favorite tip of them all, don't stop meeting people in real life.

Dating apps work as a tool for meeting people.

They shouldn't be your only solution for romantic interaction.

I've noticed online a lot of discourse around how people are now leaving the dating apps in like droves for in-person meetups, for speed dating nights, for dating trivia nights, simply because it's absolutely exhausting to do all that work and never actually meet people.

In the UK specifically, in the UK specifically, there was an online report that documented how there have been major declines in the usage of dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble compared to the previous year.

There was also a 2025 study done by researchers in Germany who basically interviewed all these people and found really high signs of dating app fatigue with a lot of participants feeling like they were really worn down by dating

repetitive interactions by unclear intentions by how emotional it was to just have all these like these tiny mini connections with people that went nowhere I honestly think a lot of people are mainly sick of like the transactional nature of it all it's like all trends or all cultural phenomena there's always a counterculture after a while after things have kind of settled or been the norm for a bit

There's always going to be this point where people are like, wait, that thing we had before was actually really, really good.