Gemma Spake

dating apps seem to be the only way to date.

No one's meeting in person anymore.

The meet cute is dead.

People meeting through friends is like a faraway fantasy.

How do you operate in that system when you're still a hopeless romantic, but the dating apps just feel so pointless?

When you want your love story, but it's like, I've been at this for a while.

When is it going to be me?

How do we survive the dating apps?

when again it feels like the only option left despite knowing deep down it's basically turned dating into a game.

This is something as I said a lot of my friends are going through right now even our researcher Libby is dealing with this like pessimism even the phrase dealing with like that's very indicative of the type of conversations we've been having but she was in London the other day we were having dinner and she raised this really crucial point that dating apps

don't want you to win, regardless of, like, the catchy taglines, designed to be deleted, whatever it is.

Like, they're a business.

They want you swiping for as long as possible, the same way social media apps want you scrolling for as long as possible.

Because of this, because of this system they're set into, a business system, I think I've noticed a lot more people experiencing what I call dating burnout because of how the apps are structured.

Like, it's so...

exhausting that people are kind of giving up hope i actually saw a really interesting article titled what i wish i knew before dating at 20 by this guy called aiden and in the article he talks about how what the apps base our choices off of who they show us who they think we'll like is actually completely shallow we put so much trust in these algorithms but you know to be in a long-term relationship if that's what you're after

You have to be really open-minded.

You have to be curious.

You have to be able to navigate conflict.

You have to have similar values.