I think online dating has ruined dating

Let me start with a disclaimer, because the internet reads titles like it reads a menu at 2am: badly, and while already ordering.

I am not saying romance is dead. I am not saying every couple who met on Hinge is doomed to end up posting a joint dog account and then divorce-arc'ing on TikTok in 2029. I am saying something much smaller and much more annoying:

The infrastructure we built for dating is quietly incompatible with the thing dating is supposed to be.

That's the whole essay. The rest is just receipts.

What dating used to be (with rose-tinted goggles fully on)

Before the apps, dating had one big, ugly, redeeming feature: friction.

You met someone at a party, at work, in a queue, at a wedding, through a friend who inexplicably knew a guy who "made his own kombucha" — and you had to actually deal with them being a full three-dimensional human standing in front of you. You couldn't Cmd+F them for red flags. You couldn't cross-reference their bookshelf with their Spotify with their step-brother's LinkedIn.

You just had… vibes. And time. And usually one very specific pub.

Was it efficient? God no. Was it fair? Also no — dating pre-apps was a spectacular postcode lottery. Apps did genuinely widen the pool, especially for anyone queer, disabled, remote, shy, or over 30 in a small town. That part is real, and it matters.

But here is what we quietly traded away.

The apps didn't just digitise dating. They gamified it.

The moment you turn any human behaviour into a swipe, you're no longer in the "meeting people" business. You're in the slot machine business.

The mechanics are almost embarrassing when you spell them out:

• Variable reward. You don't know when the next match will hit, so you keep pulling the lever.
• Loss aversion. Every un-swiped profile is a potential soulmate you're "wasting." So you keep swiping.
• Sunk cost. You paid for a subscription. You will squeeze value out of this month if it kills you and it will, a little.
• Optionality bias. With 400 unread matches, why would you invest properly in the one in front of you? The next one is right there.

None of this is a moral failing. It's just what happens when you take a thing humans are already anxious about and wrap it in casino UX. You cannot design "hot single 800m away" as a scrollable feed and then be surprised that people scroll it like a feed.

Choice overload: the "I'll keep looking" bug

There's a very old psychology finding — jam on a supermarket shelf. Give people 6 jams, most buy one. Give them 24, most walk away. More options, more paralysis, less satisfaction with whatever you eventually pick.

Now apply that to human beings.

The result is a generation of daters who are simultaneously exhausted and unable to commit. Not because they're heartless (mostly), but because the app has trained a very specific instinct:

> "There is always someone slightly better one more swipe away."

This is fine when you're picking jam. It is catastrophic when you're picking whether to be vulnerable with another human. It's the reason perfectly nice third dates get ghosted for reasons nobody, including the ghoster, can actually name.

We call it "the ick" now. Sometimes it's a real incompatibility. Sometimes it's just your brain, mid-tab, refusing to close the other 47 tabs.

The profile-industrial complex

The moment dating became a marketplace, people became products. And products need packaging.

Enter:

• The prompt written by a Google Doc committee of your three funniest friends.
• The 6 photos, one of which is legally required to feature a dog you do not own.
• The height, in centimetres, adjusted for storytelling.
• The "6'4 because apparently that matters" that started as a joke and is now a Zillow listing.

We're not showing up as ourselves. We're showing up as a pitch deck for ourselves. And then we're shocked when the first date doesn't match the pitch deck. That's not catfishing. That's just marketing.

Meanwhile, the actual attractive stuff — how someone laughs at their own jokes, whether they're kind to waiters, the exact way they say "no worries" when they mean the opposite — none of that fits in a Hinge prompt. So it gets filtered out by a system that literally cannot see it.

Situationships are not a moral crisis. They're a UX bug.

Everyone loves to blame Gen Z for the situationship. "They can't commit." "They have no emotional vocabulary." "They think a shared Spotify playlist is a marriage proposal."

Look, some of that is true. But the situationship isn't a values problem. It's an environment problem.

If the app you met on:

1. Has 40 more "options" waiting for both of you,
2. Rewards ambiguity (no label = no risk to your other matches),
3. Treats deleting the app as a bigger commitment than saying "I love you,"

…then the situationship is not an anomaly. It is the factory setting. Everyone is dating in the middle lane because the app has removed most of the exits.

The bit where I stop dunking on the apps

Because it would be very stupid to pretend the apps are all bad.

• They gave millions of people access to a dating pool they'd never have found otherwise.
• They saved people from small towns, bad families, wrong friend groups.
• They made it dramatically easier to filter for the one or two dealbreakers that actually matter to you.
• They made "shooting your shot" less physically terrifying, which is arguably a public health win.

The apps are not the villain. The way we use them is the villain, and honestly, the way they use us is a bigger villain.

The apps make money when you stay single-but-searching. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a Q4 earnings call.

So what do we actually do?

I don't have a five-step framework. Anyone who says they do is selling you a course.

But if I had to write the survival guide on a napkin, it would say:

• Cap the pipeline. Talking to more than 3 people at once is not "keeping your options open." It's admin. Nobody has ever fallen in love inside a spreadsheet.
• Get off the app faster. If a chat has been going for more than 4 days without a plan to meet, one of you is bored and the other is a bot. Either is a reason to stop.
• Judge the person, not the pitch deck. Photos lie. Prompts lie. First dates lie a little. Third dates lie less. Trips lie almost never.
• Stop treating "the ick" as gospel. Some icks are real red flags. Some icks are your brain trying to protect you from being seen. Learn the difference. (We literally built a quiz that helps you figure that out. Yes, that was an ad. Sorry.)
• Remember that "next" is not a strategy. Sooner or later, you have to actually stop swiping and start dating a real, imperfect, occasionally annoying human. That's the whole thing. That's dating.

The point

Online dating hasn't ruined love. Love is fine. Love is doing great, actually, if you look at any random Sunday in any random park.

What online dating has ruined is the middle bit — the part between "I noticed you" and "we're a thing." That middle bit used to have coffee, small talk, awkward eye contact, and a slightly-too-long silence that turned into something. Now that middle bit has notifications, ghosting, three ongoing chats and a mild feeling of being auditioned.

That's not romance. That's a job interview with worse lighting.

So no, I don't think we should delete the apps. I think we should stop pretending they're neutral. They have opinions about how you should behave, and most of those opinions are bad for you.

Use them like you use Deliveroo: when you need them, on your terms, without letting them convince you that scrolling is eating.

Dating still works. It's just that these days, most of the work is un-doing what the app taught you to do in the first place.

Rob & the Ickmeter team