An Unexpected Defence of Dating Apps

The unabridged story of how we met

My great grandparents met on a bridge. I would love to tell you the whole story but I’m not sure there’s anyone still alive who knows it, so I will make it up for us. It was the early 1930s so in my imagination it is, of course, black and white.

He is wearing a long coat and a hat, she has her hair tightly curled and stockinged feet in T-bar shoes. They are walking towards each other, coyly making and dropping eye contact, passing, and, of course, both turning to look back at the same time. They are sheepish, she giggles into her hand. Or perhaps they are both rushing, not looking where they are going, bump into each other and then the orchestra plays the strings as their eyes meet and jaws drop. Perhaps he runs after her “excuse me miss, can I take you for tea? Can I call on you? Can I write to you?”

I thought the very first person I matched with on a dating app was The One. I thought I was so lucky, that it was all turning out so conveniently for me. In my defence, although I was 29 I hadn’t been single since I was 21, so I still had a very young adult approach to dating. Needless to say, it didn’t work out and in the aftermath where I mourned it very much like I was still in secondary school I made a pronouncement: no more apps. My great-grandparents met on a bridge, and that was how I’d meet my person too.

Unfortunately for me, this was a winter lockdown and meeting strangers on a bridge was pretty much illegal. And so, back to the apps I went.

I am not here going to argue that my experience on dating apps was nourishing and wholesome and an all round rosy time of my life. They are, of course, godforsaken places; a coliseum of posturing and false hope and abandonment. A man once described a sexual fantasy to me on a dating app that was not-even-technically rape, which I say just to be clear that I don’t have any rose-tinted glasses when it comes to the apps (and also to be clear, I didn’t meet up with him).

However, I am just old enough to remember the dating apps we had before dating apps: they were called bars. We used to go out to them to meet members of the opposite sex under the pretence that we were having fun with our friends.

Just-about-matching slicks of liquid eyeliner, hairspray scrunched into crunchy hair, a skirt (short), a top (low), heels put on at the last minute, glasses of lambrini/gin and lemonade/white Zinfandel, packets of Thai Sweet Chilli Sensations and talking about who might be out tonight. Then the shout from downstairs, CABS ARE HERE, and it begins. 

Wobble-trotting out of the door to the taxi, streetlights and underpasses flashing at regular intervals, huddling in the queue and then in, to the bar, to a solid place you can hold for a second and look - look at who’s here, look at who’s looking at you… hoping someone is looking at you. A few shouted and misheard words into ears, looks across a room that don’t turn into footsteps, regroup in the toilets, where’s he gone, why are we leaving, who’s crying? And then again but in reverse the huddle, the car, the lights, the door; lying in bed still wearing the eyeliner, a too-late glass of water and the only weight next to you the anticlimax.

In many ways, the experience of dating apps is not much different. The putting on of an image that is you, but you as seen from the outside in, a you that is designed to be viewed. The frenetic light flash of swipe, swipe, swipe. The ogling, the analysing, the judging someone’s shoes. The looking, the making eyes with a swipe and hoping they swipe back instead of breaking your gaze. The stilted conversations which end up with you both drifting back to your groups of friends. The bedtime routine of putting down your phone down next to your glass of water and feeling the emptiness.

There has been much discourse about everything that is terrible about dating apps, the majority of which is right. They over-emphasise looks and attractiveness. They blur the boundaries between the real world and a digital/imagined world. They’ve caused the death of the meet-cute. They foster an ineptitude for commitment, a perpetual “the grass could be greener” mindset. They facilitate poor communication and ghosting. They represent a sexual marketplace.

My point, I suppose, is what’s new? Dating apps enable objectification but they didn’t invent it; women were/are objectified in bars too. And if dating apps are the new bars of the digital world then Instagram is the new beach/park/coffee shop, public places where women have always been objectified, hassled, made to feel uncomfortable; sliding into DMs is simply the new sidling up to ask if anyone is sitting there. (I suppose this analogy makes Facebook the local pub you go to at Christmas where your uncle’s friend places his hands a little too low in the forced hug).

Is the truth not that we have always been shallow, and jealous and hurtful; that there has always been misogyny and predatory behaviour; that we have always been let down, and mistreated and taken advantage of - and yet have we not, in the midst of it, always managed to find love? Perhaps all the same terrible and beautiful human behaviours happen in every generation, and the only thing that changes is the medium. And perhaps just because something is digital, does not mean it is not human.

One year ago, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock made his first appearance on the reality TV show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. I was staying with my parents for the weekend, and my mum and I were watching it in hopes of a catharsis we did not get. During each ad break I went into the next room where my phone was on charge because I had just matched with someone on Tinder. We were having an entertaining conversation, but I was not sure why I was entertaining it: I didn’t live there and, it quickly turned out, neither did he. But anyway, long story short, now we’re in love.

Even though “this was nice but it’s not exactly going to work” seemed like the logical conclusion to our chance meeting he ran after me asking, “can I write to you?”. My head turned, I giggled into my hand. “Ok, you may write to me, sir”. And we did. We wrote each other emails, long ones, multiple times a day for weeks. We wrote each other 89 emails before we exchanged phone numbers.

I can’t begin to work out the odds of us being in the same geographical radius to match, but they’re probably similar to stepping onto a bridge and meeting your soulmate before you reach the other side. Ours may have been a digital bridge, but it feels like a bridge all the same. And now if we have a family they will know the full story of how their great-grandparents met… on Tinder.