There was a woman I knew years ago, and we would have never matched, not because of looks or age or whatever the algorithm weighs, but because everything about her that mattered was invisible on a screen.
The way she laughed was too loud at the wrong moment.
The fact that she put French fries in the chocolate sundae.
The particular silence she had after saying something she meant.
None of that fits a profile, none of that survives a swipe.
I tried dating apps once, briefly, a long time ago.
I understood exactly what they were for, and I used them for precisely that.
But I never confused them for something else.
The problem is that most people do.
The apps promise connection, but they deliver a catalog.
And the trouble with catalogs is not that the products are bad, it’s that browsing changes you.
You start comparing before you’ve even spoken, eliminating based on criteria you didn’t know you had until the interface handed them to you.
You open the app, and you are no longer someone looking for a person, you are a consumer navigating a shelf.
There is a principle in commerce, well-documented, largely ignored by the people who profit from its opposite, that too many choices destroy the ability to choose.
Not because people become more selective, but because the criteria collapse.
When the options are infinite, the mind reaches for anything to anchor a decision: a shirt, a background, a jawline that reminds you of someone else.
You’re not choosing a person, you are choosing a detail, and that’s being mistaken for judgment.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the paradox of choice, the counterintuitive truth that abundance produces paralysis, and paralysis produces regret.
On a dating app, where the next profile is one gesture away, this plays out in its most complete and most cynical form.
The decision-making process has nothing to do with who you are, who they are, or what might exist between you.
It’s pure noise pretending to be a signal.
You swipe on a location you recognize, on a line that made you smile for three seconds, on something you cannot even name afterward, and somewhere on the other side of the screen is a person who has been reduced, in the span of less than a second, to that one flickering detail that happened to catch the light at the right moment.
The tragedy is not that you chose wrong, the tragedy is that nothing in the process was ever about choosing at all.
Baudrillard would recognize this immediately.
The profile is not a person, it’s a representation of a representation, a curated image of a curated self, offered for evaluation by strangers doing the same thing on the other side of the screen.
The encounter never actually begins.
You are not meeting anyone, you are meeting their simulacrum, and they are meeting yours, and the real people are somewhere else, waiting to be discovered by accident.
That is what people who grew up before the internet remember, even if they can’t articulate it.
The encounter had texture, there was no preview.
You didn’t know what you were getting until you were already in it.
Someone’s voice surprised you, their hands moved in a way you hadn’t expected.
You discovered, over three hours at a table, that they had an opinion about something that changed yours.
That discovery was the thing, not the conclusion, the process.
The swipe eliminates the process, it offers only the conclusion: yes or no, before anything has happened.
This produces a particular kind of damage, not just loneliness, which is the obvious one, but something more structural, it trains you to approach people as candidates.
You develop a screening habit that doesn’t stay in the app.
It follows you out to dinner, to a party, to the moment when someone real is standing in front of you with all their inconvenient complexity.
The app has already taught you to look for the disqualifying detail.
There is also the question of what availability does to desire.
Before the internet, the imagination filled in what you didn’t know.
Uncertainty was generative.
The person across the room could be anything.
Today, you have already seen three hundred profiles before noon.
You have already evaluated bodies, bios, jobs, and opinions.
You arrive at the actual encounter already saturated, already slightly bored.
Not because the person in front of you is boring, but because you have been consuming people as content for six months, and your appetite has gone flat.
The people who mattered most to me, I could not have found on an app, not because we were incompatible on paper, though we probably were, but because the things that made us matter to each other would never have survived the filter.
They were too slow, too strange, too dependent on the specific afternoon when we happened to be in the same place without having planned it.
Connection of that kind is not a product, it’s a coincidence that you have to be present for.
The app promises to make you present to more people faster.
What it actually does is make you absent from the people in front of you, while keeping you busy evaluating the ones who aren’t there yet.