Longform

In the old days, if you were single, that was it. You’d just be single, forever, and that was the long and the short of it. It was depressing, but also a reassuring constant, a reliable truth. Now, there all these apps that people have now, all the apps for meeting people and they have funny names that may be either secondary Star Wars characters or illegal sex acts, such as Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Happn, Badoo, Zoosk, Crumbl, Bidet, Paploo, Bossk, Wibbl… I may have made some of those up, although you’d be hard pressed to know which ones.

Dating is now an interminable process of tapping and swiping through apps of varying degrees of quality and substance. They vary from Hinge’s earnest and template-driven but ham-fisted efforts to hook me up with someone, anyone, to their own financial detriment, to Badoo’s seedy, nebulous nightclub feel. They all have a niche of some sort, and there’s also cultural separation, because different demographics use different apps and to achieve slightly different outcomes. They’re also pay-to-play (well, they have to be, in order to make money from it). Free to get in, but pay to get access to features of one type or another. And even with that, it’s still tiring somehow.

I could tap and chat to everyone and arrange lots and lots of dates, but I’m not the kind of person that can do that, and as it is I find it tiring to deal with. This is still all new for me, so maybe I just need to get used to it, because of course this isn’t how it worked when I last went on dates. In the old days, if you were single, that was it.