Every week, I get emails from people who want to tell me their dating app horror stories. Sometimes, it’s about a single night of hell; and sometimes it’s about a relationship that started out on a dating app and ended up in some hellish place – often because their significant other was still, secretly, on dating apps. Betrayal is a common theme, unsurprisingly, at a time when these apps have made the array of options for potential partners seemingly endless, and the ability to access them virtually immediate.
I’ve been a critic of the dating app industry almost since its beginning, a role I never planned to take on. When Tinder launched its mobile app a decade ago this year, I had just started doing a story for Vanity Fair on teenage girls and how social media was affecting their lives. I was at the Grove, a Los Angeles mall, talking to a 16-year-old girl, when she told me about a new app, Tinder. She showed me how she was on it, matching and talking with men in their 20s and 30s, and how some of them had been sending her sexual messages and nude images.
