One of the first things I did when a long relationship ended in 2019 was download a dating app – mainly motivated, I must admit, by fantasies about my ex’s reaction to seeing my profile. Since then, I’ve never really stopped. I sit on them during TV ad breaks, while I’m waiting for the microwave to ping, in all those pockets of time where I used to listen to my own thoughts. In bed I lie on my back scrolling until my hand tingles because all the blood has run from it. Yet, despite my commitment, they’ve not found me a boyfriend, or even much sex. In fact, they’ve done the complete opposite to what I thought they would do when I first heard about them. They don’t make anything easy – they make it much harder.
I was at university when the people around me first started using Tinder. I had a boyfriend back then, so I never signed up. But I remember being jealous of the people who did. It would make it so much easier to find someone, I assumed: you wouldn’t have to waste nights out chatting to people in the smoking area only to find out they have a girlfriend, or open the door to rejection by writing your name on a napkin and giving it to a waiter. You just had to decide whether you like the look of someone, wait for them to do the same and if so, you can both meet up and have sex, or date, whatever you wanted. Apps would make the ambiguity of attraction explicit, obvious.
