Dolly Alderton has said dating apps have heightened our insecurities “to a new level”.
The author and Sunday Times columnist said she receives lots of questions about apps and ghosting, the act of abruptly ending communication with someone without explanation.
Ms Alderton, who wrote the bestselling memoir Everything I Know About Love, also documented to BBC Newsbeat about her experience as a modern-day agony aunt.
She said: “I get so many messages about apps and ghosting. We all have baggage and I think those anxieties have been heightened to a new level. Before dating apps, you focused solely on the human in front of you and how they were behaving, but now there are so many versions of them to analyse, like on WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter.
“So many messages I get are about what to do when your partner is liking the pictures of other people and ‘does it matter if my boyfriend won’t put me on his Instagram’?”
The journalist, podcaster and writer published her hit memoir in 2018 about her love and life experiences – featuring flashbacks to her adolescence in the early 2000s.
It has now been made into a seven-part TV series by the BBC.
Following the book’s publication, the journalist revealed she was inundated with messages from readers who felt it had resonated them with including the supermodel Adwoa Aboah.
She told BBC Newsbeat: “The strangest thing happened. I had an Instagram message from Adwoa Aboah, possibly the most beautiful woman on earth, saying, ‘I’ve never identified with a book about heartbreak this much’. And I thought, if the most beautiful woman in the world is telling me she can relate, then how reassuring is that?”
The TV adaptation of her book Everything I Know About Love aired on BBC One on June 7.
The show is based on her coming-of-age story which follows two childhood best friends, Maggie and Birdy, as they try to survive their 20s, bad dates, heartaches and humiliations.
The Witcher and Traitors actress, Emma Appleton, plays Maggie and former Bafta Rising Star award nominee and The Morning Show actress, Bel Powley, portrays Birdy.
The cast also features Marli Siu, previously seen in Amazon Prime series Alex Rider, who will play Nell, and Jordan Peters, who recently starred in Gangs Of London, who will portray Neil.
The memoir went on to win the National Book Award for autobiography in 2018 and was shortlisted for the non-fiction narrative book of the year in the British Book Awards in 2019.
Her second book and debut novel, Ghosts, is among six books in the running for the 2021 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.
