The number one problem with dating apps is that they position themselves for self-selection and most people fail to select appropriate mates when given a whole shopping mall’s worth of candidates. I would never have swiped right on my current partner (7ish years). Or my first spouse, either. Two highly fulfilling relationships in my life that I never expected or tried to manifest initially.

People can generally identify when they have chemistry with someone, but not when they will have chemistry with someone, and most dating apps are run on the idea that you select whom you want to have chemistry with. Not whom you can or will, but want to have. All dating apps will converge to garbage because they focus on choice in love, rather than chance. They don’t throw you into a room with random people and let the real relationships blossom and the false ones fall away, they tell you to pick from a lineup of people whole you have never talked to (and to be honest probably will never talk to), but in real life we talk to random folks, sometimes that unattainable hottie and sometimes the perhaps homely but amiable passerby, and find out the brute force way which ones make us spark. It’s not about the subscription fees or the with dating apps, it’s about the fundamental disconnect between the freedom of election and the inability to act. The promise of consumption without the serendipity necessary to facilitate it.