Let me be clear: I am not above dating apps. I am beneath them. Beneath them, as in fetal-position-on-my-couch, screen-dimming-my-dignity, spiraling in real time. My latest relationship with Hinge lasted two and a half hours. I never even made it to a date. I made it to: the profile, the scroll, the rising sense of nausea, and the existential deletion.
It’s not the rejection that breaks me—it’s pretending I care long enough to be rejected.
We used to fall in love because of a look, or a line, or the way someone smoked a cigarette while talking about Godard. Now I’m supposed to decide my life partner based on whether he can answer “Two Truths and a Lie” without mentioning skydiving. This is not romance. This is onboarding.
Dating, once an art, has been reduced to a bureaucratic process. Everyone is a brand. Every prompt is a mission statement. You’re not being seduced; you’re being vetted. Assessed for cultural fit. Ranked on approachability. It’s like being interviewed for a role that doesn’t even come with benefits, except the potential to split a subscription to HBO Max.
Taste used to be seductive. Now it’s a checkbox.
Hinge flattens everyone into a personality template: “emotionally available,” “into sarcasm,” “looking for someone who doesn’t take life too seriously but also communicates.” Everyone likes dogs. Everyone “loves to travel.” Everyone is “a little competitive when playing board games.” We are not people—we are brand identities.
I used to fall for people slowly, and mostly by accident. I liked the way they underlined books, or made oddly specific playlists, or had a nose ring. Desire was irrational. Messy. Beautifully biased. Now I’m expected to select someone like I’m filtering Airbnbs: “6’0, liberal, loves pasta, no red flags.”
Hinge didn’t kill romance. It replaced it with HR paperwork.
I used to have crushes. Now I have likes from men who use the 🤠 emoji unironically.
There is no magic on these platforms. No spontaneous glance, no accidental shoulder bump while reaching for the same battered paperback at a mom-and-pop bookstore. Just The Scroll. A meat market with sad little badges that say “Most Compatible” when what they really mean is “Statistically Least Likely to Scare You.”
Dating apps are not about intimacy, they’re about options. You’re never being chosen. You’re being sorted. Optimized. Previewed while someone else replies to their “backup match” with the same “what’s your ideal Sunday?” text they sent you five minutes ago.
Every conversation feels like a wireframe of human interaction. There’s no risk, no mystery, no tension. It’s emotional UX design, and I’m over it. And the worst part? Everyone thinks they’re above it. They say “I hate dating apps” in their bios, as if naming the void absolves you from being inside it. But the void has a face. A hundred of them, actually—and they all look vaguely familiar.
Why does everyone on Hinge look like someone else’s idea of a safe choice?
It’s not that anyone is ugly. It’s that no one is hot. Every face is the same: soft lighting, Patagonia fleece, the exact smile that says, “My therapist says I’ve gotten better at expressing needs.” NPC energy is real, and it’s sexually repellent.
You want to feel wanted. Chosen. Seen in some unbearable, metaphysical way. But instead you’re being liked by a man whose bio says “Fluent in sarcasm 😏” and whose favorite movie is Interstellar. I don’t want to date someone who quotes The Office. I want to date someone who leaves me slightly smarter but emotionally unstable. Is that too much to ask?
We’ve reached the uncanny valley of desire. It’s not that I’m too picky—it’s that the whole thing is rigged to make everyone seem vaguely tolerable and completely undesirable.
You’re not on Hinge to fall in love. You’re on Hinge to simulate agency. To scroll through an endless sea of people you don’t want and convince yourself it’s because you have standards, not because the entire ecosystem is spiritually vacant.
And when it inevitably fails, you feel humiliated. Discarded. Not rejected—preemptively unfelt. You start to believe that your failure to connect is a personal shortcoming, when really, the system is designed to hollow you out and sell you self-worth in the form of hingeXtra™ premium boosts.
So no, I’m not downloading Hinge again. Not because I’m above it. But because it makes me want to vanish into the sea like a Victorian governess. I don’t want to be optimized, selected, or “matched.” I want to be misunderstood in person. I want to sit across from someone who doesn’t quite get me yet, and fall in love anyway. That doesn’t happen in a UX flowchart. It happens in a moment that wasn’t designed.
And maybe that makes me naive or difficult. But at least I still believe that something real can happen outside the scroll. And I’d rather sit with that belief—quietly, humiliatingly, romantically—than keep trying to perform connection for an app that can’t feel anything back.
spring break 