The thing I hate most about online dating (other than all of it) is the absolute disrespect it has for the idea of romance. Online dating, for men at least, is a numbers game, and in more ways than one. It’s a numbers game for men in that you have to “like” 100 people to get the attention of one. It’s a numbers game for women, in that they have to sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of likes to choose the few they want to bother to interact with. It’s a numbers game for men again because we have to pay to be allowed to have unlimited “likes” in a day (which again, you have to do if you’re going to get a match once every 100 attempts). We have to pay further more if we want to be preferentially listed near the top of a person’s 1000 person list, then pay even more if we want the ability to send a compliment, star, whatever it is dependent on the app that gives us a slight edge to grab the attention of someone.
So, the idea that there is that one person out there for you, that you’re fated to meet The One, that love is based on the Universe bringing you together… I dunno, it gets pretty diluted by the sheer mechanical act of forever swiping, forever not even being seen, forever sifting through thousands of people and making snap judgments based on appearance, or location, or whether they smoke or not. It’s a very, very, VERY weird world.