Hello friends, if you’ll allow me, I would like to rant for a moment about the state of dating in an urban setting.
I don’t want to immediately say things were better decades ago, but as someone who is monogamous, vanilla, just wants a steady partner, it feels impossible to date with the current apps. I am in hobby groups, I’m on Bumble, Hinge etc., I meet new people. Yet I can’t seem to find anyone. I’m despairing friends, I’m despairing.
I feel like I’m picking people off an algorithm. The room for surprise and delight has been cut off. Now there is only space for cold hard data. Lots of pretty people with good education and it’s so hard to see them as people and not just another part of an ever growing list. Another dot in the scatter plot.
People who are in LTRs, how’d you find your partner? What keeps you together?
Other single folk, how are you finding dating to be in your current locale? What things have brought success or failure in your mind? How do you define success or failure?
I met my wife on Bumble and we just had our first baby. Dating apps didn’t work well for me for about a year, but then they really started to pick up and I had much better dates. What I found worked best was sticking to swiping, but getting to an actual date within the first week of talking and limiting getting to know eachother over text. If you do the whole introductory phase on an app, then you will have a hard time developing a dialogue or a vibe in person. If you use the apps for brief introductions and finding dates, then they are good. I would just try to take the dialogue off the app as soon as you see an opportunity to have a date in person.
Did you use the website or the mobile app? I’m interested in diving in but want to do so in the least invasive way.