When you first fire up a dating app, the universe seems full of possibility. You’re playing a no-stakes game of hot-or-not on a website full of single people extremely excited to tell you how tall they are. Matching with a cool-looking person does approximate the thrill of catching an eye across the room. And scrutinizing the wild profiles of weirdos and the shockingly basic profiles of normals is a bottomless joy.
If you’re still on the apps six months later, however, you come to the realization that you’ve outsourced your romantic life to a data-collection service. Six months after that, you’ve deleted and re-downloaded the app more times than you can count, because what else is there? By then, you’re probably not even going on dates. You’re just swiping to score that dopamine hit from matching with a stranger. It’s pitiful.
