Hinge markets itself as an app “designed to be deleted,” this is true in the sense that I deleted hinge two hours after downloading it because I felt like kebab meat spinning around waiting to be picked by a drunk man looking for a meal after a dry night out. I have never heard a successful dating app story, everyone I know either got too few or too many matches, they always got weird messages, and the few normal ones would stop responding after a few days. Yet, people still use these apps.
In an increasingly online world, dating apps present themselves as a way to meet new people, as the stories of people meeting each other in real life become increasingly rare. Nobody needs to drive from Chicago to New York, nobody gets introduced to a man in a reindeer jumper at their mum’s turkey curry dinner, and nobody has to write an article on how to lose a guy in ten days.
Instead of living in a romcom we are struggling to even get a few seconds of eye contact in real life. It seems the only way to get directly approached is to get drunk in a club and hope for a sloppy snog to Pompeii by Bastille. However, this certainly is not the peak of romance. But, neither is meeting online. Around 4.4 million adults in the UK use dating apps and they all seem to say the same things: they want to travel more, they are in fact Batman, and they are crucially not looking for anything serious. Fatigue has set in and Tinder saw a seven per cent drop in subscriptions in 2025.
Loneliness is profitable, many dating apps offer more matches and visibility – for a price. A former employee of Match Group, the owner of the main dating apps, claims “All they care about is revenue, finding as many ways as possible to lure people to a paid feature.” Apps tell you a lot more people have matched with you… but you have to pay to see them. If you send someone a superlike you get boosted… but you have to pay. All this money spent on “free” apps has led to a lawsuit in the US that claims that these apps encourage gambling with the addictive features hidden behind the prospect of getting a match.
I would love to meet someone in real life — but I am not making the first move, neither is the cute guy from my lectures, and 72 per cent of Gen-Z would agree with me. Dating apps represent a deeply rooted issue within Gen-Z. We are not meeting people in real life and learning about each other over dinner, instead we are swiping right and getting ghosted after a week. Meeting in person has worked for thousands of years, I am sure it will suffice for many more.
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