is app-based dating ruining everything?

BOOKBEAR EXPRESS MATCHMAKING

Hilma af Klint, Svanen, 1914.

I grew up obsessed with the promise of finding love online. In high school, I would go on Omegle, choose the “text-only” chats, select some keywords, and start chatting with strangers. I later met up with at least one person I met on Omegle, a student at Berkeley. I was the kind of girl whose fantasy was to meet someone through Craigslist Missed Connections; I was hoping someone would spot me heading home from Downtown Vancouver on the Skytrain reading some Philip Roth book and decide I was their soulmate. I decided to major in Statistics in college because I was so into Christian Rudder’s blog iconic, unforgettable blog OkTrends. During freshman summer I interned at a now-defunct dating app doing design work.

As part of “market research” for the app, my manager encouraged me to be on every dating app: “Check them out.” So I had a Tinder, Bumble, The League, Coffee Meets Bagel, and OkCupid account (I don’t think Hinge was around yet?). The funny thing was, I really didn’t go on that many app-based dates that summer. I was too busy falling in love in real life. I had made this friend, D, who was far more of an extrovert than I was, and he invited me everywhere. It was 2015, there were intern happy hours every day, the Dropbox cafeteria was the place to be, Quora internships were prestigious, the Thiel Fellowship was very cool, and I was googly-eyed over all of it: you can drop out of school and still get a job? Boys can be smart and cute? By the first week of August or so I had gotten my heart broken by one boy and started dating another. The relationship didn’t last, but I had unknowingly hooked into something more intoxicating: I found a peer group I really liked. And I was already picking up on something that didn’t quite hit the wider cultural consciousness in full force until the past couple of years: dating apps are just not an ideal way to meet people.

Okay, so why is that? The thing many of my friends report is,

• The average person on a dating app is just not as cool as my friends are. This obviously makes sense, since your friends are a carefully curated group of people who you’ve been whittling down for years, perhaps decades, who share deep similarities and core memories with you. Statistically speaking, the first cute girl you swipe right on Hinge is probably not going to measure up. But a lot of people are on dating apps, so we know for sure that some cool people are there. I think that

• identifying the right people and enduring disappointing dates is probably a big barrier—many people I know report being so discouraged by several lackluster dating-app dates that they need to take several months to recharge.

• I also believe that the qualities that dating apps encourage people to focus on, which are basically how you look, your job/background, and your ability to be funny in one or two sentences, are often qualities that are not as important to compatibility as they seem. Sure, many of us prioritize physical attractiveness, but in real life when you see someone at a party their vibe and mannerisms are as important as how photogenic they are.

• It also seems that dating apps create incentives for people to misrepresent their intentions. I imagine that someone who is looking for novelty and stimulation is probably not showing up to their date saying, I just want to fuck a lot of hot girls.

The recent Cut article about how young women are having a hard time also mentioned that “apps have turned dates into transactions.” I personally think there is something inherently unnatural about meeting someone for dinner or drinks and deciding over the course, of say, three sushi dates whether they are a suitable romantic partner. I have my own anecdotal story to illustrate this: S and I originally met on Coffee Meets Bagel in 2015 and went on exactly three dates before we called it quits. He was working a ton and I was not a good communicator. We only started seeing each other when we moved into a group house together in 2018. A classic SF story, but I think it also illustrates how important proximity and context are when it comes to dating. This might be weird, but I’ve never had a single boyfriend who I met once and immediately started dating. Every single person I either met as a friend and either talked to a lot or saw around at various gatherings constantly before we started a romantic relationship. I was immediately intrigued by all of them, like, “Oh that person is interesting and cute,” but it took time to unfold. I like seeing how someone acts around their friends. I like seeing how someone acts around my friends. I like to know their texting style and their intellectual preoccupations and whether their sweat smells good to me and whether we could live together in a tent until we died without getting bored of each other.

I think this is why Twitter works so well as a dating app. I truly believe that if you can read 500 of someone’s Tweets and think, Wow, this person is intriguing, that means something deeply significant. It’s revealing something about conversational style and values and attention. I also think that the fact Twitter is not designed to be a dating app makes it better?

It’s well-known maxim at this point that everybody dreams of doing a dating app and everybody fails. Literally every mainstream dating app on the market is either started or owned by Match Group. Except Bumble, which was started by Whitney Wolf Heard but also Andrey Andreev, a Russian entrepreneur who interestingly enough founded the Russian dating-focused social network Badoo before he started Bumble. It seems improbably hard for new players to make anqthing work!!

However, my lifelong dream is to be directly responsible for someone’s marriage, and as a result own 10% of their firstborn child (I’m kidding!!). And clearly we’ve all kind of soured on app-based dating, anyway, so maybe I don’t have to make a dating app in order to fulfil my dreams. Recently I was very inspired when I saw Marriage Pact, an organization that’s doing values-based matching across college campuses. I was immediately like, man, I wish I was a college student so I could get involved in this. But then I thought: you know what? I actually have access to a network that’s sort of like a large distributed college campus (lol), namely the Bookbear Express Readership. In fact, several readers have expressed interest in dating another Bookbear Express subscriber!

The premise behind Bookbear Express matchmaking is this: in order to qualify, you must live in New York or SF and be a free subscriber to Bookbear Express. you answer a 65-question survey about your values. You provide your name and age and plenty of information about the partner you’re looking for but no picture. Sophia and I will contact you with your closest match. (There may be some adjustment on the fly, like maybe we’ll give you your three closest matches). We’ll also provide you the contact information of someone who we believe we’ll be a great platonic match. And we hope that you will help us by meeting up with your matches and giving us feedback!

If you want to be matched, please fill out the questions by Tuesday, June 18th. We’re learning as we go along, so expect interesting swerves along the way (and perhaps some in-person events!!)

(P.S. As I was writing this I wondered, where is Christian Rudder now and what is he up to? It seems like he’s in Costa Rica with his family and has left the turbulent world of online dating behind him, which I’m sure is a healthy choice for one’s general sanity.)