After a dating drought, Sean Russell decides to try his luck online.
I arrive at the pub early and it’s cold, so I go in and find us a table. Which table, though? One near other people? But I don’t want to be overheard. There is one in the corner, but a bit out of the way, and that’s weird. Pick one and sit down. I sit at a small circular table with a candle and cross my legs and wait. She will be here any minute. I use my phone as a mirror — hair is OK, I suppose. I put the phone in my pocket and wait. Does it look like I’m waiting? Do people think I’m waiting? I get my phone out again, find something to scroll through. Then I spot Emma (not her real name) and see she is more attractive than her profile. She smiles at me and I don’t know whether to stay seated or stand, but she is coming over, so I stand. Go in for a hug? Kiss on the cheek? Just don’t shake her hand; that’s weird. She sits down, I get her a wine and myself a Guinness and sit down opposite her.
She is dressed nicely and she is definitely my type. “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “It took longer to walk here than I thought.” Then her phone rings. “Oh, that’s my mum. What should I say? ‘Sorry, Mum, I’m just on a date.’ "
It is an odd experience to go on a date you have arranged through an app. On the one hand, the pretence is removed — you both know why you are there and you can cut to the chase, so to speak. On the other, any hint of chance is lost, any kind of “chase” or anticipation is gone and the person in front of you is instead reduced to a scorecard. Is she attractive? Is she funny? Is she intelligent? Do we share things in common? Does the talk flow? And, perhaps most important, is there a spark? You have to make your mind up on all of them in just a few hours.
I wrote about what it's really like to use the dating apps as a 30-year-old man and why they're not for me or many others - dating essentially becomes like looking for workhttps://t.co/HXlWvx0drs
— Sean Russell (@SAntoniRussell) February 21, 2024
The first time I fell in love was in Paris. I was 22 and was living in the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company. I met her in the rooms above the shop and when we went out together, I would wait on Parisian street corners in the cold and sweat with nerves, going over and over how I looked and wondering if she would turn up — she was always late.
The second time I fell in love was on an archaeological site in London, during my previous career, among the things the Romans left behind. She was all I thought about when I got home and I would wait for her to message me. I looked forward to going to work and always wanted to be with her.
I won’t go into those break-ups, but suffice to say they were not particularly messy and I am still close to both of them. At the age of 30 I find myself single once again. Being single doesn’t bother me as such, although occasionally I wake up at 2am in an existential panic that life is not what it was supposed to be and that by this point my brother was already married with a child and a house, and my sister by 32 too. But as soon as I am single, well-meaning friends’ first question is often, “Will you go on the apps?” Even my 66-year-old dad says, “You gotta get on those apps. So many couples meet through them now.” They seem suddenly inevitable — the done thing, the only way to meet women.
My idea of finding love is cinematic. It is Notting Hill (“You are lovelier this morning than you have ever been”) and Before Sunrise (“I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between”), but there I was on my way to a date in Dalston, east London, to meet a woman Hinge said was one of my “most compatible”.
I sign up to three apps: Hinge, Tinder and Bumble. I have been on Tinder once before, in between love one and love two, around the time Tinder first became popular. I found the whole thing somewhat humiliating. There is nothing like starting your day by waking up and looking at your phone to see, despite the thousands and thousands of women signed up, that yet again, you have no matches. I would swipe right and left, and every now and again a woman would appear who I thought was beautiful and seemed to share my interests. I would hold my breath, swipe right and hope the “It’s a match” message would pop up, but it never did. After a few weeks of this, and not a single match, I gave up on it, took what little self-worth remained intact and moved on with my life.
This is a story familiar to many young people, but particularly young men. According to Roast.dating, data from Tinder suggests that 52 per cent of men get less than one match a day and the chance of a straight man matching is 2.8 per cent. Straight women? Thirty-five per cent. I mention this statistic to one of my single friends, Richard. “That’s an insane difference,” he says. “And that’s just matching. If you take into account we have zero game, then we are doomed.”
I set up my new profile and search for some good pictures of myself, but I quickly realise that men just do not take many photos of each other, or at least the men I know do not. When I go out with my friends we take more pictures of our pints than we do of each other, although I am sure we all wish there were more photos of us together. And so I make a selection from the handful of pictures I do have. One of me and my brother before a half-marathon, one of me during one of my last archaeological excavations in Sicily, another of me doing the best man’s speech at a friend’s wedding, one with my nieces and nephew, another of me with my bike in the Alps.
“Men in Lycra are not good on dating apps,” says my friend Georgina. “It’s a known ick.”
“But it’s something I love,” I say.
“You love the fact you’re a cyclist, and a girl can find that attractive about you, but it’s not necessarily something to put on a dating app.”
She tells me to try without and see what difference it makes. Already the apps begin to feel odd. To find a date I have to be a different version of myself, it seems.
“It’s not about being fake,” Georgina says. “It’s just about learning to present yourself. Men are bad at this. Women are much better. We’re so used to it.”
Eventually, Georgina and I narrow down my photos and change the pics. One with a dog (not mine), one at a coffee shop, one with a magnum of wine. She gets me to crop one of me and my mum and brother so it’s just me. “More pictures alone, eyes to camera,” she says. Eventually, after a total rehaul, I am ready to go.
You may have read my colleague Hannah Skelley’s piece on what it was like dating using the apps for the first time. While it is nowhere near a level playing field, within an hour she had more than 7000 likes on Tinder. Me? Thirty-five, and it stays at that number for about three weeks. But likes aren’t matches. I get zero matches for about a week, then one match and then zero for the next two. That one match messages me: “You have a lovely smile.” I show my mate, Dan. “What the hell am I supposed to say to that?” I say. “Thank you,” he offers and we laugh.
“Thanks, so do you,” I reply to her and I never hear from her again.
I get zero matches for about a week, then one match and then zero for the next two.
On Bumble? Three matches, two of whom do not speak to me within the allotted 24 hours and so disappear. The other writes: “What’s one thing you’ve never done that you’d love to try?” “Hmm,” I reply. “I’d say scuba diving.” And I never hear from her again. Bumble is so unsuccessful that at some point it offers me a man. Jeez, I think, have I swiped through all the women already?
I thought changing my profile to Georgina’s suggestions would make a difference, but it doesn’t really. Tinder and Bumble feel entirely fruitless, a waste of many hours over a couple of months.
It is easy to grow disheartened. You start to ask yourself questions. Why am I not matching with anyone? Is it the way I look? The way I dress? When thousands of people are judging you based on a few pictures, it is hard not to draw embarrassing conclusions. If I walked down the road and passed 100 women, only a handful would be attracted to me, but I would be none the wiser (unless they told me, of course). But on an app you know that the larger part of the crowd are all actively saying no. They are actively saying no on three apps at once without you even leaving the house. If I were an insecure man, that would be upsetting.
Hinge gives me more hope. I get about one like a day and four matches over a week. I write to them all, but one in particular in whom I am interested. Her name is Emma. There is a funny video on her profile that makes me laugh. She seems nice. She seems to like good food and wine. She lives nearby. She is my age. I don’t get a reply for almost a week. I have forgotten all about her by the time she does message back, but it is another two days before I get a reply again.
“These chats take forever,” I say to my housemate Eimear, who met her boyfriend on Hinge. “I message them and I don’t hear for days.”
“It’s probably because she has loads of matches,” she says. “She’s just working down the list.”
Every evening after work I swipe through the apps. Left, right, left, right and nothing. Finally there is another response from Emma. After a couple of weeks of slow, intermittent small talk I get fed up and ask her for a date. I want to meet her and talk properly.
In Dalston, at the table with the candle, Emma and I get chatting. “Do you like your work? What about your housemates? Do you like living in London? Would you like to live anywhere else? What things do you like to do outside work?” It begins to feel like an interview. This goes both ways, I should say. I ask much the same questions back. I suppose it is an interview in some ways, for the role of life partner, one true love. How romantic. We don’t stop talking, but somehow it never feels flowing, like those wonderful conversations where your mind melds to someone else’s. This date feels performative, mechanical.
We laugh and talk about our families. We tell each other our plans, what we want from life. I say I wanted to live in Italy once, but now I’m happy in London. She says she doesn’t want to live abroad, although she thought about it once. We joke about the large group of friends that is growing next to us and seems to be annexing our table. It’s all rather pleasant, but that’s it.
I go on another date, again via Hinge. We’re in another pub in Hackney and we get drinks and sit opposite each other at a tall table. The pub is better this time. It is louder and warmer and there is more of a buzz. She is American and when she finds out I am a journalist we quickly get on to politics. I have always been drawn to America, so I ask her about that. There is more flow, at least at first, but when she gets her phone out to show me a place on Google Maps I see she has marked up a lot of nearby locations with a heart.
After years of being told to ‘be yourself’, the apps force me to change myself.
“Those are date ideas,” she says.
And here we are again: the idea of the date as something to work for. Multiple apps, multiple dates, multiple places, one after the other until you find something. We carry on chatting and get a couple more drinks, but at some point in the evening the conversation turns into an interview again. “Do you have any siblings? What do you want to do with your life?” Necessary questions, no doubt, but in this context it seems as if we are searching for things to say rather than caring about the answers. I start to look forward to leaving.
The endings of dates are hard. I feel no desire to see either of these women again, but both dates are pleasant, if without a spark. I don’t want to be horrible. We say goodbye and hug and tell each other it was a nice evening, thank you. And then we part. The second date messages me to say, “Let me know if you want to do it again.” Emma doesn’t say anything. Should I message her? I start typing something, but I feel false. I don’t want to say, “Let’s be friends,” because that’s not true, nor do I want to say, “Let’s do this again,” because that wouldn’t be true either. So what do I say? I opt for nothing.
I wonder if I met either of these women in different circumstances how things would go. If I were at a party and bumped into them, could we have long happy lives together? Probably not, but the feeling lingers that, rather than aid dating, these apps kill any chance of anything happening. What of all those women I swiped left and right on, the ones I didn’t match with? Had we met in real life, at a mutual friend’s party, would we have hit it off? Maybe not the first time, but what about the second time we bump into each other, or the third?
Over the phone I ask my dad what meeting women was like when he was young. “It was so different then,” he says. “You’d go to the Friday disco, try to make eye contact with someone and if she smiled at you, you’d ask her to dance. There would be Donny Osmond and David Cassidy and Marc Bolan playing, and then to the cinema or something like that for a date.”
I say it doesn’t often happen like that any more. “No,” he says. “Things seemed more innocent then.”
“How did you meet Mum?” I ask.
“I was working with your grandma at one of my first jobs and she showed me a picture of her daughter. I thought, ‘Wow,’ and then we were introduced at a party. She was very shy so nothing came of it, but we kept meeting each other at parties and her sister told me, ‘Christine likes you.’ Then one day it just clicked. Now we’ve been married for nearly 45 years.”
The apps seem laborious and false to me. After years of being told to “be yourself”, the apps force me to change myself, to add a dog, to remove my bike, to crop out my mum and brother. And it makes little to no difference anyway. For more than two months I swipe left and right almost every night and get the grand total of about 20 matches and two dates out of it. It all feels like so much work, but above all it takes away any feeling of excitement, anticipation, serendipity.
I know many people who have met their partners through one app or another and are very happy. That’s why I was curious. I know they can work and I hoped they would work for me. It was nice to meet those women, but it is not what I am looking for. At least for now I’m happier being single and I hope one day I’ll sit on a train and a beautiful woman will sit down next to me and we’ll get chatting, or I’ll be in Waterstones when we reach for the same book at the same time, and then it all begins again.
Written by: Sean Russell
© The Times of London
