The treadmill won’t run on its own. Climb on and press Start.
Just like the Fitbit tracker you bought hoping it would somehow melt away your muffin top, dating apps are mere tools in your arsenal to find a mate. A BOSU ball can’t do the crunches for you. A flirty text exchange with a Tinder match might give you a quick dopamine high, but it’s not a comparable substitute for meeting in person or picking up the phone and hearing someone’s voice.
Dating apps are genius because they will help you locate potential partners. But only you can figure out which ones are worth meeting. “These are not dating sites, these are introducing sites,” Helen Fisher says. “The only good algorithm is your own brain.”
Sean Rad, cofounder of Tinder, agrees. “Nothing replicates real life,” he says. “There is no substitute.”
Internet dating gives us the illusion that dating is easy. Its speed and access gives another false sense that you will know instantly, when you meet this person in real life, if he or she may be worth a second date. But the idea of love at first sight is deeply flawed. We all have friends who have suffered the indignity of dressing up to meet someone promising from an online match and then, in real life, having that person arrive at the table, give them a quick once-over, and say, “Hey, you look great, but I just know this isn’t going to work and so let’s not waste our time.” The truth is you can’t possibly tell if someone is going to be a match in three seconds.
“In your real life, you might meet someone at work and think they are a complete idiot for a year,” Fisher says. “And then over time, you discover they are kind, funny, and love to play tennis and you do, too. This natural system of getting to know someone is being killed by anyone who expects to have instant romance on the first date.” It feels counterintuitive in our hyperconnected and superfast world—uncomfortable, too. But it is during those awkward getting-to-know-one-another moments in real-life places that love starts to blossom.
Rad started Tinder to replicate a coffee shop or bar experience—minus the awkwardness. “The core thesis behind Tinder is that the fundamental thing that prevents people from walking over and saying hello to someone that catches their attention is that there is no context,” he explains. “So there is not a socially acceptable reason to go say hello. The timing might not be right, the circumstances might not be right. Those are external. The internal mechanisms at work are humans’ fear of rejection.”
It is far easier to settle in on your sofa and swipe through profiles, either with friends or alone. You can scan hundreds of possibilities, write a profile to poke or message them all, and respond to those who do the same to you.
But you still have to meet that person and have a real connection if these tools are going to work, which is why you should try the gamut of dating apps and settle on the one that feels right to you, whether it’s Tinder, Match, Hinge, Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, JDate, or any of the other dozens that are out there.
You still have to meet that person and have a real connection if these tools are going to work, which is why you should try the gamut of dating apps.
Apps are like cars; they need to be handled with care. They are unparalleled for broadening your horizons and taking you on journeys you might not have imagined, but you need to proceed with caution. You need to know what gear you’re in and to make sure you signal exactly where you want to go so others know, too.
You also need to banish any expectations that an app will lead you directly to Prince Charming, as he does not exist (see Rule #15). As Esther Perel—the brilliant couples therapist, author of The State of Affairs, and host of the Audible podcast series on love, sex, and relationships Where Should We Begin?—points out, that’s too much pressure to place on one person anyway. “The more freedom you have, the more relationships are like a free choice market, the more you also have to deal with the uncertainty of knowing that this is the right person,” Perel says. “The more freedom you have, the more you are also riddled with self-doubt and uncertainty. You knew what kind of person you needed to bring home, what social class, what education, what religion, all those categories, which were pretty much selection processes, mating categories. Now the world is wide open and you have to reassure yourself.”
EXPAND YOUR NETWORK
This is the dilemma of being so overly connected. It puts too much pressure on the hunt for this very specific person who will be the answer to your dreams. Thinking of dating apps in this way is unrealistic and will psych you out. Instead, use these apps to expand your real-life social network. Dating apps are best understood and used as introducing tools. They can introduce you to people who may, in turn, introduce you to someone—maybe their best friend, brother, colleague, or cousin—who you decide is special. These apps are a powerful way to hone what Rad calls “an innate humanistic desire to meet other people and expand your social network.”
I love his use of “social network” here and have always felt dating apps should do more with this idea. Because their real power is in how they can create the possibility of meeting people already on the margins of your world whom you might otherwise miss connecting with because you aren’t normally in the same place at the same time. Think of all the people you have met and your delight when discovering you were actually at the same party two years ago but didn’t meet then, or you were holidaying on the same beach during the same spring break, yet you didn’t run into each other.
So instead of thinking, “How do I find a partner?” think, “How can I expand my connections? How can I create more possibilities in my life, whether for relationships or friendships?”
Reimagine dating apps as a way of meeting more people as opposed to meeting “the One.” The chances are you won’t be able to spot the One with a quick match anyway. But you may meet someone who is worth meeting for a quick drink. And he may have a best friend or brother that you end up dating for six weeks, or you might introduce your friend to his brother.
Dating sites are in fact beginning to do this more. Tinder Social was launched in 2016 as a way to meet friends and connect with other people who want to spend the evening or afternoon either going to the beach or a concert or on a road trip. To use the app, you create a small group of your existing friends. Tinder Social then matches you with other groups and, just like regular Tinder, you swipe right or left to join other parties to hang with. So one group may invite the other(s) to go to a beer festival or to play volleyball in the park that Saturday.
This is where tech really works. With work life taking up so much of our time during the week, our ability to meet both potential partners and new friends is often limited to Friday or Saturday nights, depending on where you live. If that’s a decent-sized city, then you have opportunities to meet people. The issue is how to narrow those opportunities to find something you will actually enjoy. And if you live in a rural or less populated area and for spice you have to rely on friends cajoling their out-of-town cousins to come stay, then social apps connect you with people you might live close to but not run into otherwise.
As long as you use them with care, dating apps are a great tool. The Pew Research Center found that the number of people ages eighteen to twenty-four who use them has nearly tripled from 10 percent in 2013 to 27 percent in 2016. Ultimately, the stats are in your favor. Use apps regularly, and you’ll have many more opportunities to meet people than you would have if you just went to a bar or a club three times a week.
So let’s be clear what using apps carefully means. It’s why I like the analogy of learning to drive. If you got into a car for the first time, hit the accelerator, and sped off with no attention to what others on the road were doing, you would end up in a hospital. With apps, you also need to figure out where you are hoping to get to, signal clearly ahead of time, observe other people’s signals, and, if in doubt, slow down, pull to the side, or stop.
A global authority on digital behavior, the cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken warns that people can easily get into trouble when they mistake the internet for real life. “Cyberspace is a space where we go—it’s an immersive environment, not a transactional medium like watching the television,” she explains. “When you go online, you’re psychologically immersed. You feel anonymous. You are disinhibited.”
Sometimes the power of anonymity online can be a good thing in terms of exploring yourself and your sexuality. “No one gets pregnant or an STD from sexting, for example,” she says. The problem, however, is that the profile we create online—whether on Match.com, OkCupid, Facebook, or LinkedIn for that matter—is an aspirational self. In the dating world, this applies to both you and a potential date. “So he is presenting this aspirational and highly manipulated entity,” Aiken says. “And so are you.”
The profile we create online—whether on Match.com, OkCupid, Facebook, or LinkedIn for that matter—is an aspirational self. In the dating world, this applies to both you and a potential date.
In short, both you and the person you’re flirting with online are not presenting your real selves. “In cyberpsychology, we refer to Walther’s Theory of Hyperpersonal Interaction, which says that when you’re in a computer-mediated communicative environment, you only get curated pieces of information about another person, so you have the tendency to fill in the blanks with positive attributes,” Aiken explains. “That leads you to idealize this person who you are communicating with.”
STRANGER DANGER IS FOR ADULTS, TOO
Add to that what Aiken calls the “stranger on the train syndrome” in which talking to someone you don’t know—and might never see again—can lead you to easily disclose personal information. “Online conversations can quickly escalate,” Aiken says. “And people can discuss sexualized content much more rapidly than they might do in a real-world context.”
Studies on self-disclosure find that people reveal much less to a person who they meet in real life. Online, Aiken says, that level of self-disclosure doubles.
Aiken thinks the internet should come with a “stranger danger” warning for everyone who logs on. “The person you meet online, no matter how well you think you know him or her, is still a stranger,” she says. “And much of what you think about that person is idealized—you fill in the blanks with what you want him to be. So you’re creating this person.” Her point is important: “Online dating is very crowded,” she says. “There are four people in it: two real, normal selves, and two virtual selves.”
After you’ve flirted heavily online, it’s easy to segue to a real-life meeting with diverging expectations. What happens online is not the same as foreplay IRL. This dissonance between the online/real-world relationship could help explain the sixfold increase in sexual assault associated with online dating.
Yes, you read that right. Sixfold. The most recent statistics come from the UK’s National Crime Agency, which discovered what the agency calls a “new type of sex offender”—offenders who were not known to police and had no previous history of assault. Some 71 percent of those reported assaults took place on the first date and in the victim’s or the offender’s home. “It could be that escalation and amplification of the relationship—moving to talk about sexualized content very quickly—meant that a cyber-intimacy was built,” Aiken explains. “So by the time that real-world date takes place, there was an expectation that something more was going to happen.”
This is precisely the reason that it is so important to have guidelines (see Rule #5) around online dating—back to my point about driver’s ed—and to keep to them. And the first of these rules is obvious. Never agree to meet a stranger—even if you have exchanged thousands of texts and you have dozens of Facebook friends in common—at his or her home for a first date. And if he insists, cut bait. Meet in a public place—a café, a bar—with other people around who informally police you. And always tell a friend where you are going and who with. I have one friend who, when she knows she wants to hook up with a Tinder date, asks to see his driver’s license, photographs it, and then texts the pic to a friend telling her what’s happening.
Another rule is by all means have a drink, but don’t get drunk with strangers, no matter how many secrets you shared online. Approximately one half of all sexual assaults involve alcohol, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (See Rule #8 for more on the influence of alcohol on dating.)
Most women have their own rules around online dating. Cindy Gallop—the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, a user-generated, crowdsourced sex-video platform that wants to disrupt the porn industry (see Rule #10)—loves internet dating and has a three-rule process before she goes on an actual date with anyone she has met online.
“It’s the Cindy Gallop three-step filter,” she says. First and foremost, she chooses men based on their looks—specifically, her own definition of attraction and not what her friends may think if she shows up at a party with him. “I’m not looking for the chiseled jaw, the clean-cut good looks. I don’t care about conventional attractiveness,” she says. “I genuinely only care about whether he’s attractive to me.”
Then she tests that by asking for at least three photos, one that is recent and full bodied. “There is nothing wrong with saying this, because everybody knows why you’re asking,” she says. “If anybody objects, off the list instantly.”
Her second filter is a writing test. “I prefer email to messaging, which is a much more casual form of communication,” she says. “And I urge women to cut men some slack because they have no idea how to approach a woman online, or off.” Her point is, the emails might be clumsy or even crass—but they’re a good barometer of whether you sense any potential chemistry. “That’s entirely subjective,” she says. “For me, any misspellings means it’s not happening.”
The third and final hoop is speaking on the phone. “Young men particularly resist this one,” she says. “But insist on it. Ask for his phone number and call him. This is where you will find out whether you like the sound of his voice, which can tell you a lot. You also find out whether you can maintain a conversation on the phone, because if not, then you sure as hell can’t over a cup of coffee or a drink.”
Ah, the phone issue. I get why people hate talking on the phone. It’s tricky. It puts you on the spot. You talk over each other, you get cut off, they call back, and you can’t talk right now. You make a joke, but they think you’re serious. It’s so much easier to send a text or email.
But the reason you must call all online matches before you commit to meet in person is that a phone call will give you so much more information than any text possibly can. You need to mine for aural clues. There’s the sound of his voice for one. On a very basic level, do you like it? Could you listen to him for an hour? Does he sound the age he says he is? Does he sound kind? Dozy? Sharp? Psycho?
Have a list of light questions ready. Kick off with a reference to a local sports team, a band in town, a book you’re reading, a news event.
The goal is to figure out if you speak the same language. I don’t mean literally, but do you get each other’s references and cues? Is he polite or aggressive? You need a sense of his values. Does he care about the things you do? Forewarned is forearmed. And remember, he is also listening for clues. Do you sound like yourself?
The goal is to figure out if you speak the same language. I don’t mean literally, but do you get each other’s references and cues?
This is not just about protecting your valuable time. It’s about using your psychological detective skills to preserve your emotional energy. If you find yourself on a never-ending carousel of internet dates, something’s not working and you need to hone your selection process.
Think of it as you would approach hiring someone at work. Yes, the HR department scours LinkedIn, but they call, Face-Time, or Skype before engaging a manager’s time to meet a candidate. It’s exhausting to keep swiping, getting your hopes up, and then meeting people who don’t work out.
Gallop loves the efficiency of the phone. “If it’s not going well, you are able to say at any point, ‘It’s been nice talking to you, but I don’t think it’s going to work out. Bye.’” she says.
However, if you have a nice conversation and like the sound of his (or her) voice, then set up the first date. Gallop guarantees it will go fine because this person is now no longer a total stranger. “I’ve met with men with whom there was absolutely no chemistry, but because of those three filters, it was a perfectly pleasant first encounter as opposed to an awkward, embarrassing one, which none of us have time for,” she explains.
Aiken agrees a phone call first is important. But her bigger concern for women looking for love online is just how male-dominated dating apps are. “We have spent so much time fighting for our rights as women, and yet we live in a cyberspace that is almost exclusively designed by men,” she says. “Women need to be actively engaged in helping to design it.”
Thankfully, that is beginning to happen. Tinder and Match are among the top ten most used dating apps, according to a study by Applause, an app analytics company, but two of the hottest apps lately—Bumble and Coffee Meets Bagel—were founded and are run by women. Whitney Wolfe left Tinder, which she cofounded, and set out to create a “positivity social network” for young women called Merci, rooted in kindness. The tagline was “compliments are contagious,” which meant users could leave only compliments on one another’s pages. “I wanted to do something in response to the lack of online accountability,” she explains. “When I was a kid, you couldn’t bully someone in the classroom without consequences. You can’t run a red light or speed without repercussion. Where are the consequences digitally? They don’t exist.”
When her business partner asked, “Why not do this in the dating world? It needs this,” Wolfe, at twenty-eight, looked at her own experiences as a young, single woman and realized he was right. She started Bumble because she felt that she had succeeded in so many aspects of her life—except dating. “I was confident enough to travel the world, study abroad, and start my own company,” she says. “Yet, I always felt very disempowered when it came to dating. It all came down to me not being able to make the first move,” she explains, recalling “hours of agony” in college, waiting for guys to text after meeting them. “Whenever I did make the first move, I was shunned or guilted for it by friends or by society’s standards,” she says. “That dynamic is just insane.”
She started asking all her friends about their dating experiences and realized that she was not alone. “Almost all of the women I know had been in dysfunctional relationships,” she says. “All these wonderful, brilliant women, in this constant state of disarray surrounding dating—it really comes down to power and gender dynamics.” What began as a social network morphed into Bumble, a dating site that placed women in the driver’s seat, a move Wolfe sees as the antidote to unhealthy relationships. “It lets women make the first move with no judgment, stigma, shame, guilt, or blame,” she says.
To ease the awkwardness of women making that first move, Bumble—which brilliantly markets itself as a dating app for people who would never use a dating app—has a set time limit. After the initial prompt, the match disappears in twenty-four hours. Empowering women to make the first move, Wolfe adds, has been truly exciting, and to Aiken’s point, a move toward correcting the gender power imbalance. Clearly women agree: The company celebrated 250 million first moves made by women on International Women’s Day 2017. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, perhaps we can rewire and reconfigure the dating world,” Wolfe says. She’d like to start with a misconception that men are all lecherous monsters. “People remark time and time again, ‘Oh my gosh, the guys on Bumble are so handsome, high-quality, educated, and smart,’” she says. “My response is, ‘You’d be surprised by how many men want a confident woman who has her own voice.’”
Use your voice and your best-suited app (see the next rule!) to help you find the partner who makes the most sense for you.
CASE STUDIES
Megann, 25, on how internet dating saved her small-town love life.
Megann grew up in a rural town outside Detroit. By the time she graduated from high school, she had dated anyone who was, in her words, even a remote possibility. “I like the more sensitive, soulful types and grew up in a place where they were rare,” she explains. She went to a local community college, and her options did not improve. “It felt like high school all over again,” she explains. “You pretty much had to hope someone brought a friend from out of town to a party. And that still felt like needle-in-a-haystack odds.”
She started playing around with online dating, first Tinder then Plenty of Fish (POF) and Swoon out of “pure boredom.” “I never thought anything would actually come from it besides maybe talking to some fun people,” she says. She flirted online with a bunch of guys who seemed interesting and wound up meeting a few in person, but none were a real match. “I still felt lucky,” she says. “They were all good experiences, just no one I wanted to actually date.”
But then Drew got in touch with her through Zoosk, which she liked because it was “easy to use, and free.” After a witty back-and-forth that lasted two hours, he sent her the message: “What would it take to go on a date?” To which Megann responded, “Just ask!”
He did. She agreed to meet him for lunch at a nearby Chili’s—and was not ready to say goodbye after he paid the bill. “We went up to a USS warship that is parked nearby,” she says. The date lasted twelve hours. “Unlike the other guys I had met, he lived up to my idea of what he would be like,” she says. “Super-bright and motivated. I was inspired.”
Drew had just come out of the military, so he was also well traveled. “I found that incredibly attractive,” she says. “Most of the guys I grew up with had no aspirations to visit Detroit, let alone leave the country.” He had been living with his mom for two weeks, in a town an hour and a half away. “We never would have met if it weren’t for the internet,” she says.
During that first date, they covered lots of territory—and discovered a mutual love of comic books, Star Wars movies, and Mexican food. It took a few more dates before Megann mentioned something she wanted him to know before they got too serious. “I have always known that I don’t want kids,” she said. “So I was relieved when I told Drew that, and he smiled and said, ‘That’s cool. Me neither.’”
Now, four years later, they live together, with two cats, and are saving up for a trip to Europe, Megann’s first trip outside the US. She is certain that without the internet, she would still be single. “Growing up in a small town like mine, we had such limited options,” she says. “Plus, I was not a social person, so I would have been screwed.”
Kelly, 36, on her “dating-palooza,” or 500 dates in less than two years.
A year and a half into her marriage, Kelly’s husband said he wanted out. Kelly was thirty-four years old and went into therapy to figure out what went wrong, as well as what role she may have played in it. “I really thought I had married my teammate for life,” she says. “But as soon as we married, it started to unravel. I knew I had to honor the grief and work through all the emotions before I even thought about dating again. It wouldn’t be fair to displace any unresolved emotions on another person.”
Kelly did a dating detox for several months before she began what she calls her social experiment: “dating-palooza.” The founder of Shynebyte, a New York–based talent strategy company, she applied similar strategies to finding a partner that she does to matching the best client with the right job. “The world of recruiting is complex,” she says. “So I created a five-A model to optimize the process for my work, which I applied to my dating approach: Align, Attract, Assess, Acquire, and Acclimate.” Align, for instance, is to proactively define what you want in a partner, whereas Assess involves accepting that dating is messy and so being open to all potential outcomes, including making male friends or business connections. She signed up for Tinder first, chose six photos that she felt represented the different dimensions of who she was, and wrote a bulleted bio that emphasized her quirkiness, such as her goal to visit each Beach Boys “Kokomo” location (she’s halfway there).
Kelly then committed thirty minutes a day to swiping, and she experienced both swift requests for her phone number and drawn-out messaging that never graduated to texting or a phone call. She preferred the former.
In the year and a half that followed, she went out with 351 men and on at least five hundred dates, often averaging two a night. “It was exhausting,” she says. “Even thinking about it I get tired.” Those nights when she was meeting more than one man could also get hairy: “I did get caught once running late to the next date, whom I had planned to meet across the street,” she says. “I admitted why I had to run—it didn’t go over very well.”
Her attitude about meeting people remains open. “I’ve actually set people up with my friends,” she says. “I see this as a value-add ecosystem.” She has had bad dates and great dates—and has met some really interesting people, as well as a few creeps. “One guy wanted to play truth or dare over text,” she says. “I found it a refreshing break from ‘Hey, what’s up?’” She chose truth, and the two went back and forth with questions she appreciated, like “What scares you most?” But then, out of the blue, he texted, “Spit or swallow?” “I blocked him immediately,” she says.
That was not the only man she has ever blocked. Another guy texted her, “Something tells me you’ve been a naughty girl, and need to be punished,” she recalls. Kelly replied with, “Your intuition sucks.” “I could make a coffee-table book of all the unsolicited dick pics I get,” she says. The new thing, she adds, are “cumming videos.” “Men I have never met, jerking off in a video, calling my name as they cum,” she says. “It’s very disturbing.”
She has also gone on multiple dates with men she thought had potential. “I went on four dates with a guy I liked a lot,” she says. “But then, he said, ‘When the time comes, I hate condoms.’” She told him they were necessary for her, no matter what, and his response floored her. “He said defensively, ‘Do you think I would sleep with a girl who’s not clean?’” she recalls. That was the end of that relationship.
Another guy she dated was in the tech world, so when she used the term “elastic load balancing” in their conversation, he got quiet for a moment. He then said, “I think you are too smart for me.” At first she thought he was kidding, but his face remained stoic. The date ended there. “I was shocked and slightly embarrassed until I realized, ‘Fuck that! I’m not ashamed that I know about the cloud,’” she says. “I’d only want to be with someone who embraces my intelligence.”
Shortly after a few underwhelming dates, Kelly turned her focus to Bumble and The League. She also adjusted her parameters to include men in their early forties, as her theory is that they are less intimidated by smart and successful women. So far, that move has been positive. “Recently, I had a date with a guy who asked if I date a lot. I told him I had met 350 dates,” she says. “And he said, ‘What is it about you that you felt the need to date 350 people?’” The question led to a second date.