A Hinge date in West Michigan—we met for drinks at a fancy rooftop bar in downtown Grand Rapids. She, a blonde business executive, a bonafide girlboss. I, a young professor, living in a new town far from home. She ordered an espresso martini, I ordered a Manhattan. We made small talk for half an hour and ordered a second round. It went down fast.
I paid the $80 tab, and we left. We hugged in the lobby and said we had fun. Too drunk to drive, I rented one of those electric scooters and zoomed around the city until I sobered up. Nearly cracked my head open on the pavement. More fun than the date by a mile.
We never texted again.
Dating apps are failing Michiganders in their search for love, and it’s not hard to figure out why.
More than half of young American adults have used dating apps. They’ve become one of the most common places to meet romantic interests, exceeding school, church, and work. Meeting through friends used to be common, but even that’s fallen by the wayside. Meeting online is the new way, we hear.
Monetizing human loneliness is big business. Sign up for Tinder Platinum for $30 a month or stay single forever, the ads cry out. Tinder is the most profitable app of all time, don’t you know.
One obvious clue as to why the apps don’t work—Match Group doesn’t make money when you find true love and cancel your subscription.
Match Group owns Hinge too, by the way, in case you thought that was a better alternative to Tinder. You can never escape their algorithm. Even if you delete and come back later, they’re known to track you. A phone number, an email, an iOS account—all link you to a unique identity within the dating app ecosystem. Once the algorithm determines your ranking (yes, they rank users), that’s it for life.
You’d think apps would make dating easier. More convenient, more opportunity. Yet satisfaction with dating and relationships is obviously at an all-time low. Talk to your friends, talk to young people and ask them. The mood is grim. Many couples who met before the dating app era feel like they got the last chopper out of Vietnam.
For Michigan, online dating presents a particularly tempting premise. The state is dotted by so many small towns, cities, and neighborhoods, all connected by highways. Lower urban density can make it hard to meet new people, and dating apps convince you that the right person for you is out there, but perhaps they’re in the next town over, down a country highway.
Many Michiganders fire up the apps and end up on random dates at bars and restaurants in towns they’d rarely visit otherwise.
Divorced from the context of each other’s lives, dating app connections often feel like a bridge too far. You are more than just a few photos and a bio on an app. It takes a whole lifetime, a whole world of people and places, to become who you are. If you’ve ever arranged a date on a dating app, you know that the person you meet is never quite like they seem online.
Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always different. Their personality, the way they carry themselves, even the way they look. Some people use old pictures where they were slimmer, but even accurate pictures are still flat, 2-D, and people exist in 3-D. Smell is important too. Did you know pheromones are a major element of attraction?
When you meet someone in the flesh, you experience these subliminal cues of attraction in the first five seconds. The apps give you none of this information, and you’re left to discern based on a few photos and text messages.
This leads to bad dates. Like my date with the blonde girlboss. A nice girl, no doubt, but just no mutual connection whatsoever in person. Not a horrible evening, all things considered, but a waste of time. Had I met her in person somewhere, this would have been obvious in two seconds, and we’d never have gone out.
Narrative, chance, mythos. Romance thrives on fate. The story of how you met isn’t simply incidental, it’s a foundational element of any long-term love affair. The universe conspires to bring two people together at the same moment in time. Love at first sight is real, but you’ll never feel it from a picture.
No wonder a common dating app bio is “let’s pretend we met elsewhere.” We know deep down that narrative is important, and that dating apps sell us short. They deprive us of the chance for a potent story, and a good story is the foundation of any lasting romance. The narrative we tell ourselves about why we’re with a particular person comes to be our bedrock.
Sadly, the dating app narrative undermines us from the start. You’re a special person, a unique soul with a lot to offer, but on the apps… you’re just another user, another match, a photo in a sea of photos. You are “dating app boy/girl,” and that story supersedes everything else about you.
Not only that, but if you’re not doing as well on the apps as you think you should, it undermines your confidence. All that swiping, all those bad dates, all those failed connections. They deprive you of the chance to fail in ways that build your confidence. Asking someone out in real life doesn’t always work either, but you always feel like, hey, you gave it a shot, and it took bravery to do it. You’ll never feel that from an app.
Sometimes romance builds gradually, as well. Two people in social proximity come to feel affection over time. Friends become lovers. Dating apps force an immediate romantic context that might not exist under more natural circumstances.
There are exceptions to my dating app hate, of course. Some people do find love on the apps. Finding love in a hopeless place, indeed. But by and large, they’re failing single Michiganders by any conceivable metric. Consider the declining marriage and birth rates, or just consider popular perception. In either case, the apps aren’t working, or at least they aren’t doing what they say they do. They’ve monetized your loneliness, and it’s time to take your own initiative.
Meeting people in real life isn’t easy, but the opportunity is greater now than it ever has been. No one expects it anymore, so if you’re the least bit outgoing and social, you’ll find it way easier than you think. Forget the pickup artist shtick: Just go out into the world, talk to people, and you’ll find yourself meeting people you’d never have expected to otherwise.
Be patient and forget the fake immediacy of the apps. Love doesn’t come every day. But that’s the point. The kind of connection you want isn’t casual or easily forgettable. It takes something special to happen, divine intervention, in a way. Don’t deprive yourself of that.
If you’re lucky, you’ll tell your grandkids one day about how you saw her on the dock at the lake and it was love at first sight. Or that he was in your Spanish class in college and you loved his smile. She was sitting at the bar and ordered the exact same drink as me. Our hands accidentally touched browsing vinyl at the vintage shop. That sort of thing. Go find your story.
Ditch the apps and get out there. Live your lives, Michiganders. That’s how you’ll find someone to live it with.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
