UVic “Modern Love” Stories, inspired by the New York Times column
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
I swore I’d never be the dating app guy.
Of course, I made that promise to myself when I was in the middle of a five-year long relationship. It’s a lot easier to swear on the guys you’ll never be when you have a long-term girlfriend. I also swore that I’d never be the going out every weekend guy (guilty), that I’d never be the guy who gets really into rock climbing (guiltier), and that I’d never be the health nut guy who gets super jacked and looks incredible (I haven’t done this one yet, but it’s coming, I swear, just give me six to eight months and a steady supply of creatine).
The beauty of a committed relationship isn’t just stability. It’s equally the ability to be delusional. There’s this little voice in every person’s head that whispers, at some point or other, you could do better. If you haven’t heard that voice yet; don’t worry, it’s coming for you. And depending on your ego, it’ll range from a polite murmur to a full-blown internal TED Talk, one with slides and those stupid pointer sticks and a Q&A session at the end. If I was on the open market, you think, surely, they’d be lining up out the door.
You sit next to a cute girl on the bus or catch a hot guy’s eye across the dance floor, and you imagine that life where, if not for the metaphorical ring on your finger (or actual ring, I don’t know your life), you’d walk up to them, give them your number, and they’d be over the moon to have been gifted the simple presence of your company. You’d never have to get on the apps, you convince yourself, because you’re a goddamn treat. If anyone was going to bring back old school dating, it would be you, the serial monogamist, with your secret belief that you’d be an all-star single person.
Except here’s the thing: You’re a moron.
Because the truth is, that cute girl on the bus? She didn’t notice you. And that guy whose eye you caught across the crowded floor, as if the universe itself had parted the room just for you? He was zoned out, daydreaming about being the GM of the Seahawks, and unless you can run a 4.3-second 40-yard dash, you don’t stand a chance.
But I don’t blame you for believing. I was the same way. I knew that little voice too, and it was TED-talking more often than not. When my relationship ended, a huge part of me was jazzed to be unfurling my wings for the first time since I was seventeen. Here I was, king of the mildly attractive men, finally taking off into single-person airspace, an F-16 among Cessnas. A hawk among pigeons. A moron.
The first thing you realize when you become newly single is that all those single-person fantasies are just that: fantasies. Passing someone in the street and nonchalantly giving her your number sounds great in theory, but oh my god, it does not work in practice. Of course it doesn’t. First of all, people in this city walk unbelievably fast. Before you know it, she’s blowing past you, and you have to decide whether or not it’s worth turning around and following her, which obviously you should NOT do.
But hey, you’re a romantic, so you do it anyway. And now you’re following someone. Not just someone, a complete stranger, trying your best to keep at least three car lengths distance behind her because you don’t want to be a creep. Which, spoiler alert, that ship has sailed. And then, she goes into Lush, so now you have to go into Lush. And you hate Lush, because every time you go into Lush you leave feeling as though your nostrils should be pressing charges. But you do it anyway. And far too late, you realize: how the hell is this going to work? You don’t carry a pen and paper. You don’t carry business cards because you’re a 22-year-old writing major and not Patrick Bateman (although, currently, not too far off). What was the plan here? To ask for her LinkedIn? And now you’re stuck in Lush, pretending to browse the Minion bath bombs, right up until the moment she hands the cashier an ocean salt body scrub and says:
“Do you gift wrap? It’s for my boyfriend.”
I think that’s around the moment I decided to download the apps. All the apps. I got Hinge, I got Bumble, I got Tinder. I even managed to get myself on Raya, where I was able to message Charli D’Amelio, Kiernan Shipka, Eileen Gu, and about seven of the women from Love Island USA. I’ll let you guess how many of them got back to me.
The first few months of being on the apps is somehow equal parts gratifying and humiliating. Creating a profile is genuinely fun. It’s like a little game, trying to find the balance between being funny, and a bit dangerous, and looking like a complete sociopath. Depending on your delivery, “dog lover” can come across as dog lover, and “overnight hiker” can look shockingly similar to “I’m going to drag you into the woods and leave you there.”
But if you do it right, the likes will start to roll in. Dating apps are set up to reward newcomers. Suddenly, you’re the shiny new toy; you’ve got twenty conversations on the go, four coffee dates next week, and four thousand on the horizon. Someone says you look like Chace Crawford, and you don’t know who that is but your women friends tell you he’s cute so you immediately let it go to your head. You’re being funny. You’re being charming. You tell a joke, and it lands, so you copy paste that joke into every conversation you’re currently having, and it keeps landing, because you’re a genius and a messiah and nobody has ever been as good at this as you.
You have first dates, you have flings, you get into situationships. But you’re picky. That’s the danger of infinite choice, there’s always something better — someone better. The hunt for them is satisfying, and time consuming. The app does what it’s designed to do; it keeps you on the line. A week will pass with practically no matches, and then the moment you consider deleting your account, suddenly you have twenty. You don’t even realize it, but you’re hooked. You start to, against your better judgement, let that little flame icon on your phone define your self-worth.
And that’s when it all comes crashing down.
The first time I got ghosted, it was like being hit by a bus. I was affronted. I was enraged. How dare she ghost me, the guy who looks marginally like Nate from Gossip Girl if you take a tequila shot and squint really hard? What is she, crazy? Does she even realize what she’s missing? The name of the game, then, was coping through wild conjecture.
“She probably had a family emergency,” I remember telling one of my friends, my fingers crossed dramatically. “Or, if I’m really lucky, maybe she got in a car crash. Wait, maybe she’s dead!”
After that first few ghosts, though, you begin to stop wishing horrible maiming accidents on strangers (mostly), and you realize that ghosting is a dating app necessity. It’s simply the quickest, cleanest way to get yourself out of a situation that you don’t see going anywhere. It’s the 21st century guillotine. You discover your new match doesn’t like pulp in their orange juice? Sacrebleu! Off with their head!
When I first started on the apps, I swore I would never ghost anyone. But a year in? I was practically Casper.
But still, it sucks to be the ghostee, so you begin to change tactics. You’ve already tried your true authentic self, so now it’s time to become the person they want you to be. Everyone does this to some extent. With family, with friends, with lovers. You modify yourself to fit into their lives, trusting they’ll do the same for you. But dating apps take that idea and turn it up to ten. On the internet, you can be whoever you want; so why not be Mr. Right?
Oh my god, you say, toggling between your Hinge chat and Wikipedia, I also ADORE 9 to 5, the 1990s comedy film featuring Dolly Parton for which the Grammy award winning song of the same name was created… Did you know it grossed 103.9 million and Ronald Reagan once watched it on Valentines Day?
Dating apps, if you’re not careful, can teach you to believe that you aren’t enough. That you need to be smarter, funnier, more attractive, more interesting. The irony, of course, is that you already are all of these things, you just can’t show it. Three questions and six photos can never capture the vast complexities of the human spirit. But don’t fret, Hinge now lets you add a poll to your profile. Oh, goody!
In the year or so I possessed the apps, I had a lot of friends ask me for help with creating their profiles. I don’t know how I became the friend group’s Tinder counselor — or Fire Marshall, as I now prefer to be called — but it happened. And what I’ve found is that, time and time again, the people I consider to be some of the smartest, funniest, most delightful individuals I’ve ever met seem committed to coming across like absolute duds.
My good friend Mike, for example, was, for an entire month, using the line, “Girl, you have a real Outer Banks vibe and I’m so here for it” on every single woman he matched with, simply because it had worked once. This is one of the most clever men in my life, and here he was running some bizarre marketing campaign for Netflix Originals. It didn’t make any sense.
But that’s the reality of losing yourself to the apps. You begin to treat yourself like clickbait. How can I grab their attention? How can I get a response? How can I win? Because that’s what it feels like to get a match, to see their profile slide from your stack into your conversations. It feels like you’re winning.
And when the opposite happens? It feels like you’ve lost. And you feel like a loser.
But you shouldn’t. And I don’t think you have to.
It’s been about a year and a half since my five-year relationship ended. It has been an up and down experience, and I fear I have still learned very little. However, I think I’ve come to understand the trick to dating on the apps — or at least my trick. Which, if I could sum it up in one word, is balance.
Dating apps aren’t inherently evil. Tinder isn’t some dark, insidious force conspiring to make you feel like an unlovable troll (that’s just your brain, dude). At their very base, the apps are a solid invention. They’re a way to meet people outside your normal social bubble, a means of connection in an increasingly isolated world, and a chance to finally test out your absolutely on-point opinion about audiobooks in a controlled setting.
The problem is, dating apps only work if you don’t let them consume your entire soul. If you treat them as a supplement to your life, rather than the entire buffet. The moment you start measuring your self-worth in little red notification dots, that’s when you’ve lost. The second you find yourself deep in the archives of someone’s public Instagram page, trying to decode their captions like they’re the fucking Zodiac killer, you’ve gone too far. When you, a rational adult, find yourself adjusting your music taste based on a stranger’s linked Spotify profile? Yup — I think it’s time to log off.
At best, the apps are a fun little game, with the added benefit that something real and meaningful could sneak onto the screen at any moment. I have friends who have met their spouses on the apps. It’s a bit like Deal or No Deal. Behind one door: Ooh, true love! Behind another: BOO! Weirdos!
So, my advice — if you’re asking (which, if you’ve made it this far, let’s face it, you are)—is this: Use the apps, have fun, meet people, go on dates. But also, touch grass. Go spend time with your friends. Go to a bar and try your hand at (politely) asking someone for their number. Get really into climbing and become insufferable about it and slowly lose all those friends you were just spending time with. And for the love of God, stop watching those “best opening lines for Tinder” TikToks. Mike, buddy, I love you, but I’m talking to you here.
I’m no longer on the apps. Not because of a bad experience, or a hatred for them, or a belief that they’re ruining the state of modern love. Not even because Charli D’Amelio never messaged me back — she would’ve eventually, guys, I’m certain of it. Rather, I’m no longer on the apps because the apps did their job. I swung open one of the doors and, lo and behold, I met a person I quite like.
In the end, I didn’t make a connection because of some wickedly clever pickup line or a viral-worthy meet-cute where we both accidentally sent the same GIF at the same time and then discovered we went to space camp together when we were seven. It was just a conversation. She told a joke. I told a slightly less clever joke. We made plans. We went on a date. And then another. Before I knew it, I wasn’t checking my phone for new matches anymore.
I’m not sure where I’ll be another year and a half from now. But if you ever see me lurking in the dark corners of a Lush, looking confused and overwhelmed — don’t worry, I’m not slipping back into old habits. I’m just trying to figure out what the hell a shower steamer is.
