No. Holy cow. Those are my biases. I can choose to act on them or not. I get pigeonholed after a few weeks on every dating platform, it’s brutal and very depressing. In the wild I can choose to go to a different grocery store, go to a different park, hang out in a different cafe, go play mini golf… whatever. I am very open minded, I go out of my way to talk to a lot of different people from every walk of life, despite having a healthy group of loving friends and not being particularly extroverted, but I can only talk to those who are willing. I can try to talk to those who catch my fancy, and believe me I do, but our “stranger danger”, dopamine addled, earbuds-in, narcissistic and anxiety ridden culture makes this a fairly poor strategy. Perhaps in another life this would have been how you meet people, but generally speaking as a male in the modern heterosexual dating culture of millennials and gen z, you aren’t going to have much luck meeting people “in the wild” because talking to people unprovoked —-if you even can, everyone is plugged in all the time— is either creepy, weird or annoying- or at least that’s been my experience living throughout Northern California and the Bay Area. And covid has made this phenomenon significantly worse. And I know what this sounds like, so I’ll just come out and say it: I’m conventionally good looking, tall, fit, well dressed and a good conversationalist, not a creep. In settings where it’s appropriate, like, say, a music festival or a party, I’m good at meeting people, so I really don’t think it’s me. But on apps it’s just the same people. With apps there’s basically two options, I give a lot of people a chance and my MMR tanks and I only see a certain kind of person, or I’m selective for people I think would be a good fit and I see a different higher MMR group, which eventually devolves into the first group as it seems MMR decays over time.
I’m currently single again and almost 30 and I recognize a lot of the women I get in my feeds from dating at other points in my life. I use many apps, have no filters and cast my net quite wide. If I didn’t understand that this is essentially to be expected from social media for profit, I’d be befuddled and confused, but it’s really just upsetting. Romantic love is a huge piece of the human experience being gate kept by mega corps.
OkCupid getting bought by Match Group was horrible; now it’s search functionality is gutted and it’s got the same matchmaking bullshit all the others do, and matches me with the same groups of people and inactive accounts just like the rest.
Anyway, what you wrote triggered me, and I felt quite compelled to scream into the void about it. Modern dating apps feel like I have overly aggressive parents trying to put me in an arranged marriage. Its downright suffocating and makes this whole messed-up-planet, extremely socially divided, and ethically bankrupt life feel that much more dystopian.
Rant over.