The Apps are not your friend, a caution against using dating apps to find romantic partners

I'll make this quick. Going on a morning hike tomorrow, need to get up at 6am. More importantly, there's not much there is to say here besides the well...title.

If you've been burned by the dating apps, it's not just you. The whole world things dating apps suck they make you miserable they don't find you quality partner. For the one-in-a-hundred friend that found their husbands in the apps, or the one-in-a-ten-thousand friend whose first date from the apps ended up as their husband, think about this: would their chances have been improved or gotten worse if they had picked a random person from the phone book of appropriate age group, gender and sexual orientation? It's a blind shot, don't look at your friends who've found true love in the apps and expect to be one of them in the future.

Here's the reason: it is not in the best interest of the apps to get you hitched. Your happiness is rather contrary to their bottomline. Think about this: imagine they had a magic algorithm. As long as two people who were to be the perfect partners were enrolled in the app, they would be instantly matched. And boom. That's the end of it. No more dating no more moneymaking no more monthly fees no more value-addons. People get in the apps, people get out, there's no large pool of people seeking desperately for love and attention, desiring validation. There is no constant source of income for the app companies. To put it differently, imagine if you were a majority shareholder of a dating app company. An engineer comes to you and says, sir our budgets are tights and the profits are not great, and I've discovered a way no one will ever renew the subscriptions with our app because they'd be instantly hitched! No sane person would allow that to happen, after all the shareholders are whom the company is working for you as the customer are just an incidental party who happens to be the whale. So even in the case where the Apps were perfect, you STILL wouldn't find matches because the shareholders would sue the company otherwise for failing to fulfill their duties.

Now in real life the apps are not perfect the algorithms suck. Which means you're thrashing about looking at every person you possibly can just hoping you'll get a match, with no chance of a good sight. But they do have some 'cleverness' baked in, they can use heuristics about age sex gender interests location race to make suggestions about who might be relatively better for you. And suggest the opposite. Because remember, the more value you get out of those apps, the greater your stability, the lesser value they can extract from you. Your win is their loss. Your pain is their win.

Third, getting in the apps makes you believe the whole world is at your disposal, that's the entire universe of the single people of your interest that you'll ever find. Which could not be more further from the truth. All the people you find there are a very small subset of your age group, and those that are active at any particular time are much small portion of that still. Which means you are looking at an immensely small self-selected bunch of people and considering that to be the universe of your choice. Which means you're going to start freaking out because it's not working and time's running out your friends have done better is there something wrong with you maybe you should change something maybe you need to become more interesting oh god ogawd egads!!!

Let us go back to the 'self-selected' part. Think about the kind of people who would get into the apps. If you're a straight woman, think about the men there. Unlike what the apps would have you believe, most men in the general population do not bring up sex in the third or fourth sentence of your first conversation. The apps are marketed as 'hookup  apps' or sex apps, and not meant to conjoin people for life. So people's expectations are adjusted to that. If you however go in there expecting long-term commitments and arrangements you're going to be in for much disappointment. Not just with the men of the app, but men in general, because in your mind the apps are a random sampling of a general population. Which, to repeat again, is extremely wrong.

TO summarize: if you want to get laid ASAP as a woman or a gay man go for the apps and you'll get to where you want to be in a matter of hours at most. Otherwise, whatever you're looking for you will not find in those apps and it's probably time for you to change your tacks. Talk to real people make real connections, understand that relationships are about irl interactions and despite everything being 'e' today, your personal relations are stronger than that. Use the social network of friends family coworkers and acquaintances you already have, don't go hunting for fruits of gold in the desert when you have a lush forest of personal relationships right next to you .