Dating Apps and Aesthetics: A Meditation on Why Shit Sucks
By Remy Solomon
A famous philosopher (or incorrigible gossip, depending on how sympathetic you are towards Babe Paley) once said, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” If I may, I’d like to update that sentiment for the most modern of woes.
“That’s not dating, it’s swiping.”
I’ve been swiping for about six years now; I’m mostly on Hinge, sometimes on Tinder, and when I’m feeling truly despondent, I slink over to Bumble. My swiping has produced, to date, no long-term partners, no friendships — hell, I haven’t gone on more than three outings with the same swipee. If I’m being generous, the swiping has spawned a couple of funny anecdotes, but certainly nothing so uproarious as to be worth six years of sunken acquisition cost. And besides, I don’t want to be generous, I want to be critical.
I’ve sat across from many a person in some leather banquette as I drink either a Paloma or a Moscow Mule and try to be sublimely charming without being so charming as to seem, as one date put it, like I am “doing a bit.” On average, I go on probably one date with 75% of the people I meet, two dates with 20%, and three dates with the last 5%. Nobody has ever made it to the Final Boss: a fourth date. I guess theoretically the Final Boss is infinite dates, but that’s in another game which is still wishlisted on my Steam account.
I take such a captious loupe to my life solely to stress that I am making an effort. I mean, I’m really, hand to God, trying to find some kind of connection out here in the digital wasteland. And I am totally failing.
Let’s start with the most obvious question, the one you’re thinking but don’t wanna ask in mixed company. Allow me to pose it:
Am I just unbearable?
First of all: quite possibly! I’m writing a whole article bemoaning modern dating, which has gotta be at least be some kind of flashing light indicating incoming shitheaddery. But as much as I like to engage in some warranted self-deprecation (the more socially presentable stepsister of self-flagellation), I don’t think this answer necessarily covers it. People are, in my experience, shitheads. You just gotta find your variety of fellow shithead.
In the meantime, let’s assume the problem isn’t entirely me. Operating under that premise, I’m left to wonder — what is the problem?
Grab your coat and walk with me on this one. After painstaking consideration, I think the issue lies not necessarily in me, but in aesthetics.
Ah-ah-ah, I hear the clamorous hoard of reply guys rushing to agree with me. Yes, Remy, the problem is simply that you’re too picky. You women, all driven by looks! Harpies, I say, harpies! They viciously nod their heads; this is the answer they were hoping to hear. Because “women be superficial and reductive,” amirite? But no, take your seats and I’ll let you know when it’s appropriate to raise your hand.
When I say ‘aesthetics,’ I mean the aesthetics of the profile itself. In the roughly five seconds I spend making the choice whether to swipe left or right, I am performing a complex social analysis of the swipee that has nearly nothing to do with their physical appearance. I’m analyzing the brightness of flash in their photos, the half-heartedness of their impulsive selfies, the ironic or flippant language in their captions, and if applicable — and it usually is — the quality of the memes they deploy.
These arbitrary visual-textual markers are meaningless in isolation; I don’t have any deeply held beliefs about the correct number of watts per selfie. But when we step back and take in the whole picture, these signifiers in conjunction with one another serve to deliver a very specific “vibe.” A vibe, in theory, is an auratic derivative of qualities that I think are important to me: are they, in some capacity, creative? Do they like to have a good time? Do they hold political opinions that don’t totally suck? Can they tell me something new, something that I don’t hear on every other fuckin’ date? If the signifiers amount to a good vibe, I swipe right.
Just as there’s a certain array of signifiers that indicate a likely right swipe on my part, there’s an equal collection that suggests I should swipe left. For instance: veganism. If a person references veganism on their profile, I swipe left. But wait! Several of my good friends are vegans, and when I asked, one said she had it listed on her profile, “in a roundabout way.” If my friend is great, and she mentions veganism on her profile, why am I so determined to swipe left on vegans? Clearly, it’s not based on an experience of actually disliking vegans. As a matter of fact, I’m a life-long vegetarian, so it would probably only benefit me to seek out people with similarly circumscribed and frankly annoying diets.
And yet again, I whine and pout and throw up my hands and say, through rapidly blinking falsies: it’s…the vibe. There are a limited number of outlets to describe and categorize yourself on a given profile; why the fuck would you dedicate any of that character count to veganism? Who cares?
Well, ok, let’s run with the “who cares” model of analysis. Why, then, is it so critical that I say “Jojo Siwa is a psyop” on my profile? Is that joke so profoundly funny that it deserves its own digital mantle? Of course not! It’s barely even a joke so much as a boozy slushie of other online discourse. However, it deploys a number of practical signifiers. “Jojo Siwa” tells the swiper that I have a working cultural literacy, and “psyop” suggests potential leftism based on current memetic discourse. And anybody who can extrapolate both of those things from a throwaway one-liner is somebody who might be operating on the same wave-length as I am.
…Right?
At the end of the day, despite all this rigorous analysis, my dates are still going poorly. Could it be that my signifier valuation system is fundamentally flawed, that the signifiers are all getting garbled and mis-interpolated? Is it possible the whole system is bunko? At least the vegans have the good grace to just say they’re vegans, and that they give a shit about something; I’m too busy trying to morse code my come-ons.
Still, the vegan straightforwardness registers to me as cringeworthy, I can’t help it. In a day and age where elaborate courting practices are nearing extinction (which is a bummer in the sense that I would love a chic little wristlet dance card), the obfuscation and circuitousness of a certain vein of aesthetic is almost a flirtation in and of itself.
I don’t want to know everything about the person who I go on a date with before I meet them. I want to act like we’re meeting in the dark corner of a pub, that I’ve caught your eye, that suddenly you’re offering to buy me a drink even though you’re here with your friends and you really shouldn’t leave them. In a scripted, coded world, I want to recreate a type of artificial spontaneity. And yet, in the same breath, I don’t want to waste my time getting all gussied up for an outing that I’ll cut off after an hour because, as I say while sliding a ten dollar bill onto the table, “it sounds like we have different priorities.”
Here, then, is the ultimate contradiction: I need to know nothing about my date while simultaneously knowing just enough to keep me excited for the otherwise repetitive ritual. Hence, the vibe method — an ankle flash of a connection without a full reveal. I don’t have a problem with vegans; I have a problem with their refusal to participate in neo-seduction.
Perhaps online aesthetics, however tedious, are meaningful. After all, they’re a level playing ground to some degree; everyone has the ability to curate their own profile within the basic framework of the app. And reliance on profile vibes is certainly more equitable than a reliance on something like physical appearance, right? At least curation highlights a person’s agency, rather than their passive features.
Unfortunately, this leaves me at an uncomfortable juncture: what if the vibe method works, and I’ve just miscalculated my own vibe?
Let’s get real here: the aforementioned vibe I described swiping right on is what your be-cardiganed great aunt might disdainfully refer to as “creative types.” I’m swiping on people whose vibe suggests they have opinions on Bifo, trade archived grails in streetwear Discords, and are anonymous sources for Wet Paint dispatches. I’ve been actively seeking a cultural fluency, a relevancy, a basic…coolness.
Hold on. I’m waxing poetic about the search for “coolness” while wearing Everlane jeans and drag queen merch. My work is creative, sure, but I’m no Chloe Sevigny (especially given that I can’t name a more contemporary reference than an It Girl from the 90s). What if I’ve been swiping on profiles that are not compatible, but rather, aspirational?
In my heart of hearts, I don’t think I actually want to date somebody that’s “cool”; it seems like an awful lot of work to fake a taste for 100 gecs in perpetuity. I just have no idea what sort of profile aligns with the kind of person I actually would like to date; otherwise, given my frequency of dates, I’m pretty sure the statistical skew says I would’ve found someone by now. I believe I’ve substituted an easy, straightforward desire — cultural access — with my romantic desire, even though the two ought not be interchangeable. And I don’t think it’s entirely my fault.
Say the app matches me with a photographer, one who has nicely lit pictures and witty captions that, let’s face it, probably say something about Erewhon. We go on a date. It’s nice, but it doesn’t work out. I unmatch. The app then blitzes me with a litany of people who aren’t like that photographer, people who love The Office and “hate small talk.” People who, I promise, would not like what I’m dishing up. And then I think, I need to get back to an approximation of the photographer, yet nobody fitting that bill manifests. So in an effort to tell the app what I want, to try and create some sort of tactical coding which indicates that the algorithm was heading in the right direction beforehand and to, please, stop sending people my way who are “fluent in sarcasm,” I’m forced to emulate the photographer’s profile.
I have this creeping sensation that I’m searching for and replicating aesthetics not because they contain some artificial pinnacle of my innermost desires, but because that’s exactly what the app needs me to do.
Hinge, at least, has kind of affirmed this. In an interview with Vice about the app’s inner algorithmical workings, Logan Ury, the director of relationship science at Hinge, said: “It’s not just based on who you are likely to like, it’s also based on who is likely to like you back.” And who, I ask, is more likely to like you back than yourself — or rather, somebody who conforms to a similar set of aesthetics and thus, in the eye of the app, has the same essential data markers? If you want to get more precise matches, and therefore more dates, you’re required to be both Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, simultaneously shaping the object of your affection and becoming it.
Dating apps are reinforcing an aesthetic Mobius strip based on textual-visual signifiers of group status that were perhaps nurtured on other platforms like Instagram, and which in the context of dating apps, become full-blown clubs. Paradoxically, it appears that if you want to find connection, you need to engage in categorical division. In other words, by all means be their guest and dick around outside of the aesthetic margins, but it’s only going to make your search more belabored.
That psychological skirmish leads us straight to Foucault. Oh, Foucault. Can’t talk about dating without bringing in a little Foucault, a man I will spend the rest of my life pretending to have read and not just skimmed in between vodka shots. Aren’t I enacting a form of self-surveillance when I so closely tailor my digital personality to that not of the intended user, but to the needs of the panopticon itself (in this case, the apps)? My whole profile is designed to appease not necessarily my own desires, but those of a faceless beast who’s definitely data-mining the shit out of me.
And I’m starting to suspect that we continue to enact these aesthetic categories when we actually go on the dates. I find that I’m tailoring myself in real time the way I would tweak a profile, making subtle changes that best suit my audience. I don’t think I invented the debilitating art of people-pleasing, but rather that I have so much relative data about my target demographic that the performance becomes charged with specificity. You know how Youtube recommends increasingly niche content, because the algorithm understands that’s more likely to keep you engaged? I’m doing that, but with other people. Which, based on how people feel about the Youtube algorithm, isn’t great.
For the record, other folks are returning the favor in kind, albeit in a different capacity. If we agree that app aesthetics aren’t just signals, they’re club memberships, then it makes sense that the mirror-image effect breeds a particular phenomenon of both belonging and unearned familiarity. Okay, I could just be looking for an excuse to get this off my chest, but I gotta say, the further I moved into a specific curatorial category, the more brazen people became with me. Not in a way that I could pinpoint as definitively inappropriate or rude; no, it was as though our fluency in the same language meant we could bypass polite conversation. Here’s what I’m driving at: I feel like I blinked and suddenly, people’s first messages to me all made an oblique reference to BDSM. Granted, I jokingly mention a sex club in my bio, so I might’ve opened the floodgates on that one. But I think it runs deeper than a provocative caption and the vibrating ground-swell that was 50 Shades of Grey. Earlier, I referenced aesthetics as a form of flirtation; to some, though, they seem to be interpreted as a form of consent.
What’s strange is that the frankness around fetish rarely reads as overtly sexual in nature, but almost as more of a business exchange between two interested parties. This is in part, perhaps, because the basis of sexuality — or maybe more precisely, the joy — is in fluidity, yet the indelible nature of dating app decisions force you to be cautious with potential experimentation. I can drastically overhaul my profile, sure, but what matches will I lose forever if I err in my reformatting? If we’re training ourselves out of digital experimentation, and as I suggested earlier, this aesthetic stasis is being reflected on dates, it’s plausible that we’re losing IRL experimentation in the process as well. Perhaps the most egregious sin of all is that the apps have deprived us of the opportunity to play.
When we hyper-categorize ourselves on these platforms, we’re undercutting some of the fundamental delights of sex itself. And if we’re removing pleasure from the romantic equation, what do we have left? We have the societal value of a partnership (e.g. split rent, health care coverage) and not much more. I know I’m not being revelatory here; blah blah, everything has valuation under late-stage capitalism, we’ve all read the DSA introductory packet. But beyond just commodifying our most intimate relationships, dating apps seem…ineffective. Maybe it’s not my business to know what I want. Or, rather, maybe it’s not my business to know what kind of dating app profile has relevance to my actual, non-app desires. I am not the algorithm, and I’m not a digital anthropologist.
In an alternate universe, the answer would be obvious: put down the phones and hit the pavement to prowl for some puss/penis/perineum/platonic flesh. Duh! Well, maybe it’s just me — I hope it’s just me — but it doesn’t look like there are in-person spaces anymore for this kind of romantic connection (and I’m including the pre-pandemic world). Or rather, spaces such as bars still exist, but the comforting etiquette and delineated customs of engagement began eroding in tandem with the apps’ rise to prominence.
And okay, I’m sure other factors were at play, and I’ve only ever dated in the era of dating apps, so take my perspective with a grain of salt. But from one woman’s POV, we’ve largely relegated the romantic-sexual experience to a certain variety of platform, as opposed to a certain space, and thus handcuffed ourselves to brands who serve as mediators.
God, this shit blows. Is there a satisfying alternative, something that’ll sate both my blood lust for a radical shift within the interpersonal sphere, and my, like, old-fashioned lust?
After ranting and raving about this bullshit for a whole essay, I felt that I needed to attempt some form of a solution. I decided to be more earnest about my desires, if only as a step towards actually pinpointing said desires. I actually tried writing my approximated “desires” all over my Hinge profile photos, or as one friend put it, “making a vision board.” I wrote about the books I liked, the things that interested me, what I was looking for in a partner. Basically, I unleashed my inner vegan. I thought by repurposing the tools of the app — crossing the caption section with the photo section — I could essentially hack the app’s algorithm; cue a dubstep soundtrack as my trench coat flaps in the wind, getting caught on my tiny glasses and totally ruining the shot.
I kept the remixed photos up for five days, then took them down out of sheer knee-knocking cowardice. It felt like doing a naked Polar Bear run all by myself, just sprinting into the icy water only to look back and see everyone standing on the shore, arms crossed in their down jackets. Without the allegiance to an aesthetic category, I was…lonely.
It would be awesome if I could grab dating apps by the scruff of their necks and hoist them above the seething horde to crow, ‘here, here’s the culprit! Arrest the bastards!’ But even in all my techno-dubiousness, I reluctantly understand that we’re probably past the point of disentangling — short of getting off the grid, chucking our Iphones into the river and learning how to harvest cabbage, these apps are now integral to our mediation of life. And who the hell wants to be off the grid anyways? Nothing, and I mean nothing, can make me so depressed that I resort to the, ew, outdoors.
Orgasms are petite morts, or tiny deaths. I suggest that, in our search for a tiny death, we stage a tiny revolution. But, because I’ve been reading sex blogs long enough to know that some chick over at Refinery29 must have used that line before, I’ll end with this — apps suck. Dating can suck. Life shouldn’t. Let’s have fun, shall we?