Filling in the Dating Gaps

New dating apps continuously promise to solve the problems of modern dating. Can they get to the core of the issue?

A few months ago, I wrote this essay below on a series of dating app launches and their respective events. For whatever reason, I never published it — there was always some other event to attend and add, some edit to make, some point I could never quite get to. So, for most of the summer, I let it sit. Rather than letting it go to waste, I figured I might as well finally share it here.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to once again thank my paid subscribers who make this writing possible. I go to these dating app parties for you! If you aren’t already a paid subscriber, I’d love for you to consider upgrading. I’m offering a quick 25 percent off sale to further entice you.

screenshots from the websites/Instagram pages for Breeze, When We First, Laila and After

Candace Bushnell doesn’t think it’s all worth it for women anymore. We’re only attracted to ten percent of men, she told me one strikingly dewy April evening, and if we can’t have that then we might as well just be alone. Bushnell probably does not realize she’s touting off a commonly repeated claim of incel forums, but it’s not as though she has sympathy for them. In fact, she thinks porn is probably what’s making men so bad these days, a claim itself often repeated by radical feminists. We happened to be at Onieals, the restaurant used as the setting for Sex and the City’s own Scout bar owned by Miranda’s (ex) husband. I wasn’t expecting to meet her that night. I’d been invited to the press launch party for When We First, a combined matchmaking service and dating app. It was the third dating app related event I’d been invited to that week, and the third I’d attend. I figured this last one would be casual, a mixer of sorts. “Let me introduce you to Candance,” one of the PR women said moments after the first cosmo made it to my hands.

In practically the same breath, she hits me with another take, one that dominates the other side of the Gender War spectrum: maybe the problem is actually porn, she says, and that men have been allowed to become lazy through the easy sexual fulfillment it offers. And then, before she’s whisked off to talk to the next guest, she finds a middle ground. Perhaps it’s all always been this bad. Perhaps men have always offered women so little, they have always been a bad trade when the alternative is just to continue on our own. The difference is that, like those consciousness-raising circles that emerged in the 1960s, we’ve developed new words and ways of identifying what’s wrong with it all — through social media.

The night before I met Marco. Marco has never had to use a dating app. He’s 6’4, let’s start with that. He is fit, but, you know, not too fit. He’s muscle-y enough to see the general size of his biceps through his suede button down without it looking like he’d be weird about what he ate when you went out to dinner. He’s German, lives in Amsterdam but was born in Curacao. If he doesn’t come from money, he probably has some now.

On an early spring week that oscillated between winter cold and summer humidity, thirteen and a half years after the launch of Tinder, Marco introduced his dating app, Breeze, to the New York City market. His was one of three announcing itself to the city that week, each scrambling to tap into the same desperation each also claimed to solve. The PR teams they’d hired all reached out to me separately, unaware of the rest. Each had a different hook — here’s an app that claims to prevent ghosting, here’s one that doesn’t have a chat function, here’s another that incorporates matchmakers. Each, however, all banked on the exact same premise: Something is fractured in contemporary romance. Let us be the cure.

I met with Marco first that week at Public Display of Affection, a restaurant selected by his PR team for its name. I arrived late, blaming (but not lying) my tardiness on an impromptu visit from my landlord in response to a leaky ceiling. In my Uber over, I contemplated the German stereotype of militaristic timeliness with each red light. Upon further reflection, I realized that I’d only been made aware of the stereotype via TikTok, where one particular creator banks on a series about what it’s like to date a German. He even looks a bit like Marco.

The real Marco was, of course, perfectly polite and understanding of my delay. Over meatballs and garlic bread and one glass of red wine in Prospect Heights, I had the app explained to me. I’d done some light initial research, but not much. A dating app is a dating app is a dating app. The main arc of my understanding of the app is that rather than having users spend time getting to know each other by messaging, the app arranges a set date, time and location for matched pairs to meet at partner restaurants. The bill is paid ahead of time, by both parties, equally.

My immediate response to this was, “well, that’s actually kind of smart,” and also, “no fucking thank you.” The idea of splitting the bill is obviously respectable in theory, but something I could not imagine myself (were I dating) or most other young women actually wanting to do. It makes sense for Europe, where the people going Dutch are literally Dutch, but here in New York? It felt like a tough sell. Should it, though? In New York, women often out-earn men at a time when we moreover outnumber them. Across the country, college enrollment among women has surged well beyond that of men. A New York Times headline that week read: “It’s Not Just a Feeling: Data Shows Boys and Young Men Are Falling Behind.”

It’s perhaps with some of these dynamics in mind that, according to Marco, women have been quick to buy in to Breeze’s arrangement.

But Breeze’s novel approach does not end at its requirement for going Dutch. Breeze features no chat function whatsoever, no possibility for “getting to know each other” before actually getting to know each other by meeting in person. That’s not all there is to it, either, though. There is a third element that separates Breeze from the pack that the app has yet to promote, and probably never will. Marco only barely mentioned it offhand. Nowhere does the app ask you to list your political affiliation.

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“New York is known as one of the most romantic spaces and it’s also the most transactional,” a man wearing several rings sighs. We’re at the launch party for After, an app whose biggest claim is that they prevent ghosting. The party is being held at The Ripped Bodice, a “romantic” bookstore where women can buy stickers that say “The man of my dreams exists in a book” or “monster smut” and baseball hats detailing their favorite romance novel tropes.