You Are (Far From) Alone
Or, ten years in the dating app trenches
I’m a 37-year-old never married, usually single woman living in a major city—in other words, JD Vance’s worst nightmare (minus the cats). Although I was not the little girl who grew up dreaming about her wedding day, I took it for granted that someday I would find a meaningful long-term relationship.
I was a late bloomer, barely dating in high school or college, and only getting into my first serious relationship as a 24-year-old. As a high school and then college student in the early 2000s, online dating was considered embarrassing, something you did if you were desperate.
I could not have guessed how much that would eventually change, how much online dating would shape the trajectory of my love life.
I first got on dating apps in 2014, when I was 27 years old. At that time, I was in my second year of grad school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Inspired by my friend Stephanie, who was the first person I knew who used Tinder, I downloaded the app.
Soon, I had a date with someone I saved in my phone as Bobby Marin County. Years and hundreds of forgettable first dates later, I can still remember my anxiety as I rode BART into San Francisco to meet this stranger. What was I getting myself into? Who was this person? The answers to both these questions turned out to be kind of tepid.
Bobby came across as a nice enough if bland person. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant in the Nob Hill neighborhood. He didn’t like his tech job and told me he dreamed of being a farmer, the first time I knew of someone from a major city with that aspiration. I came out of the date with a disappointed but not altogether negative feeling.
Despite the occasionally odd experiences that followed, I look back at this era of my life with some fondness. At that time, I truly did feel like I was expanding my horizons, my perspective, with all of the different people I was meeting.
I was recently out of a long-term relationship with little other dating experience to speak of, and now had what can only be described as a deluge of men at my fingertips. I treated it, embarrassingly, as a kind of online shopping for my type of men, or who I thought were my type.
I met people like Stanley, a personal trainer who asked to meet at a Starbucks and then took me back to what I realized was his parents house. Matt, who drove from San Francisco to the suburb where I lived to take me to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant I hadn’t known about and would patronize for years after. Shawn, who talked to me about his experiences growing up in a working-class Vietnamese family in San Jose and how he’d had to fight for everything he had. Sal, who went to the bathroom so many times while we were out at a club that the man sitting next to me asked if the guy I was with was doing coke—turns out, he was. Mark, who would become my boyfriend for a time.
By the time I moved back to the East Coast a couple years later, I felt like a dating app veteran. But I would find out that New York City dating was something else entirely. I swiped and swiped through Tinder, dismayed by my (relative) lack of success. The men that I matched with asked me to go dutch on dates, and/or unmatched me immediately after the date, and/or grilled me about my career choices and “five year plan.”
I started to count success on dates as not being asked to split the check or not being talked down to or straight-up insulted.
So what was going on? It’s not like I’d never been on a bad date in California. New York City dating seemed like the perfect storm of anonymity, a skewed gender ratio, and people for whom the novelty of dating apps had completely worn off.
And I didn’t have to chat with or even meet anyone from the apps to feel their resentment—profiles made fun of women for “thinking they would meet their husband” on Tinder, or “reminding” users that it was a hook-up app, like they’d designed the platform.
I didn’t bother telling these men that I’ve been treated like a hookup by quite a few Bumble dates, even after stating my intention to find a long-term relationship. Conversely, I’ve been treated respectfully by some of my Tinder dates (especially during the earlier years, shoutouts to Bobby Marin County).
Its taken years of work on myself (aka therapy) to start approaching dating from a different perspective. In short, I realized I was part of the problem. I had been way too focused on random people I was dating instead of being there for myself. And in an especially rough dating scene like NYC, this lack of self-knowledge as well as strategy was leading to a lot of hurt.
I had fallen into a pattern of ignoring red flags and then beating myself up over getting hurt or humiliated yet again. The (largely negative) reality of app dating might never change, but I would need to if I wanted to respect myself, let alone find a partner.
At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I do not think I am guaranteed, or even overwhelmingly likely to meet a good long-term partner just because I had an attitude change. Modern dating is just weird as hell for a few reasons, and I don’t think this is limited to app dating.
But I push back (forcefully) against the idea that being a single, nearly middle-aged woman dooms me to unhappiness. I have no interest in being the Brooklyn Miss Havisham, sitting around my apartment, crying at screenshots of text conversations with my exes from the good times. I am also not interested in “giving up” on dating, although I understand why some women my age have decided to go that route.
I am interested in continuing to find new ways to deal with the dating landscape I’m a part of, and being there for anyone who’s trying to deal with it too. Tl:dr: yes, dating can really suck, and you aren’t alone.