The following is taken from a recent article in The Times. Click on the link below to download and read the full article.
Huge numbers of twentysomethings are heading off the apps and instead seeking love IRL.
You are on a dating app and this is how it goes: a man with a face, another man with a face, one with a dog, with his mum, without a shirt. A man playing tennis, holding a child (“My niece!”), out walking, out clubbing, at the pub. He’s 6ft 2in, 5ft 6in, Buddhist, spiritual, liberal, reads books, sells books, wants book recommendations; he’s a banker, a builder, an “account manager”; he’s 27, 40, open to children, in an open relationship and you should only go out with him if that’s OK with you, OK?
It is a disorientating fever dream, a never-ending loop of profiles, filtered only by age and location. It means you are left to invent your own strange rules — based on jobs or spelling errors or what their friends look like — to narrow them down. You become judgmental, detached, ruthless — and so do they, the people you are swiping past, while they swipe from their own sofa at home.
After a decade of swiping, however, people have had enough. “The tide is turning against the apps,” says Jo Hemmings, a behavioural psychologist known as the UK’s first dating coach. “We thought they were our salvation — there was this great hope, but today there is a real sense of disappointment at the results.”