We joke now that I didn’t even quite realise it was a date – that first meeting we set up in April 2017 after briefly chatting on Bumble, the dating app.
In my defence, he suggested meeting up on the Easter Bank Holiday for a lunchtime walk at the Barbican. Compared with many of the other people I’d be talking to – who just wanted to cut right to the *ahem* chase – he seemed polite, friendly, and not overly flirtatious. Sweet.
We already had a little history: we’d swiped right because we recognised each other from 15 years earlier – we both come from the same town in Essex and had been acquaintances as young teenagers (never romantic). He was in the year below me at school and friends with my sister. But now, was this adults meeting for a platonic catch-up? Old friends sharing memories? Or more? I didn’t know.
Now, in our seventh year together, we have a mortgage, a puppy, a white picket fence, and a shared washing basket. I guess it turned out to be a date after all.
Not everything in our relationship has been the stuff of romantic fairy tales, or Hallmark greeting cards – and I’m not as insufferably smug about it as I sound – but I do have no qualms about how it all began: on a dating app. This is in spite of new research published this week that found that online daters report “less satisfying and stable marriages” than those who met their spouse offline. The findings were based on an admittedly small pool of 923 Americans, half of whom had met in the digital world.
Although the researchers suggest these results might just be a consequence of the growing number of relationships that originate online, it wouldn’t be the first time that dating apps have been dismissed as the route to romantic happiness.
The online dating arena can be bleak and unmanageable: women face sexual harassment on apps (including being sent a lot of unsolicited sexual images), experts have compared their functionality with the addictive qualities of gambling slot machines that encourage bad behaviour (ghosting, ignoring etc), and clearly there is enough of a market for return customers.
In addition, Liesel Sharabi of Arizona State University, who led the most recent study, said that there is also still “a stigma surrounding online dating that can put added stress on a relationship… dating apps are often labelled as being non-serious or hook-up orientated, which can make couples feel a sense of disapproval”.
Apps have undoubtedly changed the landscape of love: in the early 20th century, geographic location played a huge part in people meeting. A 1932 study by sociologist James Bossard in Chicago, found that most married couples lived in the same neighbourhoods. “Cupid may have wings, but apparently they are not adapted for long flights,” he said. By the late 1970s and 80s, 22 per cent of British couples met in the pub, according to Imperial College. Today, this number is much less (seven per cent of couples meet in the pub) and online dating has also overtaken meeting at work and via mutual friends.
Yet while a lot of the app criticisms are valid, I don’t subscribe to the idea that we should mourn the transition from these old ways of meeting to the modern ways. It is not inherently less romantic to meet on an app than over the water cooler, or in a bar, and I don’t think it is necessarily true that your subsequent relationship is more doomed to fail.
Yes, sitting on the toilet flicking through stranger’s pictures on your phone might not be the vision of a Nancy Myers meet-cute, but for me the apps provide the ultimate sliding doors moment. Do you swipe right and open up a whole new path for your life or swipe left and throw them onto the discarded heap of singletons?
It is spine-tinglingly exciting to me to think that the person right in front of you might be a portal to an entirely different life, one that has decades of happiness in it, and all it takes is a swipe. Plus in this day and age, as social norms change, it is much harder to meet people offline because there is an expectation that everyone is using the apps.
I sometimes think about whether our paths would ever have crossed if it hadn’t been for that dating app. All for that single swipe. I’d like to think that the universe would have found a way of bringing us together, but I’m also more cynical than that.
I think that there are so many tiny moments where the many possible versions of our lives deviate from each other, the path that forks this way or that. And luckily, both he and I picked the same one on a warm evening in April 2017. What is more romantic than that?
