Ok here we go again.
I think I’ve finally figured out the scariest thing about dating apps. They do actually turn finding love into a fucking job search.
Every date feels like a business meeting or something, no sparks, pure cringe.
Think about it, we fill out our “resumes” with our best photos and wittiest bios. We list our “desired positions” in the filters. We swipe through “candidates” hoping to get a “decent offer”. The whole thing is an HR pipeline with better lighting. But love is the exact opposite of a job search, which follows logic. Love? Personally, I think there is no logic in love.
Love is a bias, a fucking tyranny. The bias is that you only want one specific person to do the things literally anyone could do. The tyranny is that you pour all your emotions, irrationally, recklessly, entirely onto another human being. And dating apps have always given me this weird feeling, love obtained through this process feels so bland it’s almost offensive. If I were a planet, this whole approach would be like some engineer calculated the perfect speed, angle, and mass, then launched another planet at precisely the right time so we’d form a nice, stable binary star system. How romantic. How efficient, how abso-fucking-lutely dead inside.
What I want is a rogue planet hurtling toward me at full speed out of nowhere in the middle of the void. The moment we touch, atoms from two entirely separate worlds are forced into lattices they were never meant to share. Molecular bonds snap, shatter, and reform into something unrecognizable. The pressure breeds temperatures that fuse nuclei into heavy, unnamed elements that no periodic table has ever seen, existing for a few picoseconds before decaying into something else entirely. Oceans of molten rock erupt outward, entire crusts peeled off like skin, shockwaves rippling through mantles at speeds no device could ever measure. What used to be two worlds is now a single, blinding wound in space. Some debris escapes into strange new orbits. The rest? Fuses together so tightly that nothing, not time, not entropy, can pull it apart, until our one last atom is annihilated with the heat death of the universe.
I’m not saying dating apps are pure evil, you could still meet someone real on there, the odds exist. But what’s truly terrifying about these things is that they teach you how to NOT invest. Everyone on there wants low-risk love. A guaranteed return with minimal downside. But since when has that ever been how love works?
I’ve seen people around me become professional swipers. Always chatting, always got girls around them. And then what? This one’s family background isn’t great. That one’s not pretty enough. Another one said something weird at dinner that gave them the “ick”. Next. Next. Next. Bro, stop cos-ing a fucking conveyor belt.
Being overly rational in love is a slow way to lose everything. The second anything feels slightly off, they’re gone. No friction allowed. But no friction means no sparks either. They end up like the guy in Socrates’ wheat field parable, walking through the field, always convinced a bigger stalk is just ahead, waiting, but never actually picking one. And the field does end. It very much does end.
Uninstalled.