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Is Hetero Partnership Worth the Misery of Hetero Dating?
For women right now probably not.
Back in 2019, after almost a decade on the apps, I raised venture capital to build and launch my own dating app, Chorus, an attempt to remedy the horror show that online dating had become. I was proud of what we built — a more human, community-based approach — but for various reasons, including the money required to compete with Match Group, as well as Meta continuously suppressing our ads, we folded after a few years. In the time since, the apps have only gotten worse. Much worse.
It’s funny that back then I thought it was as bad as it could get. At that time online dating had just surpassed friends as the number one way people met their partners. This was a big deal! It went in the pitch deck! For the first time, online dating was the norm. Now it’s hard to imagine a world where that wasn’t the case.
My generation — hovering awkwardly between Gen Xers and millennials — exists in the intersection between earnestly dating without technology and completely and utterly relying on it. I started online dating back in 2011 when the word “tinder” referred to flammables, Match was known as Match.com, and most people believed that online dating was still reserved for the socially inept. I was twenty-nine.
Up until that point, what “dating” entailed was an abstract concept I’d absorbed from old movies. My generation did not date. We “met up.” Meet-ups involved texting your romantic interest around midnight on your flip phone to coordinate a meeting spot close enough to one of your apartments — both convenient but inconspicuous — while your friends hovered at a nearby bar so you had other options.
This system had its flaws. Namely, a heavy reliance on alcohol, complete ambiguity when it came to intentions, and the need for an almost meditative commitment to going with the flow. But there was a saving grace to it all too. A beauty that, like most good things, didn’t reveal itself until it was gone.
Despite the ambiguity of the meet-up itself, you were generally meeting people you’d crossed paths with in real life. Most often at parties, events, places where there was some mutual connection between you and the other person. Because of this, there was always some level of…
