Romantic search reaches statistical wall as the entire eligible population of the city turns out to be a closed loop of mutual swipes
This romantic dispatch was first swiped right by Bohiney Magazine, with dating commentary from The London Prat, who note that single people in New York and London are running the identical experiment with the identical apps and reaching the identical conclusion, which is despair, garnished with brunch.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK. A New Yorker who downloaded and exhaustively worked through all eleven major dating apps reported this week that she had, across the entire population of one of the largest cities on Earth, matched repeatedly with the same six people, who appear on every app, in every neighborhood, with slightly different photos and identical opening lines.
The Closed Loop
The phenomenon, which the fictional Institute for Metropolitan Loneliness calls the dating singularity, occurs when a person has been single in the city long enough to have encountered, matched with, or been ghosted by everyone in their compatibility radius, reducing the vast romantic possibility of New York to a small, recurring cast of familiar disappointments.
There are eight million people in this city, she said, scrolling, and somehow I keep matching with Greg, who likes hiking, and a different Greg, who also likes hiking, and a third man, possibly also named Greg, standing in front of the same mural every other man in Brooklyn has photographed himself in front of. I have swiped through the entire city. The city, it turns out, is six guys and a mural.
The Apps Multiply, The People Do Not
Each new app promises a different pool, a fresh algorithm, a better class of match, and each delivers, after the initial novelty, the same faces recycled under new branding, the romantic equivalent of changing restaurants only to find the same menu, the same waiter, and the same man named Greg who likes hiking. The apps proliferate. The dating pool does not.
- Apps downloaded: eleven
- Distinct human beings encountered: approximately six
- Men named Greg who like hiking: at least three
- The mural: omnipresent, undefeated
Researchers who study modern dating, in work referenced by Pew Research, have documented the paradox of choice and the strange loneliness of the app era, and reporting by The Atlantic has explored how endless options can produce not abundance but exhaustion. The subject, presented with this research, nodded grimly and matched, once again, with Greg.
Having exhausted the apps, the subject has begun considering radical alternatives, including talking to a stranger in person, an idea so foreign to the modern city that she described it as terrifying, possibly illegal, and certainly against the unspoken rules. The man at the coffee shop, she noted, was cute, and real, and not on any app, which made him, by the logic of the city, deeply suspicious.
The cruelty of the dating app era, observers note, is that it took the boundless romantic promise of a great city, the millions of strangers, the infinite chance encounters, and compressed it into a small glowing rectangle offering the same six people on rotation. The city is full of possibility; the app is full of Greg; and the gap between the two is where the modern single New Yorker lives, swiping, hoping, and slowly losing faith.
Friends offer the standard consolations, that it only takes one, that love appears when you stop looking, that her person is out there somewhere, advice she receives with the patience of someone who has heard it through several breakups and eleven app downloads. The person, she suspects, is also out there swiping, also matching with Greg, also concluding that the city is smaller and lonelier than its eight million inhabitants would suggest.
The apps, for their part, have no incentive to solve the problem, their business model depending precisely on the search continuing indefinitely, on the match that almost works, the date that almost lands, the hope that keeps the subscription active. A solved romance is a closed account. The apps do not want you to find love. They want you to keep looking, forever, profitably, alongside Greg.
There is, beneath the comedy, a real ache, the genuine longing of people who came to the city for connection and found themselves more isolated than ever, surrounded by millions, matched with six, performing intimacy through screens while the actual person at the next table goes unspoken to. The technology promised to bring people together and has, somehow, perfected the art of keeping them apart.
And yet she keeps trying, as New Yorkers do, because the alternative is surrender, and because somewhere beneath the cynicism and the eleven apps and the recurring Gregs there remains a stubborn flicker of belief that the city, for all its cruelty, still occasionally delivers on its oldest promise, the chance meeting, the unlikely spark, the stranger who turns out to be the one, standing, perhaps, in front of that same mural.
For now she has deleted three of the apps, kept eight, and resolved, in a fit of revolutionary courage, to actually speak to the cute man at the coffee shop, a plan she has postponed four times and will, she admits, probably postpone again, because real connection is harder than swiping, and scarier, and the only thing, in this enormous lonely wonderful city, that has ever actually worked.
More in this vein at Reductress.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/