Why I’ve Never Used a Dating App

Call me old-school, but I want to meet the love(s) of my life offline

In the sweet new Japanese reality TV show Offline Love on Netflix, ten strangers arrive in France, turn in their phones, and then with only a guidebook in hand and a local coffee shop converted into their very own post office, they attempt to find love, through fate. No devices.

You meet people solely by chance, or fate if you will, and the only way you can contact them again is by sending them a letter and then meeting them where you’ve asked them to meet you, by using a physical map - and hoping they’ll be there too.

Of course this is a reality TV show and we’ll never really know what is scripted and what isn’t, but the premise is heartwarming.

Mere decades ago, this is more or less how people actually interacted with those beyond their immediate family and neighborhood. If you were set up on a blind date you’d be told to look for the man waiting in the restaurant with a red rose. Pre-internet, you had to rely on other people to tell you what someone was like and whether they thought they were a good match for you, or simply wait and figure it out in real time.

Digging up info detective style was a LOT more complicated than it is today. Today you can see a baby photo, a pic of their dog, figure out their last 5 jobs, where they went to school and whether or not they play pickleball in a matter of seconds. Spend a few minutes and you’ll probably even find their credit score. All before you’ve even met once.

On dating apps, we even list out all of this info for potential matches willingly. Ourselves.

And yet, parts of the dating app experience can feel just the same as your parents and aunties and uncles vetting potential romantic matches for you. Family and friend intel, an app algorithm, they’re both very biased, no? ;)

The many little boxes of dating apps ask the basics, like height, age, ethnicity, religion and education. And the more specific, like what you’re looking for in a partner and what terrifies you. It’s not very different from a parent sharing that information with their vast networks of friends and colleagues to try and find you a match. But your parents don’t really know what terrifies you and maybe your LinkedIn does a better job of making your job seem important. Yup, at this point people are sliding into each other’s DMs even on LinkedIn.

The contestants of Offline Love can’t look up the people they go on dates with to get a sense from their online presence about who they are outside of who they appear to be when they meet IRL. (I mean I do have my suspicions that they are doing this at any computers they can find around the city, but let’s believe in good faith that they are following the rules of the show.)

The question this made me ponder is: Does the Internet really actually give us a good idea of who a person is? Can it? I’d argue that we can never truly know other people, or ourselves for that matter, but that’s another existential thought for another day.

On some level we all understand that what we put on our social media isn’t who we really are, but we’re still picking up what people are signalling on their social media as some kind of truth.

For me, being Internet famous makes this even more complicated. Men are either intimidated by what they see, or they're sexualising me.

If someone were to match with me on a dating app, it’s likely that they’d try and look me up online. No harm, I’d be doing the same.

What they’d find is probably me in a clitoris costume encouraging women to find theirs, or giving the best tips and tricks for how to give a great blowjob. There would be a video of me answering the number one question I get asked, “Ma’am, how can I last longer” and then me wearing a flashy outfit for a function I had to attend.

While all of this is true and I have wholeheartedly made it my life’s mission to educate about sex and I do have to attend a bunch of events, and I hope some people find it all quite endearing, I’m also just hanging out in my pajamas with greasy hair on a Sunday morning, drinking chai and pondering life’s big questions: If a donut has a hole in the middle, is it still whole?

But this doesn’t really come across on my Instagram because, well, that’s one of my places of work, but understandably, it’s difficult to separate the professional from the personal on the Internet, especially when you have a big community and platform.

Unlike the participants on Offline Love, anyone who matches with me on a dating app has every opportunity to look me up online and then form whatever preconceived ideas of me they want to. Now if you’re thinking, “Isn’t that the same as if they met you in real life?”, well, YES! Except at least in real life they are actually meeting me, and I have the chance to be all of me, instead of them deciding who I am based only on a rather curated digital footprint.

I’ve never actually filled in the little boxes on dating apps, but many of my friends have, and very few of them have said it’s a fulfilling process. Mostly they talk about how exhausting it is, how many hours you have to dedicate to chatting with people, figuring out a good day to meet, making sure that you’ll be safe and then hope to god you get through the date without too much awkwardness.

Tinder “changed how young people connect with each other” - ok I’m rolling my eyes too - it changed how people hookup. We went from asking our friends to introduce us at a party, or offering to buy someone a drink at a bar, or finding any excuse under the sun to talk to someone we fancy, to simply swiping across a screen, almost as if shopping for socks on Amazon, then letting the algorithm work its magic.

People no longer had to fumble through conversations to try and gauge whether the other person was open to hooking up, it became clear through the app. And in many ways, that’s wonderful. Walking up to someone and asking for their number is not for the faint of heart.

In fact, it’s amongst the top questions people ask me: How does a shy person ask someone out?!

But is that really what is happening on dating apps? People getting over their social anxieties?

Swiping across dozens of profiles, behind which are actual people (if we correct for all the weird AI bots on there) is not a natural thing. We never do that in real life and I personally find the thought of doing that overwhelming.

In fact, Gen-Z is steadily moving away from apps and into real life, or semi-real life and using their social media to find love, or something like it.

“Date Me Docs” have become a niche alternative to apps in some parts of the world. They are long form documents, like literally Google Docs, that describe a person in way more detail than those tiny dating app boxes and seem, at least on the surface, more genuine. (Look them up, they’re a thing.)

Full disclosure: I went down a rabbit hole of reading people’s date me docs. They are … amazing. Some of them are in the form of blogs and many of them have links to a questionnaire you can fill out if you’re interested in going on a date with that person. Some even have testimonials from past relationships. :)

Many of them make space for laying out their sexual preferences, what kinks they have, whether they are monogamous or polyamorous or open to something in between.

A lot of the easiest to find Date Me Docs happen to be profiles of Americans, but I’d love to be introduced to all the Indian profiles out there - only because I find them so fascinating ;)

I suppose the original Date Me Doc is the Indian “Bio Data”, passed around by family members to find partners for their kids.

While some people’s Instagrams or online presence perhaps become a kind of looking-glass, albeit warped, into their real lives, my online presence is so niche, so about ONE thing, that it really doesn’t give people the whole picture, and so I’m still resistant to downloading one of the apps.

While not entirely like Offline Love, I think the concept of presenting oneself in the truest and most authentic way possible to people who you might want to date or partner with is wonderful. And like Offline Love, the thought of writing someone a letter to tell them about myself, or asking them to meet me for coffee and having to wait and wonder and imagine what they’re like is so charming.

I know people don’t do it like that anymore and the slowness of those acts is at odds with the whirlwind worlds we live in, but how lovely it would be to be able to offer a more complete picture of who I am to potential love interests than just the idea of me as the internet sex-ed lady, dancing with dildos - though I do think what I do is pretty awesome, and, btw, so are the dildos 🤭