A survey conducted by surveymonkey.com returned the results that 56% of the people surveyed had a ‘somewhat to very negative experience’ with dating websites overall, with little to no differentiation between the sexes and age groups. That in itself should go a long way toward suggesting what a miserable experience online dating is. Another study from the Pew Research Center goes a step further and reveals that 36% of respondents found their interactions on dating websites to be ‘very or extremely upsetting’.
Dating apps have the tendency to dehumanise the people stored throught its databases. You’re encouraged to flick through them like you’re online shopping, flicking through a catalogue of objects. You’re encouraged to take a shallow view on things and be unrealistically picky. That one has a nice house, but this one has a nicer car.
Of course, it can be tempting to embellish the information on your profile, especially when you know everyone else is already doing it. The result is a dishonest representation of yourself, condensed into a brief one-liner, to accommodate for the short attention span you’re contending with in your prospective suitor. It would be difficult to get any salient or meaningful information about yourself across even if you were being honest.
There is a wildly disproportionate distribution of sexes in the userbase. As an approximation, 90% of the users on any given online dating service are male. This results in the 10% of the women on the dating sites receiving a disproportionate amount of attention that would not be seen in real life. This leads them to develop unrealistic expectations in their interactions with their matches. Receiving the sheer amount of connections that they do, they are free to prioritise and ignore the majority of the average men. It leaves the average men receiving no responses and no attention. They think to themselves that there is something wrong with them, and their self-esteem nosedives and goes into free-fall. Dating websites are terrible for the average man.
With how women have free rein of the dating pool, you might then be forgiven for thinking that women have it a lot better on dating apps. They do not. While they pursue the narrow proportion of the men that they find the most attractive, so do all the other women. The artificially high standards that they have been conditioned to have work against them. The select few men, then, are the ones that find themselves spoilt for choice, not the women that pursue them. They are free, then, to treat all these interactions as fleeting dalliances from which they can carve a flurry of notches into their bedposts, before abandoning them and moving onto the next. This in itself causes damage to these women’s self-esteem, and the problem is compounded by the volume of abusive messages they are reported to receive. Dating websites are terrible for the average woman.
Do you know if the people you’re viewing really are the people you’re viewing? Very little of the information on people’s online dating profiles is verified, if any – and there are even suggestions that the users are not screened for fraud or sex offences. The parent company of many dating apps, the Match Group, has clarified that they do not screen for such outside of their paid apps, and neither are they legaly obligated to do so..
On the wild outside chance that you do match with someone and successfully navigate your way into a date, and it turns out to your eternal surprise that they are not three Furbies in a trenchcoat, or a flasher in a trenchcoat, what happens then? You find that you’re sat across the table from someone who chronically interacts via smiley emojis, and has no idea how a well adjusted human being interacts in the real world. Unless you are looking for a meaningless hookup, or have had your soul ground down to the point of harrowing desperation, you will most likely find that the date is a disaster, and you’ve been paired with someone with whom it is near impossible to develop a viable romantic relationship. It will inevitably fail, and you will be back to scrolling endlessly through pages of human simulacra while surrounded by your seven cats and empty pizza boxes.
I don’t envy you. No-one does.
Ghostleigh 
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