How One Year On Dating Apps Has Brought Me More Friends Than Dates

10 min readJul 10, 2017

I’ve been on dating apps for a little over a year now. As I’ve written before, this isn’t my first attempt at online dating. Last time I was single, I used sites like eHarmony and Match. But I met my most recent ex through mutual friends and we were together for a couple years; during that time, swipe apps like Tinder and Bumble were invented. The past 14ish months have taught me a lot about men, human nature, and myself.

I initially started this post intending to list some of the things I have learned during this time. I intended to try to strike a balance between funny observations and serious things I have learned.

However, the more I wrote, the more I realized the rise in my dating app usage and what I’ve ended up getting out of it is inexorably linked with the rise in my usage to another app — Twitter.

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I’ve been on Twitter since 2009 or 2010. I’ve had a few different accounts over the years; prior to the account I currently use, I had two specific niche accounts for specific blogs/themes, and one general account kind of similar to the one I use now (I really regret deleting this one back in the day). I started the account I currently use now in 2014. I mostly tweeted about education, politics, and television. I could go days or even weeks without even logging on. I used it a lot during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. to follow protests and prominent activists. I’d also often live tweet TV shows or political debates and enjoy some brief interactions through that, but overall Twitter was not a social media platform I thought much about. When I first became single and started using apps more, I started posting a few things here and there, and trying to see what hashtags, if any, people used to talk about dating or discuss funny profiles they saw. I would look through hashtags like #swipeleft and follow a few random accounts here and there that discussed dating.

As I became single for longer, and started using dating apps even more, I found Twitter a nice place to vent about the daily annoyances of single life and dating apps in particular. It’s worth noting here that I have great friends. My life, when it comes to friendships, is pretty drama-free and my friends are awesome. It wasn’t always that way, but over the years as certain people have come and gone, those that are left are truly some of the best people out there. But, when most of your friends are in relationships, there’s only so much you want to vent about the banalities of dating life. Twitter became a place to go to joke about the cliches in profiles, the frustration of “ghosting,” the quirks people display that can really make you lose interest even though you aren’t quite sure why. Little things that I would feel like I’d be bothering my “IRL” friends with — there was now a place to go where everyone was currently dealing with or had recently been dealing with very similar stuff.

But, while all the lighthearted stuff is fun, it can also be more than that. Twitter can be a place for a reality check when it comes to dating (and non-dating subjects) — it can be a place for people to tell you that you are overreacting to something, or to give one another advice that comes without the type of bias that “real friends” are bound to carry. Before I knew it, seemingly overnight, there was a group of people I interacted with fairly regularly. It was cool, and even though serious topics were discussed at times, I still didn’t really think much of it.

Then, within the past six months or so, slowly through an increase in private messages or, at times, specific events that have warranted specific discussions, I have started considering a few people less of “internet friends” and more of actual friends. At this point there are a few girls who, if I went longer than two or three days without messaging, I would feel odd. There are a few other people who, while I may not talk to them every single day, if a few days to a week or so goes by and I haven’t heard from them publicly or privately, I start to wonder if they’re okay. And with these people, we often talk about more than just dating. This is, admittedly, a weird dynamic among people you have never met. But it’s way more common than I initially realized — and funny enough, a lot of times it’s the women who complain the most about the internet not being a good place to meet men that are the most open to meeting friends via the same medium. I’ve met a few people in-person the past couple months, and am probably meeting a few more this summer. I’m always a little worried we won’t have anything to talk about outside of Twitter, but so far that has yet to be the case. It’s pretty cool knowing that there are people in cities all around the country, and even the world, that you could reach out to if you’re passing through (or they to you) to grab some coffee or a drink.

Of course, with the good, comes the bad. There is occasional drama. I tolerate more drama on twitter than I’d ever put up with in my real life, if I’m being honest. I’ve witnessed people (that I thought I liked and respected) gang up on or even borderline bully others. I had a weird situation a few months ago where someone sent me a message pretending to be someone else, and I’ll never feel the same toward the person who most likely did it. Without having met most of these people, and the fact that they owe me literally nothing, it is hard to know who to trust at times. When you’re sharing stuff that is very personal, it can feel hard to believe that people aren’t turning around and sharing that information with others; it can feel like, “Why would this total stranger have any loyalty toward me?” Just like in real life, there are some internet friendships that are very one-sided, where I feel I put in most of the effort and the other person is mostly indifferent toward me (and to be fair, there are probably people who feel the same about me). There are days, which lately seem to happen more and more frequently, where I consider sending a few people my phone number to keep in touch, and just deleting my account altogether.

But for now, I keep coming back. I think this past weekend is a microcosm of why. When I tweeted about a scheduled date falling through, several different people messaged me to ask what happened, and to let me vent about it and joke about it. One friend made a few jokes about the guy’s appearance and name, and I couldn’t help but notice that she knew more specifics about him than my “IRL” friends did. (Again, not a dig at my friends at all, my friends are awesome — just an indication of how much more I talk about dating online than I do offline.) One person messaged to say they were sorry to hear about it — this is the type of comment that I would feel weird about coming from an IRL friend (specifically ones in relationships) because I’d feel as though they felt sorry FOR me or pitied me. But, when it comes from a person who I know is going through similar stuff, it comes across as more of just an “I feel you, I know what it’s like, and boy does it suck” and sometimes that is oddly comforting. (I fully recognize that this is not actually about how people mean what they are saying to me and is entirely about how I am interpreting it, but there’s some truth to the whole “perception is reality” school of thought.) Another friend messaged me to talk about it, and after we talked about my situation for awhile, she started telling me about some messages she had recently sent to a guy and I ended up laughing for a solid five minutes straight. Although I wasn’t sad about the date falling through by any means, it was still a great distraction for what had been a pretty annoying day.

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On dating apps, it can sometimes feel like you are constantly losing. Losing confidence, losing patience, losing the will to care. I think we all agree that swipe apps are by no means an ideal way of meeting someone, but we all also know people who have seen success with them. And, whether we like it or not, it is just kind of the reality of many people’s lives today. Yes, some people still meet their significant others “ in real life.” But as our generation waits longer to get married (if we even do), and spends more time doing things independently whether it be traveling or going to school or building a career, you can reach a point in your life where it can be next to impossible to meet single people without the internet. We can be as cynical as we want toward online dating, and there are plenty of valid negative things to say about it, but the fact is it widens our pool of options in a way that no other thing can.

Sure, this comes with downsides — we get more picky, we think our perfect match is just a swipe away, we swipe out of boredom and then don’t really make a genuine effort to connect with matches, we reject people for reasons online that we would never reject someone in person (think of the last few people you dated and how far from your “ideal” person they probably were), we “ghost” people or blow them off and don’t think much of it because it’s been done to us so many times — all of these things are true. But I’ve been on dates over the past year with guys I’d never have otherwise met. And anti-online dating people can say “Well, if online dating didn’t exist, maybe you’d have met them doing XYZ” but that’s just not the truth. The chance of me ever meeting these men any other way is as close to zero as it could be without actually being zero. So for that, as frustrating as online dating can be at times, I think there are some positives to it.

I will continue to defend the idea of online dating, even though it’s brought me numerous frustrations over the past year or so and is bound to bring me many more in the coming months (and let’s be serious, probably years). I’ve been reminded just how boring and dull most people are, and how awful the majority of humanity is at holding basic conversation. I’ve had some really ridiculous messages, I’ve had some messages that are going well and then suddenly people fall of the face of the Earth, I’ve had people message me just to start arguments about politics or other issues. But I’ve also met a few interesting people (albeit no one I’d want to be in a relationship with). I’ve learned to trust my gut, and I’ve learned to examine my priorities and my non-negotiables when it comes to dating. I’ve thought a lot about what I deserve from a relationship, the ways in which I have taken previous boyfriends for granted in the past, and the things I accepted from previous boyfriends that I probably shouldn’t accept from future ones (and how to pick up on the red flags for those issues via the internet).

But through the good and the bad of online dating over the past little-over-a-year, through the times where I’m swiping nonstop all day to the times I’ve had to take a break for a month or two at a time, one thing has been constant, and that, weirdly enough, has been Twitter.

Ending a long relationship, particularly with someone you lived with, makes it so the person and all the things your day-to-day life was built around are no longer there. In the immediate aftermath, you are just focused on the moving forward and the rebuilding. I had things I had to do — I had to find an apartment, I had to move, I had to figure out what was happening with my dogs. I joined dating apps probably a bit too soon, in an effort to “see what was out there,” and eventually once I was truly over my last relationship, accepted the apps as the new way I’d be dating for the foreseeable future. But during this time, I didn’t really expect to gain anything new, except maybe a new boyfriend. I was just concerned with moving forward from what had already been lost.

If you’d have told me that getting on dating apps and writing a few tweets with a few stupid hashtags would introduce me to people to message about the most ridiculous things that annoy you throughout the day, people to talk to about the trivial aspects of dating, people to swap movie and TV recommendations with, people to attend political protests in DC with or explore New York City with, people to get a drink with during my upcoming post-internship-pre-dissertation-much-needed-vacation later this summer — I don’t think I’d have believed it. And, like dating apps, while Twitter in many ways is not ideal, it has introduced me to people I’d definitely have never otherwise met.

All in all, it’s been a weird year and in some ways I’m sure it’s only bound to get weirder. But I’m trying my best to take the ride for what it’s worth — with the internet in the palm of my hand, of course.

How One Year On Dating Apps Has Brought Me More Friends Than Dates

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Written by Sarah

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