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ATLANTA —It was earlier this year when Jenny Nguyen-Don, who was living in London at the time, had been talking to a guy on Hinge, a dating app, for about a month. She shot him a text asking if he wanted to meet her that night. He agreed.
The two exchanged messages while Nguyen-Don got ready — he mentioned he had to make a quick stop on the way, but Nguyen-Don was already on the train, with no service. She didn't get his message until she arrived.
That's when she noticed something strange. When she went to text him, his profile picture on WhatsApp was gone, and her messages weren't going through. The realization dawned on her: Because she hadn't replied, he'd blocked her.
Confused, she texted him again, and then messaged him through the dating app. That's when, suddenly, his WhatsApp profile picture came back; her messages suddenly sent.
When the two met up, she confronted him. He denied ever blocking her, but the damage was done. They continued with the date, but it was "awkward," Nguyen-Don, 29, told CNN. They parted after about an hour.
"After that I was just like, what a loser. And he was 36 years old!" Nguyen-Don said, in a TikTok video about the date.
That video went viral, and not just on TikTok, where more than 5 million people tuned in. Commenters were shocked: "He blocks you because you didn't respond within like 20 minutes?" one asked, bewildered.
With thousands of options at your fingertips, many people looking for relationships claim that apps have made dating a slog — an endless journey of swiping, recycled small talk and inevitable ghosting.
Apps commodify dating
Online dating is inherently disconnected. You swipe on a profile — usually a handful of pictures, some basic information, and a few answers to prompts. All of this is supposed to give you a sense of the person on the other side of the screen, a hint at who they are and whether you could work out.
Human beings are abstract, said Benson Zhou, an assistant professor at New York University Shanghai who studies sexuality and digital media. On apps, appearances can play a larger role. The actual person becomes muddled, replaced instead by data points like height and weight.
"The person is not that concrete," he said. "They're reflected through numbers."
Dating has always been superficial, Zhou said. The difference now is the fixation on appearance and those data points, which have become a dominant part of the apps.
"Then… design of those dating apps should definitely be held accountable for this kind of dating culture," Zhou said. "That's what they want to direct the user's attention to, and that's what is prioritized."
Foyin Ogunrombi, 27, is a social media content creator in Johannesburg, South Africa. After more than four years on the apps, Ogunrombi said she's experienced it all.
But the most repeated atrocity, she said, is the inability to engage meaningfully. There's no "finesse," she said — just back-and-forth "Hi" and "How are you?"
Both users know why they're there, she said, resulting in a cut-to-the-chase methodology. The longer people are on apps, Ogunrombi said, the shorter the time becomes, wanting to know whether a match will work as quickly as possible. The commodification of dating, she said, has dimmed the whole experience.
"The whimsy and romance and idealism of meeting someone who could potentially be your forever person, all that goes away," she said.
In its place is a business-like transaction. You're exhausted before you've even gotten to know the person, she said.
Who's to blame: the app, or people on the apps?
But is any of this the dating app's fault? That's the question raised by Nguyen-Don, whose video about getting blocked went viral. If people went to therapy, worked on themselves, and learned how to communicate, they could use the apps in a healthy way, she said.
"You can't really blame the medium," she said. "Everyone's on it. It's so convenient to find so many options, but you have to go through the sucky people to find a good one."
And yet it's worth questioning the tool. There's a dominant narrative that because the apps are so easy to use, it's easy to find love, Zhou said. Reality shows the opposite: Even if you match with a variety of people — sparking optimism — the probability of actually connecting with that person is relatively low, he said. Many users get pulled into a delete and redownload cycle, a trend so prolific it's been dissected in academic studies.
The apps might claim to help users find love, but to make money, they also need users to keep coming back for more, Zhou said. That informs some of the "stickiness," of the apps, he said.
That idea has brought Ogunrombi some comfort. The endless choices are by design, she said, to keep her swiping on the platform.
"It's not just me who's being exhausted," Ogunrombi said. "It's the dating industrial complex trying to exhaust me."
The apps do work for some people. David Argetsinger, a 31-year-old programmer in Everett, Washington, met his now fiancée on Coffee Meets Bagel. His experiences on dating apps were positive, he said, and he valued the ways they introduced him to new people and new experiences.
But he also recognizes his mindset was a little different. Rather than only looking for a relationship, Argetsinger said he approached the apps looking for friends and interesting people, which loosened some of the pressure.
"Going into it with very open expectations is key to my positive outlook on it," he said. "Because in the end, I'm fine — in fact very happy — if I come out with a friend, versus some of my friends were very upset … with that kind of outcome."
