Some nerds in Silicon Valley decided years ago that dating needed to be reshaped so as to remove the risk of rejection. Now, in 2024, a norm is taking root that flirting is a microaggression if not sexual harassment.
As a result, young men, afraid that approaching someone of the opposite sex in real life might count as an “unwanted advance,” no longer talk to young women they find attractive. And when one does, it becomes a matter of public concern.
A modestly prominent tweeter named Rona Wang noted to her 30,000 followers that she “went to a wedding & watched this guy ask the bride if the maid of honor was single.” What gall!
A wedding might seem like the optimal place to try and meet someone special. But for folks who came of age in the age of Tinder and Bumble, it’s easy to believe that the only allowable forum for flirting or asking a girl out is in these apps.
Then, there’s the new and previously unfathomable idea that a guy shouldn’t ask out a girl unless he knows she wants to go out with him.
The central function of the apps is the double-secret consent that “matches” two people. Both users must privately inform the software of their interest in the other as a precondition for one to make an advance. That way, nobody gets asked out who hasn’t already consented to being asked out.
This was half the point, right? That guys wouldn’t run the risk of rejection. (The other half was the hope that guys would find a treasure trove of willing, beautiful women who, in the pre-app days, were simply out there, silently waiting to be plucked up by guys too shy to socialize.)
But this option of frictionless dating that didn’t involve actual socializing has somehow convinced people that other means of finding a date are out of line.
“Like every man of my age (late twenties),” one letter-writer to an advice columnist noted, “I only date girls I have met on dating apps.” He added, “Dating within one’s friend group is considered bad form.”
“No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” one single woman in northern Virginia told writer Kate Julian. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with.”
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The dating apps, like most tools of neoliberalism, removed the “friction” from finding a date, and we’re learning now that the friction — the tension, the persuasion, and the risk — was good after all.
But in a world in which awkwardness has been redefined as “trauma,” it’s probably best if we all stay home alone.