Are we so afraid of having a negative experience that we’re no longer in it for the experience at all?
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“This date couldn’t have happened in any other time or place,” the man beside me said. We were walking down a tree-lined street in Palo Alto. He was a Syrian Muslim immigrant; I am an American Jew with a half-Israeli father. Eventually, that would lead to our breakup. But on that bluish Monday night on the Peninsula, summer was just beginning, and our meeting felt cosmic.
One of those decisions was a “like.” Having spent my 20s either in a relationship or on dating apps in cities where everyone is too obsessed with developing themselves to look for a relationship with anyone else, landing in comparatively low-key San Francisco for the long term made me want to try looking for someone to spend that time with.
In just two weeks, I’d gone out with a diverse cross-section of the Bay Area’s population, from an enigmatic German furniture designer to a lonely girl living at her parents’ in Walnut Creek to a menschy Jewish doctor who never called.
The difference between this experience and trying to compete with literal models in LA was striking, and I felt a rush of gratitude for this button in my pocket that seemed to conjure destiny.
People come esposa bГєlgaro to the Bay Area from all over the world, and while no one can predict or control what happens next, you can at least meet them at the tap of a button. Among my 30-something young professional friends in the Bay Area, though, being pro-app feels unpopular. This isn’t new (is this the second or third wave of app backlash?), but it does leave me feeling like online dating is dying just as I have fallen in love with it.
While nationwide data show that Americans are using dating apps at the same rate they did in 2020-about 30% of American adults use them-we remain divided over whether our experiences on the apps are positive or negative. Continue reading