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Amanda Mull's avatar

I didn’t find my current (or any) serious relationship on a dating app, but I got a ton of utility out of my decade using them, along with the attendant frustration. I moved to New York at 25 and knew like two people, and for years I went on multiple dates most weeks. (This was the early 2010s, so they were from OkCupid.) I met some cool people and a ton of less-cool people, but more than anything I built my mental map of the city and figured out what I liked to do in it. I went to a zillion bars and restaurants and events that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and I figured out what I wanted my social life to be like and what neighborhood I wanted to live in and what kind of people I wanted to be around, as friends and more. I had a genuinely cinematic half-decade or so before I was ready to settle down a little bit toward the end—exciting, unpredictable, sometimes maddening. Dating apps are imperfect and weren’t the thing that ever got me into serious relationships, but they were a useful tool for plenty of other valuable things for me.

Dating feels bad in any era and might genuinely be worse in some ways now, but I think happiness in any circumstance is going to be in part dependent on your willingness to use the tools available to you and your creativity in using them. Deciding that dating apps are de facto bad or useless seems like cutting off a lot of opportunity out of fear, I think.

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Sophie Lalani's avatar

There are few instances in life where it's totally appropriate to sit opposite a total stranger sipping cocktails and ask them a string of intimate questions - maybe I'm just chronically curious, but this strikes me as pretty wonderful indeed <3

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