At this point, every new Indian love story starts on an app—Hinge for the hopeful, Bumble for the brave. Yet, the moment people fall in love, they refuse to admit their story began with a swipe.
Even the Hinge-origin romance of Zohran Mamdani—whose wedding photos are pinned on every aspirational single’s vision board—hasn’t helped. If a young, hip politician can proudly credit swipe-right socialism for his happily-ever-after, why are regular couples still clinging to the myth that they “met at a friend’s place”?
Millennials were the first to join Tinder—and also the first to feel ashamed of it. Those who ended up marrying their online hookups lied that they met on Facebook. As if that sounded more respectable, more romantic. Gen Z was supposed to be above that shame. We update our Hinge bios with the same sincerity we use on LinkedIn. Yet the moment Mummy-Papa ask how a couple met, it’s lies on lies on lies, cooking up stories of IRL meet-cutes. Plus, Indian parents love being in denial, so they happily accept whatever you tell them.
Even if Shashi Tharoor soft-launches a situationship, we’ll still pretend we didn’t spend three hours choosing which picture screams ‘emotionally stable but hot’. It’s humiliating to admit you found love by answering a silly Hinge prompt like ‘A shower thought I recently had…’ Two of my friends met on Tinder six years ago and are now nervously workshopping their origin story before meeting each other’s parents. The copywriter girlfriend is going to tell her mom that she first spotted her engineer boyfriend performing at a Delhi University nukkad natak. Apparently, that’s less embarrassing.
Another girl in Delhi, who can’t stop flaunting her engagement ring, goes quiet when people ask how she met her fiancé. It’s a different story every day. At a concert. At a friend’s wedding. At an office party. Only her closest friends know the truth: she looked especially fabulous one random Friday, panic-swiped five guys, and booked a date for the night. The gods of the algorithm cooperated, and she ended up with a man who loves Nirula’s hot fudge as much as she does. For a dating app accident, this is basically a fairytale—but still not something she can admit out loud.
Also read: He’s an introvert, she’s a party girl. On taking Hinge relationships to the dance floor
Time to bury old-school romance
What a sad, sad thing it is to go dumpster diving for romance and not be able to share the success story. The old shame was about dating online in the first place. The new shame is that your unserious little swiping hobby actually led to something permanent. One day, your boyfriend went out looking for a low-effort one-night stand and found you. That’s how the most romantic love stories of our generation go, and we should be proud. But are we?
Parents don’t feel shy telling relatives that they found their daughter’s husband by paying Rs 15,000 on Jeevansaathi.com, but Bumble couples keep mum at the mandap. It’s baffling how even in this ultra-cool modern world, arranged marriages fixed on matrimony sites are considered more legitimate, more “organic” than dating app matches.
A Delhi-based ophthalmologist has recently made her family proud by agreeing to marry a Tokyo-based IOS developer, whom she met on Shaadi.com. She has only met the guy four times and is ready to move to a whole new country for him. This is the same person who wouldn’t even travel to Noida to meet a dating app connection. She is freaking me out.
Maybe it’s time we drop the charade and stop obsessing over old-school romance. The jig is up: love rarely happens offline, so why keep pretending otherwise? Modern dating is exhausting enough with curated profiles, ghosting, and the 500 elaborate stages it takes to finally reach the altar of commitment. Do us all a favour—just admit you swiped, matched, and got lucky.
This article is part of a series of columns on modern dating in India—the good, the bad and the cuddly.
Views are personal. The author tweets @ratanpriya4.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)