Anything is a dating app if you’re brave enough, or Indian enough. Dumpster diving—looking for matches on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, CrazyConnections, etc—is not working out, so we’re expanding our horizons. Be it LinkedIn connections, gaming apps, WhatsApp support groups, Bollywood Gossip subreddits, Gen Z are scoring dates everywhere now. At this point, MyGate is pretty much Grindr with extra verification steps.
News Flash! It shows that the dating app algorithm isn’t working and isn’t enough.
I guess all the fishes in the absolute dirt of a “dating pool” started to suffocate and made a run for it. They see an eclectic Reddit username write a 10/10 burn on Ranbir Kapoor and immediately imprint on them. Hate is a solid bonding activity.
Swipes are replaced with calculatingly subtle first moves, maybe a like on Instagram story, maybe a retweet without acknowledging the tweeter—you get it. The trick is to let the ‘thing’ simmer, not to come on strong. No offence to Hinge’s “tell-me-about-your-personality” prompts, but a heated game of Ludo with a stranger on a free app is a far better judge of character. And if anything goes wrong, the block button is your one true saviour. Unless, of course, you get scammed, which at this point is just part of the dating experience.
On dating apps, you list your interests. It can be fake too. But if you are on a gaming app—you are exhibiting and practising your interest. Nothing truer than that. And at the end of the day, dating is all about finding the right person in the right interest group.
Gamers are sorted in their zone. They figured out that nobody else would date them so they are dating each other—finding love on Twitch streams, Discord servers, Call of Duty lobbies. Two 20-somethings, who are frankly too old to play Roblox met on the app and recently got married. I know a girl who started playing PUBG to bond with her boyfriend and ended up leaving him for a random player who wiped her out in a fake battle. You know what they say—if you’re looking for a Gukesh-like boyfriend, you’ll find him on a chess stream.
The pool is now so lawless and wide that you might just find your soulmate on Facebook Marketplace. Relationships are also blooming on cinephile Tinder aka Letterboxd. Two nerds can fall in love while trashing the butt end of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham’s plot. Love is a shared interest and we are shooting our shots. That’s what the famous Rohtak boy and Mexican girl did—and ended up marrying under the Special Marriage Act during lockdown. For two people who met on a language learning app, they sure were intense. It’s a Filmfare-worthy movie script. Someone I know got asked out by a cyclist on Strava, a health-tracking app. He didn’t get a date but 100 marks for the hustle.
Also read: How to drop the F-bomb on your first date
Back to offline dating?
Maybe our collective cursing is causing the slow death of dating apps, and who knows, even bringing back offline dating. I keep hearing about 20-somethings matching vibes at pickleball courts, and heritage walks. Book clubs are breeding grounds, and office romance is only low-key forbidden. Maybe the market caught a whiff of this mating hunt—because suddenly singles mixers are everywhere. Pop-up chefs are selling them on Instagram and extroverts are cutting lines to fill seats. I would sign up but I’m so used to swiping, this whole scanning-hook-ups-in-the-flesh thing feels really odd.
The most radical act in this romance-depraved era is a virtual swayamwar. It’s when you put up a public status—be it a tweet, a story, or maybe a video on the BeReal app—covertly asking out everyone you know and don’t know. A few of them read like this, “Who is stupid enough to date me?” It’s unserious, self-deprecating and most importantly, not desperate. When it works, free and hopeful singles are drawn to the post like a moth to the flame.
One Bengaluru guy recently tweeted about how all his girlfriends ended up moving to the US and asked if anyone else would like to earn the same luck by dating him. The comment section of his tweet was half-filled with men asking, “Do you want a boyfriend instead.” And the other half was just women going, me, me, me.
What is the craziest place a guy and a girl can meet and virtually date? A Boys’ Love (BL) fanfiction forum. If you know what BL is—Asian gay romantic films, series, written for and by women—you’d get why the online forums are such hook-up hotbeds. An ex-colleague (who lives in Kolkata) told me she’s been in a talking stage with a Pune guy. He commented on her Thai BL fanfic thread and sparks have been flying since.
If this everywhere-dating era is really taking off as I am told, I see no reason to be on apps. Or maybe I’ll be back on Hinge tonight. Who’s to say? We delete, we delude and we download again.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
Yay! Another useless article on dating and romance from Ms. Ratan Priya.
Our weekly dose of cringe and embarrassment.