Somewhere in a remote village there is a remote house, and in the house there is a cellar, and in the cellar lives the only woman in the country who isn't disgusted by dating apps.
The problem isn't the commercialisation of love, nor the feeling of nausea at the butcher's counter of the appetites. Not at all.
The problem, as always, is expectations.
Listen, seekers of love — if you relate to the apps the way employers relate to a CV, things will be far easier for you.
More than one or two people have wept on my shoulder and lamented that "you can't find love on the apps these days" — as though you once could. I applied myself to the question, turned it over, and here is my conclusion:
An app profile is to love exactly what a CV is to a job.
Ostensibly a banal analogy, self-evident. On the other hand, if you dig into it a little, perhaps a few practical insights for the heart emerge. Here are the three main points of comparison. Summarise and hang on the bedroom mirror:
A] The app, like a CV, is a preliminary filter and nothing more
Almost no candidate has ever been given a job outright on the basis of his CV alone. Now you need an interview. You need a date.
If we don't mince words, we can admit that a CV, exactly like an app profile, serves for negative filtering — that is, a quick way of throwing out in advance those who are unsuitable, so as not to waste time on them in an interview. On the apps, I assume the initial filter throws out those who aren't attractive.
And a further addition to this point — the moment the CVs have been filtered and, say, twenty candidates chosen, a new game begins: everyone lines up and what will decide is the interview and/or the selection tests. Same with the date.
And perhaps this is something to internalise — the opening data are exactly that: data relevant only to the opening stage, not the middle stage, and certainly not the happy-ending stage.
At work as in love, whoever cleared the first hurdle gets an entry ticket to the second room and wins only the possibility of being examined and offering his candidacy for the job, or the bedroom. No more and no less. Keep your expectations realistic.
Or to put it plainly: what matters to you in the morning and what matters to you in the evening are two very different things. A relationship that develops and deepens will put other things at the centre of your attention, things you never dreamed of taking into account at the start.
So lower the level of drama and importance attached to the initial-filtering question, all right?
B] There are wonderful candidates whom the CV stage misses completely. Yes, on the apps too.
Validity studies have shown that CVs and job interviews are perhaps the worst selection tools there are. If we continue the tiresome analogy, there are people who could grow into wonderful romantic partners over the long term, but whose short-term marketing skills are dreadful.
Remember the realistic expectations from the end of the previous section? They are genuinely relevant here too. The app, like the CV, is far from being a precise instrument. One has to come to terms with that.
Moreover, CVs and apps press us to emphasise not necessarily the sides that are genuinely relevant to a long professional or romantic connection. Why does that happen? Simply because those critical sides of the potential partner or employee cannot be "presented" or marketed. They have to be experienced, and that experience, well, requires time.
C] People lie on their CVs. People lie on the apps. Deal with it.
A rewarding job and good, stable love are such coveted gifts of life that it is only human to round corners — and sometimes to smash them entirely — in the initial presentation.
People know themselves. They know their genuinely bad sides very well. No mad demon will convince them to expose that in a profile. That isn't cunning — it's survival.
Each of us carries within a touching hope that if the relationship goes all right, perhaps there will be room and some sort of acceptance for those bad sides.
They'll come to terms with his constant lateness once they see how much he sells in a quarter; she'll come to terms with his mediocre performance in bed if she sees how devoted and committed he is.
But first of all we want to get in the door. To play the game. We are so afraid that if we reveal to them that we never played football, nobody will pick us for the team.
And the bottom line: compassion, proportion, and again and again — come with realistic expectations.
A foolish heart is a lonely heart.