Men Weren't Meant to be Photographed

Dating apps showcase men at their worst: in front of a camera

Photo by Andrew Davie on Unsplash

Six years ago, I had lunch with a single female coworker in her late twenties, who showed me what an average five-minute run on Hinge looks like for her. She warned me that it was a “minefield of losers” out there, and hoped that showing me the men on the app would make this clear to me. Having never used dating apps, I was interested to get a peek into her reality. What I saw was a slew of relatively normal men—including men who were objectively attractive. She swiped left on almost all of them. She was never able to exactly articulate what was wrong with them, but it seemed like men who weren’t extremely good-looking were too unremarkable for a right swipe, while men who were extremely good-looking “seemed like assholes,” and also got left swipes. In case you’re wondering what she looked like, she was decent-looking, but certainly within leagues of most of the men she rejected.

From all the research I’ve done into single men and women who date each other, one general theme keeps emerging: single men have a hard time finding women who like them, and single women have a hard time finding men they like.

This doesn’t mean single men have no standards (if anything, their physical attractiveness requirements are a bit higher) or that single women never get rejected. But the imbalance of the current dating landscape is predicated on this dynamic. Last week, I postulated that women might just be better-looking than men, especially because we have more levers at our disposal to improve our appearance, and we’re more likely to know what looks attractive and do our best to attain those features (your average man, despite his protestations, is not doing that much to look attractive.) But even if every man did everything he could do maximize his looks, barring anything crazy like plastic surgery or steroids, I think the same dynamic would hold, if slightly ameliorated.

But there’s a much bigger issue at play. Increasingly, dating apps are becoming the only socially acceptable way to meet someone (and the easiest way to see who’s out there.) The ability to only match with people who already find you attractive means that dating apps lower people’s tolerance for the distress associated with rejection, making it even harder to talk to people in real life. This is especially true for young people, who have no pre-app experience. And no matter how bad dating apps are for men, they’re pretty bad for women too, because they present their available matches in the worst possible way. In the end, nobody wins.