If I had to estimate when online dating lost its stigma, I’d say it was the day I got engaged. Possibly the same hour.
Throughout my single life, dating agencies (and their zippier grandchildren, online dating agencies) were considered to be for weirdos. You’d expect to find people on the books who just couldn’t make connections in the ordinary way.
The reasons for this might vary. Your best hope was that they lived in isolated locations and only met the postman. Your main fear was that they were psychopaths, lining up potential victims. Your most likely bet was that they had some sort of peculiar trait, taste, voice or temper that rendered them unsuitable for regular human contact. Squeakers. Squeezers. Hobbits. Trolls.
Listen, don’t shoot the messenger. That’s what everyone thought. So, like most people, I schlepped around the place collecting boyfriends on the live circuit. So time-consuming! Eye contact, flirting, all that endless rabbit, where are you from, do you have pets, what sort of gravestones do you like, is Knight Rider better or worse than toast… tick-tock, we’re not immortal!
Swapping numbers, awkward phone calls, clumsy dates, no no please let me no no I insist, meet the friends, meet the parents, high-pressure minibreak in a Novotel, my goodness that loo is noisy! – and by the time you got to the really important thing (communicating by email to see if they could spell), you were already four months in and it was near-impossible to back out.
Then I got engaged and hey presto: within 10 minutes, the rest of the world decided that online dating was fine! Fast, fun, efficient; a million potential mates arrayed for selection like glistening fruit on a roadside stall; a world at your fingertips, with all its rogue apostrophes laid bare from the off.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no regrets; I married the love of my life, I’m besotted, every minute before we met is transformed retrospectively into an empty wasteland bereft of joy or meaning etc. But, you know. I’d have really enjoyed Tinder.
All this flashed through my mind as I read about Hater, the hot new dating app that launched last week and promises to bond potential lovers over things they loathe.
Overturning the traditional cheery positives (“Love the cinema, ice skating and anonymous sex behind a bin? Meet Maisie, 34, from Bolton…”), Hater allows eager singletons to form relationships based on their mutual aversions instead.
Boy, that’s dating for a post-Trump era. Let’s really get that negativity out there! More openly expressed hatred in the world; just what we need.
Brendan Alper, the ex-banker who founded the app, says: “What we hate is an important part of who we are, but it’s often swept under the rug.” That’s not how I would characterise the current zeitgeist, I must say. I’d be all for a bit more sweeping.
The app provides a list of people, places and concepts; you “swipe” to show which ones you hate. I don’t understand what half of them are (“yolo”, “Zumba”, “footlongs”, “DJ Khaled”?), but then I am fast approaching my 87th birthday.
Nevertheless, like most apps, it would pass the time happily enough at a bus stop. If someone else at the same bus stop were also on the app, simultaneously swiping their own dislike of cat calendars or people who dress like Shakin’ Stevens, that would make a decent start for flirtation. Nothing could be more destigmatising than to turn “lonely hearts” so directly into a game.
And yet, and yet. It is one of the key dangers of the internet, this irresistible hobby of giving everything a verdict: a judgment, a thumbs up or down (and usually down). One minute you’re giggling as you “hate” 100 concepts in a minute, the next you’re giving a B&B no stars on TripAdvisor, roasting a friend’s wedding photos on Facebook, trolling columnists on the Guardian website and voting Brexit for all the wrong reasons.
It’s easy for the first thought on anything to be negative. It takes a small effort to push through into kindly. With a five-minute pause, you might wonder whether the lady who forgot your coffee at the B&B was feeling a bit coldy, or suffering a bereavement you didn’t know about, and choose not to damn her business in public for all eternity, just in case.
Invited by technology to express ourselves at lightning speed, we unlearn this ability to push through, and mistake our first thoughts for our truest ones.
Certain things have always motivated us to make an effort. One of them is sex; on first dates, we are usually our best selves. Our hair is at its cleanest, our interest its sharpest, our smiles their readiest. That’s why dating questionnaires traditionally list the things we enjoy: it’s a shop window for the happy, enthusiastic life we offer.
A few years down the line, of course, you’re welcoming your spouse through the door with an exhaustive chorus of complaints about ghastly colleagues, fretful relatives, broken boilers, stubborn traffic wardens, dodgy contractors, gruelling work crises and worrying lumps (by which I mean politicians). Everything you’ve found annoying, depressing or loathsome that day is dumped at your partner’s feet like so many litres of old bin juice, transforming their evening into one long, grim, joke-free episode of Room 101. (I think I was a guest on that episode, as it happens.)
I’ve only been married five minutes, and this is my first attempt, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about – but surely the longer you both keep trying to be your best and most cheerful selves, the happier life will be? It can’t be wise to start the moaning before you’ve even had your first date.
But that’s the way of the world right now, I suppose. Happy Valentine’s Day, now sod off.
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