Online dating

Yesterday

Melissa Kite

The dark truth about dating apps and AI

If you want to know what the ninth circle of Hell is like, join a dating site. I didn’t want to join a dating site, for I am happily ensconced, but I joined one in the interests of research because something very dark is going on in the world of dating apps, and it has something to do with two bugbears of mine: safeguarding and AI. If you could mate two monsters of modern life to produce a deranged creature capable of devouring human rights, then those two monsters would be safeguarding and AI. Recently, I began to notice a deluge of complaints on online forums from people protesting their innocence after being banned from dating apps for no apparent reason.

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

How to find your perfect man

My late parents perpetually promoted their marriage as the best in the history of the universe. Because this cult of two was hardly subtle, others readily detected what they wanted to hear, so fawning social admiration of what lovebirds they were made them even worse. For us kids, this Trumpesque superlative (how they’d hate that adjective) wasn’t remotely as traumatising as divorce, but still – the romantic hagiography was a bit much. In our adulthoods, our own sad little relationships could never compare, and our parents seemed to feel sorry for us. While big proponents of marriage as an institution, they seemed to regard their children’s marriages as pale imitations – you know, nice try, kids.

Monday

Katherine Dee

Can an AI friend solve the loneliness epidemic?

From our US edition

Avi Schiffmann wants to create what he calls an “Ozempic for loneliness.” He believes Friend — his AI-powered chatbot and forthcoming wearable pendant — can address the loneliness epidemic. “I’m definitely motivated by curiosity more than anything,” he explains, “but also by how controversial the topic is. It’s just so culturally relevant.”  He wants to fill a void people feel they can’t fill elsewhere, and he wants to do it now, not years from now. AI companions are, in his words, a “very effective way” to counter isolation, a salve against the atomization we’ve lamented since the dawn of urbanization. Schiffmann reached out to me after I posted a negative review of Friend’s chatbot on my blog.

friend ai

Thursday

Ani Wilcenski

Why is Generation Z so undersexed?

From our US edition

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.

mystique

Wednesday

Alex Barton

Have you ever had ‘The Ick’?

You’re in a bar, on a date and it’s Saturday night. The lighting is low, the music is good and the drinks are flowing. Your opposite number is everything you thought they would be: intelligent, interesting and attractive. The conversation is easy and the evening looks promising. You start to think this one might be special.  But then you hear their laugh for the first time - it’s a grating string of huh-huh-huh’s - and it's all over. The attraction flips to disgust and, try as you might, you can’t look at them in the same way. It’s the moment you anticipate but never hope for…It’s the ick. Last week Keir Starmer cracked a cringeworthy Love Island joke in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Wednesday

Freya India

Can a new dating app stop ‘ghosting’?

Modern dating is a mess: it's a shallow world of filters, FaceTune and superficial swiping. Across the internet, Gen Z complain that daters flake, catfish, scam, and – most objectionably of all – ghost. A new dating app, Snack, proposes a solution. Snack is described as ‘Tinder meets TikTok': a place where Gen Zs can film themselves flirting, create content with fun video prompts, and enjoy a ‘more authentic video-first dating experience’. Snack also enables its users to punish those who ‘ghost’ them by leaving them negative reviews. ‘Ghosting’ is rejection without the closure – you’re talking to someone and, suddenly, they stop responding and disappear.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The healing power of champagne

The day after Catriona was fitted with a plaster cast and crutches, her elder sister arrived from the UK for a rare visit. Marigold is also on crutches. Diabetes. Which left me as the only able-bodied member of the household, though an ethereal one. I try daily ‘to run with determination the race that is set before me’ (Hebrews 12:1). Champagne helps. Our seasonal neighbour Professor Brian Cox has pointed me to a website specialising in getting the produce of small family-run champagne houses to your doorstep within 48 hours at a considerably cheaper price than the local supermarket and very decent it is too. I have a half-bottle at breakfast. ‘Glass of champagne, Marigold?’ I asked her at a quarter to nine on the first morning of her visit. ‘Why not?