Modern Compass

Dating technology has evolved to match millennial love.

- Supriya Nair

Yes. I, too, have met a giant blond Australian diving instructor while on holiday. It seems like a singular sort of thing to happen, but when it happens to you, you realise that the encounter is of a type. Out in the dating world, wade close enough to a coastal town and you will meet a broad-shouldered adventure sportsman from down under. The world is full of such types. See: young Korean entrepreneur boldly wearing at least one earring, somewhere around a metropolitan business district; charming and talkative Nigerian student around big university towns; white American trying to find other English speakers in Paris; intensely romantic Indian man working very long hours in a glass coffin in Gurgaon, waiting to be rescued; and so on.

This isn’t movie-studio cotton candy made flesh. It’s a skein of fantasy that dating apps construct in places where humans come and go. When you don’t stop in one place long enough to know it well, this is what you encounter: types. For many men and women I know, this makes dating apps boring, even harrowing; the Groundhog Day effect of striking up the same conversation over and over again, unable to see the other person as anything but the Tab A to fit into your Slot B, metaphorically and otherwise.