The Terrors of Text

Given my last post marvelled at the beauty of a dating app with no chat, I think it only fair that I explain the details behind its appeal.  

For the lucky few readers that have not experienced the trials of dating-app chat I would ask you to imagine a world where every conversation you engage in begins with a sentence no longer than 4 words.

A world where you are expected to keep an acronym translator handy at all times, ready to decode the ‘wys?’ and ‘wbu?’ lines and meet them with enthusiasm rather than the disdain they deserve. A world where pictures speak a thousand words, but gifs speak zero.

 

Once you get past the initial small talk, thinking of ways to liven up a conversation that has begun with the conversation couplet ‘have you been up to much this weekend’ and ‘not really, you?’, you find yourself asking the same 5 questions, re-telling the same 5 stories, being ghosted for the 5th time that month. 

 

The pain of this familiar process is no one’s fault, it is just what one must go through while using the majority of dating apps. Though screenshots sometimes provide Tuesday night amusement on your group chats, by the time you have to explain you haven’t been up to much that weekend for the 6th time that week, you find yourself questioning whether it really is worth all the thumb work. 

You also need to follow the unspoken etiquette that most users subscribe to but hardly any enjoy. Making sure you don’t reply too quickly and seem too over eager, making sure you don’t leave too long between replies and risk losing your audience. 

 

These tedious routines and unspoken rules drain the fun out of dating, making it feel like a second job that you are constantly clocked in for. 

 

Instead of talking to people the way we would in any other setting, we enter a trap that makes every line feel forced, rather than allowing us to be ourselves and attract like-minded matches.

 

If we are to make messaging online a less painful place to be, we need to let go of the unwritten rules that supress all of our natural conversation go-to’s. Bridging the gap between real life conversation and messaging matches online will make the whole process start to feel a lot less like work and a lot more like, well- dating!