This is the 5th installation of the micah 6.8 series, in which I explore how faith influences our everyday life. If you haven’t read the other installations, you can start here: Part 1: never productive enough, Part 2: the food we eat, Part 3: the beauty we create, Part 4: the work we do.

In this installation, I explore the topic of dating apps, with data taken from a survey I conducted last month. This post is simply my interpretation of the data plus a couple of my personal stories. I warmly welcome any comments on diverse interpretations and general thoughts/questions that arise from reading this article!

The next installation will be titled: the friends we make, and in light of the current conversation on racial reconciliation, it will be a reflection on friendship as a tool to heal racial divides (among other sorts of breaks in the social fabric) – stay tuned 🙂

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My story begins the way most do, I imagine. I was of a dateable age, had been for the past 8 years in fact.

It was the age when your best friends were now on their third or fourth relationship, and engagement notifications were starting to populate your news feed.

The apps were no stranger to me. I had in fact counselled my best friend in China while she sorted through eharmony profiles, as we both tried to decipher if the man was a good match given the limited information:

if he had a kind smile, how many spelling errors he made in his profile, what it meant if he sent a heart-eyes emoji.

But I was very happy being single then, and besides, I was convinced that when I moved to Canada, between a new church, school and city, something would surely happen.

I also spent my teenage years reading the Ludies (the couples who wrote “when God writes your love story”) – so that plus being the INFJ romantic idealist I am, I disdained dating apps as the most unromantic thing in the world.

The guys out there are probably creeps anyways who are just looking for hookups, I thought to myself.

One year later, I had joined an amazing, growing church in the heart of Montreal. I was serving actively in church and doing all the things the Christian dating books would advise: Stay in your lane! Focus on yourself! Be content in God! 

Yet a tiny part of me was slightly worried that there wasn’t a single (pun intended :D) male of my age range who I was remotely attracted to. And the prospects didn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. 

Skype calls with my well-intentioned parents always managed to somehow end with my mom encouraging me to put myself out there – Vivi, maybe you should search for more inter-church events where you can meet guys from other churches! 

You do your part, God does His – my dad would chime in. 

As a side note, I think there is an element of truth in that. After all, I did end up meeting my now-boyfriend at an RZIM apologetics conference and I have to thank my mom for pushing me to sign up.

Sometimes, we think God showing us His will is speaking with a booming voice from heaven, or plopping a godly, attractive guy right in front of us while we’re closing our eyes in worship. But I for one have never experienced that.

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A few months into this, my sister sends the family group chat a picture of a terrarium she made on a date with a boy she had met on Coffee meets Bagel. 

It was light-hearted, fun, without the “this-has-to-be-it” expectation that typically haunts Christian dating. 

Maybe there are good guys out there and I’ll never know until I try, I thought.

So after offering up a quick prayer of “God please forgive me if this is not trusting you,” I threw together a few pictures and set up a CMB profile. 

The two main things I emphasized on my profile was (1) I loved Jesus (to hopefully scare off any creeps who just wanted hookups and obviously did NOT love Jesus XD) and (2) that I was always down for a good game of tennis (because if it wasn’t a good match, at least we’d be on opposite sides of the court and I’d have gotten a good game out of it)

And that is how I entered the mysterious underworld of dating apps.

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I bet you’re now itching to know – so what was your experience like? Did you go on good dates? Were they awkward? Isn’t it dangerous?

There’s probably too much to say in this post and stories that should be reserved for more private settings.

What I WILL do, however, is go over some of the survey data (what you’ve all been waiting for) and put forward some of my conclusions given the data (but let me know if you have other thoughts about the data!). 

But right before we dive into the data, here are some of my TLDR personal takeaways from my own experience:

1. Technology isn’t inherently bad; it only reveals what is in the human heart. The same way that instagram can cause us to spiral into comparison and jealousy, dating apps can also make it easier to superficially evaluate people in a consumeristic manner or treat them unkindly. But maybe it simply exposed what we had been doing anyways in our heart; dating apps just made it explicit. 

2. Romance is insanely complex and people saying, “when you know, you’ll know” never helped me any. My dating app experience was more of a learning journey – understanding what I was drawn to and what were deal-breakers for me. And I would say it helped me recognize what it felt like to see promise in an interaction to then pursue it further. 

3. However, I will say that the “shopping” mentality that dating apps lend itself to as we swipe through profiles can be harmful and since this series is about how faith infiltrates through our everyday lives, I do believe that our value systems should affect the way we use dating apps. More on that to come. 

Methodology

I tried my best to get a random population sampling to complete the survey, although I will admit that the majority of my friend circle comprises Asian Christians aged 19 to 30. But I did get an equal number of males and females (special thanks to all the guys I pestered once I realized that my data was very female-skewed :P) for a total of 70 survey respondents. 

Results

So, slightly more females had used dating apps (4 more compared to the guys) and Tinder came out top as the most used dating app. 

Across the board, the most common reason for using them was to expand their social circle of friends with the encouragement from friends, or seeing other friends’ successes being the trigger factor. 

In the guys’ responses, however, there was a theme of “playing around” or “having fun” or even having a friend set up a profile for them. This theme could be somewhat mirrored in the women but was depicted as curiosity and boredom to “see what these apps are all about” and find out “what kind of men are out there”.

Extenuating circumstances such as being in a new work environment, loneliness or desperation were also trigger factors for the women. 

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I then asked those who had used dating apps what their experience was like.  

This I found very interesting – although they had similar average satisfaction scores (with men scoring a tad bit higher), the histogram curves surprised me.

The men had a very polarized experience of the apps – some were utterly appalled and turned off of it, while others had great success in finding partners.

Almost all the women, on the other hand, rated their experience as slightly below mediocre. 

It seemed like men were more successful at getting partners from the apps while women mostly saw it as a learning experience.

In general, the men had pretty short responses, either “Nothing good came from it” from the one side of the spectrum, or “after 3 days of using it, I met my gf whom I dated for 3 years.” 

For the guys in between, the mixed feelings were that though they do indeed increase the social sample, they also can be pretty superficial or feel like a choice overload. 

And then, my favorite:

“from a male perspective, swiping right or ‘liking’ a profile and hoping the other person sees your like…seems so weak and risk averse. I would much rather just directly ask a girl in person for a date, much less do so by text, and even further less doing so by a swipe.” 

And to be honest, I think women much rather that as well. 

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As for the women, they had many thoughts (haha thanks girls for the mini-essays :P)

The pros being that the apps “exposes you to a diverse array of people you might never have met…[is] a great way to make friends”. 

The major con was how it caused them to “judge people superficially” and there was general discomfort surrounding it feeling like a “meat market”.

But, there seemed to be an air of disappointment at guys who didn’t take initiative or those who just wanted something casual to the extreme of “unsolicited shirt pics” from guys who were “quite creepy and gross”. 

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Now let’s take a look at the people who had never used dating apps before:

You can see here that for the women who decided not to be on the apps, it was more likely to be a conscious decision.

They were more likely to find it problematic, with reasons that were often associated with social stigma:

“afraid of what my friends might think of me…I might look hopeless or desperate”,  and mistrust: “can’t trust people online”. 

The guys seemed more to be breezing through life, not really having thought about it much.

A lot of them were content in their singleness, or got attached before they needed to be on the apps, or decided it was too much work:

“[I] thought about it, but forgot to even try, and when I did, I was too shy to get myself to do it at the time, so I left [it] for later and then forgot.].”

My hypothesis (and please do DM me if you think this resonates with your experience or if you have other interpretations): 

Guys feel like they have more agency when it comes to dating.

When they are not looking for a relationship, they see no need for the app. Being on one could also be associated with the stigma of being passive and shy, instead of putting oneself out there to ask girls out in person.

This fear of being stigmatized was not expressed openly by guys, though (although interesting to note that girls were more likely to vocalize this stigma). 

When they are looking for one, they either ask girls out in person, or they go on the app to expand their social circles but then exit quickly after successfully finding a partner or quickly get turned off. Hence the polarized reaction to the apps. 

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Girls, on the other hand, feel more cornered into using the apps. It’s not like they’re going to ask the guys out, so they’re instead on the apps in hopes of being found (hence the sentiment of feeling like you’re on the ‘meat market’). 

As one woman expressed,

“If there are better ways to meet people, I would take them. If you have no other choice, then dating apps are a good option.”

It’s more of a heart struggle with us women going through cycles of going on the app when we feel hopeless, then exiting when we don’t think it’s working – where our involvement on the apps is a conscious decision of balancing our idealism with pragmatism. 

Idealism that we’ll meet the great guy we’re looking for through a romantic story (and not on the apps), pragmatism that none of the guys we know is that and we don’t see any other mechanism to find him. 

We’ve gone in with low expectations and those low expectations have been met with mediocre dates and little success, hence the modal satisfaction number of 4.

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So what is the balance between idealism and pragmatism? Should I stay on the apps? Get on them if I’m not already? You ask. 

Unfortunately, the question of to app or not to app is you will have to answer on your own (and maybe you’ll just need your own dating app experience to decide that :P), but as a follow-up to my #3 TLDR takeaway on mentalities we should adopt while using them, I do have some thoughts on traps we should avoid while using the apps.

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Pretense

Out of all the negative comments I received about the apps, this one trumped it all. It definitely was a big barrier for me.

In general, I already hate resumes and applications that reduce me to a 500 word essay, so to be reduced to a couple of algorithm-generated fill in the blanks like “most spontaneous thing I’ve done” made me feel two-dimensional and disingenuous. 

I also like to believe that people are so much more than a constructed profile. I didn’t want to simply judge people based on superficial criteria like the unflattering angle of a chosen profile pic but the sheer overload of profiles made it impossible to do otherwise. 

As one woman stated,

“In very frank terms, there was a sense that only the least attractive of the other gender were on the apps. That sounds very superficial, calculating and judgmental, and I think it is. I also think that has a lot to do with why I didn’t like the apps.”

We hate that the apps invariably bring out our judgmental side when we wish to know the person more as a full person before evaluating them as a potential mate. 

And yet, the reality for people who aren’t “meeting any new people in [their] daily life”, the truth is the apps help to sort for concrete factors (geography, career, religion) that play into finding a compatible partner, as exemplified by Chris McKinlay’s successful hacking of OKCupid’s sorting algorithm to find true love.

So, the romantic in me died a little as I swiped through profiles, but when I did get a connection, I tried my best to be as authentic as I could.

Then as soon as I could (if I found that the conversation could carry past a few exchanges), I would try to arrange an in-person meeting.

It was just a policy I set for myself – instead of continuing countless conversations with constructed profiles, I tried to meet the real person and make the judgment call from there.

It was a good filter mechanism, too, because the guys who were either not bold enough to meet in-person or not serious about finding someone on the apps never replied.

And I didn’t mind being ghosted because at that point, I hadn’t invested much of my own time anyways.

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Pressure

The second fear is that once you’ve agreed to go on these in-person dates, there is a lot of pressure to immediately explore the possibility of dating, as opposed to starting with friendship. 

One expressed it this way,

“I tend to only date people I’ve developed a friendship with beforehand, which is difficult on dating apps which sort of suggests jumping right into a dating relationship.”

I do agree that a date from an app does carry more weight than two friends hanging out, however going on dates should not be confused with dating. 

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During my time on the apps, I saw it similarly to having coffee with a new friend.

This is a person with a history, interests, things I could learn, I would tell myself.

And indeed, on every date, I simply had fun discovering the unique qualities of each person, and challenging myself to keep conversation going when ‘gym and Netflix’ were their only hobbies. 

But the fears ARE real. We may be afraid of being caught in a situation where we somehow feel obligated to a less-than-ideal partner. Or it may feel awkward to get to know someone expressly for the purpose of seeing if you could date them.

Or the worst nightmare – unmatched expectations. Gasp. 

Enter the DTR (defining the relationship).

OK so those of you who know me know that I’m a big advocate of it but seriously I think it’s empowering for you to communicate expectations and it also is a sign of respect for the other person. 

DTRs should happen even for friendships that are in nebulous territory; they just have to happen a lot more frequently when you’re on the apps. So treat it as good practice! 

Not every date has to be DTR’ed; many times it’s mutual (“It was nice meeting you, all the best!”) but sometimes one party is more interested in the other. 

That’s when it takes courage to clearly communicate your intentions when the easiest thing is to ghost him/her instead. 

So pressure doesn’t have to be there – if you see it as practice in meeting new people and clear communication (both of which are good skills anyways ;))

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Paralysis

One of the female participants expressed,

“Perhaps I’m overly picky, but I didn’t end up having too many conversations and I never met up with anyone.”

It’s choice paralysis – being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of conversations that need to be had to go on a date, then when we’re on the date, we’re afraid to enter into a relationship because we’re afraid of all the other choices we’re missing out on. 

I enjoyed this TED talk on the paradox of choice:

having more choice does not mean we necessarily make the best choice. 

Almost counter-intuitively, I would say one positive effect the apps had on me was that it made me a lot more open-minded (perhaps due to a heightened awareness of this paradox of choice).

While the tendency is to immediately reject anyone who doesn’t “check your boxes”, the apps showed me that good interactions could still ensue even when their profile wasn’t perfect. 

This openness to seeing where things could go, in fact, is partly what led me to the relationship I’m currently in, whereas the pre-app me would probably have been so paralyzed by the prospect of an LDR. 

Time on the apps, though, made me realize how rare and precious true connection is and gave me the courage to pursue it despite the cost. 

Bottom line – don’t be paralyzed by perfectionism in trying to make the perfect choice. It’s never going to be perfect (now, breathe a sigh of relief :D) but we can still be open-minded to where the dates might lead (or not lead). 

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Passivity

Finally, the apps tend to enable passivity in dating. 

“I tend to prefer men taking initiative, but this wasn’t…happening,” said one somewhat-frustrated woman. 

According to an article on why millennials are having less sex, “although online dating gives us a plethora of opportunities to meet people, we rarely capitalize on them, with only one in 500 matches leading to an exchange of phone numbers, according to Hinge data.” 

We’re swiping, but we’re staying behind our screens.

We talk to people we are semi-interested in, but then just as easily stop talking to them. 

It has become easy to ask someone out, but then also dump them. 

“It was like a virtual reality game no one was interested or committed enough to play,” someone commented.

And if there’s one beef I have with social media/technology, it’s that:

it makes us much more comfortable taking the easier route.

We’d rather scroll through pretty Instagram feeds of sourdough than actually put hand to flour and do the day-to-day hard work of nurturing a starter.

We’d rather stalk people on Facebook to feel like we know them, than actually call them to grab a coffee. 

If we’re not careful, technology can endorse passivity (or laziness, stronger put), and dating apps are no exemption.

To avoid this, when you’re on the dating apps, actually be there.

Actually talk to people, go on dates, be invested in getting to know people and intentional about pursuing interesting leads (see points on pretence and pressure…aaand I’m getting WAY too carried away with this P alliteration :P)

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The day I got off the apps was about a month after I had met my current boyfriend at the summer Christian training program (although I did not know this at that time). 

I honestly had started to get tired at this point. It had been a long summer of many ill-matched tennis games and stilted conversation. 

But I had accepted this date because he had agreed to pay for my bubble tea from Chinatown and who can say no to free bubble tea? He asked me to sushi the next week, and even though I had been more interested in the bubble tea than the conversation, I had said yes. 

The day we had sushi, we played a sub-optimal game of tennis (for some reason, I always think it’s going to get better…) before treating me to a sushi dinner.

The whole night, though, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

On the drive back, the conversation meandered to how long we had been on the apps. A year for me; it was his first date on the apps. 

“So what are you looking for?” He broached the question first. I listed a few qualities, one of which being someone who can lead me spiritually. 

The car got really quiet. We had reached my condo and he had turned off the car engine. 

“I don’t think I live up to those expectations,” he said under his breath. 

I started to babble, the way I do anytime I feel like I’m disappointing someone, trying to say things to make it better. 

But the truth was that a year of being on the apps had made me cavalier and jaded, and I had gone on the two dates more for the bubble tea and sushi instead of genuinely considering him. 

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That night was when I knew I was done with the apps.

Not because I had found someone, but because I knew my heart wasn’t in the right place to continue using them.

And I sat that night with the weight of seeing a selfishness in myself I hated, a selfishness that wanted to enjoy free sushi and bubble tea without thinking about the consequences on a person’s heart. 

Seeing them as an ‘it’ rather than a ’Thou’. 

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All that to say, our hearts matter.

When we’re on the apps and when we’re not. 

You may be reading this and hate the apps as much as when you first started reading, but one thing is for sure – it’s a large part of our cultural moment. 

I wrote this post not to convince you to either use them or not, but rather to demystify the experience many people have on the apps. 

I find that with many trends of the present cultural moment, Christians in particular can view it with much suspicion, and so many believers are left in the lurch, not knowing how to navigate the trend with biblical principles.

We can tend to have a purity mindset – dating apps unholy, courtship holy – while the real question is not with the trend but with our heart in entering it.

As Jesus famously said,

“it is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man.”

Matthew 15:11

And if dating apps are truly going to be the popularized way of meeting a future partner, I think we ought to ask ourself how we as the church can be faithfully engaging with instead of stigmatizing them. 

I hope to start conversations with people on how the church should engage with culture, and specifically how we as individuals engage with culture, because ultimately that’s what the church is:

each of us, as individuals, actively choosing how we live out our faith in culture. 

Maybe if there were more of us using the apps in an honouring and biblical way, the dating app scene would be a very different one.

I end with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Andy Crouch, on the role of the church in culture making: 

“I wonder what we Christians are known for in the world outside our churches. Are we known as critics, consumers, copiers, condemners of culture? I’m afraid so.

Why aren’t we known as cultivators—people who tend and nourish what is best in human culture, who do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done?

Why aren’t we known as creators—people who dare to think and do something that has never been thought or done before, something that makes the world more welcoming and thrilling and beautiful?”

― Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling