Swiping and Ghosting: Is that all Online Dating is Today?
In the here and now, perhaps one thing every one of us urban Indians must have come across at some point, is a dating app. The never ending profiles, the need to make your own profile absolutely perfect and void of flaws, all alongside this seemingly trivial yet pressurised choice between swiping left, or swiping right.
You swipe left too soon, you’re rude. You swipe right too soon, it’s needy. There is so much pressure laid upon this entire “swiping culture”, that somewhere along the line people began to dissociate themselves from the process in order to cope with it, and they now just see the profiles no longer as actual people, but instead just simply as icons on a screen.
Can you imagine a person talking to you in real life, but then somehow they didn’t like talking to you and therefore just stare back at you in dead blank silence, not responding? How incredibly rude and harsh, right? But such instances seem to be becoming much more of a reality with online dating. This practice of “ghosting” someone, simply because one doesn’t find them enticing, it's incredibly unkind and may leave the other party feeling rather hurt or disappointed.
All in all, this whole process of ghosting people, swiping mindlessly, all of this stems from the fact that none of us seem to be dating consciously anymore. There is a blatant lack of kindness and respect in online dating these days, and justifiably enough it seems to be deterring people away from the entire idea of dating online.
Nevertheless, that isn’t to say that there isn’t hope for online dating; in truth taking the decision to entirely avoid online dating might even be seen as jumping the gun. All that needs to be done, is to construct an environment wherein the people who are swiping/ making their decisions, do so consciously, with the recognition that there is in fact another very real person on the other end. By reinstating such basic kindnesses back into the world of online dating, perhaps the dating environment will become a more respectful, and comfortable realm in which individuals are free to explore.
Moreover, one such organization working to build an environment void of such detrimental practices as mentioned above, is in fact andwemet. It was founded on the belief, and rather with the hope that people will begin to date more consciously. It aimed to instead provide them with the much needed space to explore their search for their partner online, in a risk free manner; both from the perspective that all users are verified, and that they are all encouraged to respond to an extensive sign-up before they start using the service.
The sign-up in fact, goes one step further and includes everything from your food preferences, to your political ideologies, to your thoughts on parenting, and much much more. Such an elaborate survey really does guarantee the quality of the matches you obtain, and also in a way encourages one to take a pace of dating comfortable to both partners, as opposed to the fast paced- everything at once dating we might all be used to nowadays. It helps you to understand yourself better, and helps you to narrow down, and really comprehend what your ideal partner might be like, which really aids in this entire process and helps to achieve the goal of finding your ideal life partner. And let’s be real: it’s hard to ghost someone once you really know them, right? So in that way as well, andwemet aims to provide a healthier, more informed dating platform for all.
Perhaps if you’re going down this road too, and you can’t make up your mind about online dating; or even if perhaps you’ve not managed to find success on dating sites in the past, keep the above in mind, and maybe give andwemet a visit too. Who knows, it’s never too late to start dating consciously now, is it?? :)