#95: Are you baby? A litmus test

If you match and then change your mind, you can just un match without explanation.

But that’s not how healthy human relationships work, and so it’s not surprising that going back to app-less dating isn’t as easy a switch as it sounds. We’re now more scared of rejection, more avoidant of the uncomfortable conversations that are all but inevitable, a... See more

Increasingly, consumers (Gen Z’s especially) are seemingly ditching Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder in favor of apps that better cater to their preferences and behaviors. In the last 18 months or so, a new paradigm of dating apps has emerged, many of which draw upon growing behaviors around gaming, live and short-form video (Curtn, Lolly, Snack, Filter O... See more

These apps are styled like cutesy helpmeets, and their names — Yohana, Ohai, Milo — would be at home on a Brooklyn day care roster. Though pitched to “busy parents,” they implicitly target affluent working mothers who are struggling to manage household tasks on top of work and child care, and who might even be convinced to spend some (though not to... See more

"Parent or childfree" used to be my framework for understanding a dividing difference of adult life. But aging and, yes, friendship, have taught me that there are so many experiences that binary doesn't capture: To want kids but not be able to have them, for physical or financial or logistical reasons. To not want kids but accidentally get pregnant... See more

The last feature—mutual matching—is marketed as a safety feature, helping decrease the chance of unsolicited harassment. But, as a friend has said, “the problem is that the apps assume textual harassment is a worse problem for women than failure to actually meet anyone interesting.” Rather than introduce new technical patterns, the apps maintain th... See more

Maybe it’s time we grow out of the idealism of the first 30 years of the web and start looking at what we’re really doing online with each other. It’s not always healthy, but we do it anyway. It’s something that adults do because we have a deep need to gather and talk, but we can’t include everyone all the time. And maybe sometimes it gets too loud... See more