Is online dating over?

It might be the easiest way to find love in a digital world, but dating app burnout is the highest it's ever been.

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Saumyaa Vohra

Ah, the meet-cute. We were all raised on a diet of them. Carrie’s eyes meet Big’s across a Soho vodka bar in Sex and The City. On October 3, Aaron Samuels asks Cady Heron what day it is, forever branding it the official Mean Girls (2004) day. “You’re the rabbi?”, an already-smitten Joanne asks Noah as he winks back and says, “Hot, right?” in Nobody Wants This, as recently as 2024. Our heroine is a sex podcaster—the most post-millennial job you could dream up—and we still adore her IRL spark with her love interest. It definitely feels a hell of a lot sexier than meeting on Hinge, I’ll tell you that.

The idea of meeting the love of your life (or even your flavour of the season) in a “real-life” circumstance still holds an incredible sense of allure for a digital generation. Part of it is nostalgia, sure. Cc: Gen Z’s obsession with blurry photography, vinyl records, even the institution of marriage. There is a hankering for the warmth of a lost time, when things seemed simpler, more romantic. The story of a smile exchanged across a crowded Japanese restaurant is better party fodder than “I liked the photos of his abs on Tinder.”

Online dating, though still the primary medium for people meeting their partners up to a couple of years ago (according to research from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, who found that approximately 39 per cent of heterosexual couples in the US reported meeting their partners online, a notable rise from 22 per cent in 2009), seems to be losing its lustre. A study by Pew Research Center in 2023 found that only about 10 per cent of people in committed relationships or marriages met their partner on a dating site or app. So, what went wrong?