Like many other people in my generation, I participated in online dating apps. In the past five years, I made profiles on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and The League in order to expand my dating pool and see what type of people I attract. Nevertheless, I ultimately gave up on online dating once I realized that, for a black woman, dating URL is quite similar to dating IRL (in real life).

I tried to present myself authentically in my dating profiles by carefully selecting photographs and interests that highlight my strongest qualities. I consider myself to be a caring, liberal, social woman who is passionate about teaching, music, netflix, and basketball. So, I post pictures of my friends and I at a bar or me standing in the bleachers at a basketball game in order to demonstrate these qualities. My hope is that through my authentic self-presentation I will attract someone who has the personality traits that I desire in a partner which include outgoing, social, kind, respectful, athletic, passionate, and liberal. But despite my greatest efforts to present myself genuinely, my profile is always reduced to my physical appearance.

Dating apps are not designed to provide users with accurate depictions of various potential dating candidates. The quick swipe features as well as the abundance of photos coupled with a lack of description encourage users to judge a person largely by their appearance. As a black woman, I unfortunately belong to one of the least desirable dating categories. Thus, the design of dating apps encourages users to swipe past me due to my appearance as opposed to my personality characteristics.

Despite my general openness to people of all races and backgrounds, the pool of people I matched with was largely black and white males who were highly educated. Of this group, black males were most likely to message me and eventually ask to meet in person. The white males who messaged me mostly made commentary on my appearance and very rarely asked to meet up in person. Some examples of messages I received from white men were, “did you get that Spotify glitch yesterday too? It was so weird, I looked at the hottest singles and you weren’t #1” or “wow you’re stunning.” I had difficulty deciphering if men who sent comments like these had a genuine interest in me or fetishized black woman. So, I never replied.

The makeup of my online matches was very similar to the makeup of my dating pool IRL. I tend to be in spaces that are either predominantly black or predominantly white, so my dating candidates tend to be either black or white. Moreover, the men who express interest in dating me tend to be black while the men most interested in hooking up with me tend to be white. This trend follows a national phenomenon that men tend to want to pursue serious relationships with women of the same race, but are more willing to casually date women of other races (Wilson et al., 2007).

My experience with online dating led me to delete dating apps and revert to dating the old-fashioned way. Although dating IRL starts with a physical attraction, you get an opportunity to present yourself more authentically without a person swiping past you. So, I tend to form better, more lasting relationships with the people I meet IRL.

I can only hope that as society’s perceptions of race and gender change, I will be able to return to online dating. But until then, I will just have to put my phone down.

 

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Works Cited

Wilson, S. B., McIntosh, W. D., & Insana II, S. P. (2007). Dating Across Race:
An Examination of African American Internet Personal Advertisements. Journal of
Black Studies,37(6), 964-982. Retrieved March 16, 2019.