Nikita Sharma decided to drop off Tinder on a Sunday last month. The 23-year-old student had downloaded the popular dating app two months before, after hearing about it interminably from a few friends. She was aware that Tinder is mainly for finding people to date, not matchmaking. Still, things didn’t play out to her liking.
“Almost everyone on this app is looking for a hook-up rather than casual dating,” she said, recounting her experience of matching with a software engineer from Gurgaon who insisted that she come to his place for their first date. “I am no stranger to casual dating or the hook-up culture, but Tinder makes it more superficial by adding that layer of anonymity. You don’t know anything about the person and yet you are supposed to sleep with them on the first date?”
More problematic, she says, was that Tinder became a hush-hush affair because of the labels attached to it.
“Everyone who is on Tinder assumes that you are available for a one-night stand without even bothering to know your full name,” she said. “Moreover, the same people who would talk about Tinder in college started calling me names because I was on this app.”
She did go on a date with the engineer but at a bar in Connaught Place, where the two parted amicably after realising they weren’t as impressed with each other in person as they were on the app.
“It was a facade,” she said. “It seemed completely different on the app and even though he reluctantly agreed to meet at a bar, his behaviour gave it away that our ideas of dating didn’t quite match.” Since then, Sharma has sworn off Tinder.
Too much work
If numbers alone are to be trusted, Tinder is flourishing in India. The company claims that India is its largest market in Asia, attracting over 14 million swipes every day. It officially launched operations here with an office in Delhi in January, its first outside the United States.
The company even rolled out its Tinder Social feature in India last week which aims to connect social groups looking for similar activities. These could range from a food meetup to a common movie outing. The idea is to remove the taboo from being on Tinder for even those who are married or in a relationship.
Whatever the numbers, anecdotally, there’s no dearth of people who profess dissatisfaction, to varying degrees, with Tinder and its many rivals. Men complain there aren’t enough women. Women complain the men are creepy.
Debanjana Mitra is a 28-year-old professor of English who went looking for a date on Woo and Truly Madly – an app that claims to provide meaningful long-term relationships – but grew tired quickly.
The reason? Too much work for too little gain, Mitra says.
“I was talking to four new people on a daily basis and all of them seemed nice because the app [Truly Madly] is like that, but none of that ever proved enough for me to go on a date with someone,” she said. “The problem is that I have encountered the same set of people on Tinder as well and that tells me that they are as clueless as I am.”
Another person who dislikes online dating apps now is Raksha Tewari. Tewari would use them in the past to go out with people with whom she had things in common or could have a conversation with. But that ended as she realised that there are hardly any filters.
“I met a few people off it,” she said. “But I had to swipe a lot of left to get to that. Then there’s the whole lot of random text messaging to filter... It dumbs dating down to swipes. I wish it has a right, left and an additional trash button.”
Repackaged and repurposed
These are complaints that dating apps indeed recognise, and have been trying to address. Some have changed their messaging to suggest that they are meant for meaningful relationships, while others have increased their security features to filter fake profiles. A few even let women vote on men’s profiles before they are allowed access to the app.
None of this, however, seems to be working.
Avani Parekh, founder of the website lovedoctor.in, which provides online counselling and assistance in the matters of the heart, says that Indians are still figuring out dating apps. “There’s a lot of churn and disappointment in the space because ours is the generation trying to get hold of the concept that is online dating,” Parekh said, adding that most people download the apps out of curiosity.
Sometime last year, a popular dating app called Vee, which boasted of additional security features like filtering profiles, quietly became a social network that allows people to post updates anonymously.
A former official from the company, who requested anonymity, claimed the move “became necessary” because the “app wasn’t doing well”. Vee didn’t respond to Scroll’s requests for comment.
“You can make 10 different copies of Tinder and put security features but your user base is limited and predefined, so you can’t escape that,” the former employee said. “There were attempts to revive the app through marketing and clever positioning but once users leave, they never come back. It even bought users in a way by incentivising users monetarily to download the app.”
This ex-employee added that there are several other apps out there which are floundering simply because the user base isn’t big enough.
“Some apps are even creating fake profiles of women to make it appealing to the vast population of men and then there are people who pretend to be someone else and make you feel like you are talking to a woman,” the ex-employee said. “But once you realise it’s not going to turn into a real date, you would never come back.”
Wanted: More than a swipe
Vee is not the only app to opt for repackaging. Fropper, which used to be a social media-based dating website, broadened its appeal in 2011 by opening up to “platonic relationships” and “business networking”. In short, it re-positioned itself from a dating platform to a social network – cutting short its date with the cupid.
Anushka Mahajan, a digital marketing professional and a former user of a dating app, told Scroll.in that even though it claimed to be a secure place, she faced troubles.
“This one man I met through Vee asked me to exchange numbers and all was going well until he became clingy,” she said. “We would talk on WhatsApp but he started calling me on my phone at odd hours and insisted that I meet him. I would have met him but after this behaviour I had to block him. And I couldn’t report [this] to the app because this conversation happened much after I got off these apps.”
Experts also contend that people are getting tired quicker than the app makers would like.
“The apps might make it seem like it’s an easy thing, but it’s never an easy process,” said Parekh. “We don’t have a thick skin that’s required to date online, which comes with a certain level of tenacity but apps are advertising like it will happen with just a swipe.”
