The Dating Decade

A once-serial dater questions how easy it is to find love in 2017

- Anthea England

In the last 10 years, the dating landscape has changed entirely. And I would know – because I navigated it for the whole, awkward decade. In 2007, the first iPhone went on sale in the US and a dating site called eHarmony was gaining popularity. Back then, the idea of finding love on the web, much less an app, was unthinkable. I was at university and the only place I met guys was on sticky bar dance floors.

Around 2011, my friend told me he’d met a guy on a gay app called Grindr. We thought it was a fun fad and yet by 2013 I found myself on my first Tinder date. Sticky dance floors were replaced with swiping in my trackies, spurred on by mates and vino. Before long, it was more than an underground movement. If you were single, you were on the “apps” and the idea of meeting someone “in real life” was a bit odd.

In a decade, the dating world has evolved rapidly, leaving a whole generation of singles chasing their tails. I asked life and business coach Lauren Trlin why it’s hard to keep up these days. “Technology is that little bit ahead of us,” she says. “We’re the first generation that are meeting people on a phone. Think of how much we have to keep up with, evolution-wise.” And it’s true – the new dating world requires you to be more agile than a soccer player because the goalposts move every day.

THE APP SIDE

For the most part, I enjoyed the apps. Sure, I dealt with so many ghosters that I could open a haunted house, but I’d previously met plenty of duds in the bar too. Frankly, I was thankful for a new avenue to meet men – I was hardly being bombarded with bachelors at my women’s magazine job.