Beyond the Swipe: Local Daters Battle App Fatigue in Search of Authentic Connection

For many Australians looking for love, opening a dating app is no longer an exciting prospect—it has become an exhausting chore. Ursula Adams is one of many who describes her experience with the platforms as tiring. "The constant repetitive chats over text is really tiring," she said. "The tedious swiping and saying no to people over and over and over and over again. I think that's quite brutal."

According to data from the eSafety Commissioner, more than 3 million Australians use dating apps, with a third of all relationships now starting online. However, the convenience of these platforms has fundamentally altered how people connect. Adams argues that these digital spaces fail to show the full picture of an individual. "We're stuck in the phones and we're losing that human connection," she said. "You are promoting a small portion of your life via a handful of photos or a few statements, and I don't think that really gives the true essence of who an individual is as a person."

The Shopping Cart Mentality

This digital-first environment can alter how people perceive relationships, according to Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California Davis. "It feels like you're shopping. It feels like you're selling yourself and you're evaluating other products," he explained. Eastwick warns that this illusion of endless options is actually "a bad model of attraction" that makes users overly critical. "It's going to lead people to be a little bit too stringent early on and less likely to give people more of a chance," he said.

With "tons of options out there", Eastwick notes that apps prioritize quantity over quality, pushing users to rely on snap judgments. "This tendency to date so many people in rapid succession, you think you can kind of use your gut instinct after a few minutes and know how you feel about somebody," he said. "[But] what draws people in are things like self-disclosure, being able to joke and banter. Something like that takes a little while to come into focus."

The Appeal of Instant Gratification

Anthony Elliott, a distinguished professor of sociology at Adelaide University, explains that dating apps create a space of minimal commitment and high reward. "What's particularly intoxicating for people is the immediacy," Elliott said, pointing to the rapid process of "Looking at particular photos, representations of people and the stories that are put around that, and deciding, virtually within about three to six seconds, whether you want to swipe left or swipe right."

By utilizing pre-written prompts and simplified interfaces, Elliott says the technology "[it] starts to redefine what we mean by sexual relationships and eroticism," adding that "These relationships are fluid, they're fast, and in the same way that you can connect with someone, you can disconnect at the push of a button." He also highlights the invisible algorithms dictating who users see next. "It's important for people to try to be digitally literate about these influences and the fact that what's coming, what's being pushed towards you, is not neutral, it's not value-free," Elliott warned.

Slowing Down the Dating Process

Because attraction has become something people expect to curate beforehand, Eastwick notes that "It means that we're generally resistant to have casual interactions with people that we might not normally interact with or people who seem different from us," despite initial attraction being inherently unpredictable. "When people first meet, you kind of have a sense of whether you're clicking with somebody, but it's actually relatively unstable," he said.

Rather than abandoning the digital landscape entirely, Eastwick recommends using apps as "a supplement to a healthy dating diet, rather than the central piece" and suggests focusing on quality over quantity. "I suggest going out with fewer people, but going on more dates with them before you decide [and] don't just keep doing the same restaurant or bar," he said. "Do something that's a little bit more interactive — anything that gives you a chance to talk, but also doing something at the same time."

Adams has embraced this offline approach by organizing her own local group activities, such as beach dog walks and mountain bike rides with small groups of strangers. "If I spend 15 minutes a day on these apps, could I have just gone out to some new event for an hour a week and potentially met one other person?" she questioned. "Would that not have been more fulfilling, I wonder?"