Against Tinder.

Feb 14th.

Imagine that you are a single woman of marriageable age, not as young as you were. You receive this letter. How do you react?

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart more your own, than when you almost broke it eight and a half years ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I may have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan -  Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? - I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something that overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others - Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be the most fervent, most undeviating in 
F. Wentworth" (1) 

It's the kind of letter your children would find when you have gone, in your box of treasures. Sadly, few people are likely to get anything like it these days, and there are solid reasons why not. Modern dating is not set up that way, and you're certainly not going to get one from an on-line dating app. If that feels like something valuable has been lost, well, yes it has.

Dating apps promise endless opportunity, efficiently and cheaply, and they clearly work, some of the time. But there are problems. The digital interface skews everything towards what can be presented quickly. If you don't come across well in couple of minutes, that will limit your chances.

Nature has its own optimisation for effectiveness, and dating apps work for people who were going to be successful anyway. The impression is given that everyone will have realistic options, but most are there to make up the numbers. Desirable characteristics - youth and beauty in women, height and wealth in men - make choosing a dating prospect quick and cognitively easy. Apps focus the dynamics of choosiness, and the average and the unconventional will struggle even to get to the first stage of being considered.

Dating apps treat finding a mate as a wholesale data processing task, sorting and filtering profiles to find matches. It looks efficient, but it isn't saving you from any of the difficult bits. Every step is emotionally loaded. Abstracting yourself to a marketable profile means measuring yourself against your ideals of success and attractiveness. That's inevitably painful for any ordinary person. Scrolling through potential matches can be exhausting, depressing, even somehow degrading. Replying to potential matches can be deadening, reusing the same phrases and ideas. This abstracted, atomised process puts pressure at every point, and it can come to feel horrible.

In a way, all this is like experiencing the social conditions of city life, repeatedly, in a heightened, concentrated form. It's like a Kafkaesque real-life RPG in a two-way personal rejection minefield. City dwellers are no less interested in good relationships than anyone else. It is just that urban life requires a lot of social defences, and makes it hard to lower them. Information processing dating seems to promise a way around these barriers, but really just repackages them in a focussed and unnatural way.

It's not just the tech. However diminishing the digital interface is, the issues problems would still be there without it. For example, handwritten letters seem like a plausible non-tech alternative. Letters are a proven Lonely Hearts technology, and women have not lost their vulnerability to seductive words.

"I thought dating was going to be the fun part, the easiest part. Certainly, [passing myself off] as a man, I had romantic access to far more women than I ever did as a lesbian, and this felt like the best of all possible boons. I could partake in the assumption of hetrosexuality and ask out any woman I wanted without insulting her...Correspondence was mandatory in most cases, even with the women I met at speed-dating events and followed up later by e-mail...These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren't going to waste a meal, or even a cup of coffee, on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. The seductive effect of a well-written letter, or, better yet, a well-chosen poem, was often strong; sometimes hilariously so, even to the women involved, who were quite aware and ready to laugh about the effect distracting missives could have on them. One date told me, long after she had dated [my male alter-ego] Ned and learned his secret, that a co-worker, reading one of Ned's e-mails over her shoulder had said "Shit, he's sending you poems? You'd better fuck this man!
"Ned made an impression, not only because he gave these women a pale version of the reading material they seemed to crave, but because he did so willingly. It was rare, most of them told me, for a man to write at such length, much less with consideration and investment." (2)

Dating by post is slower than apps, but can be just as fraught. It's still wholesale information processing. If it goes well, the next challenge is meeting up. That's a time pressured decision interview with only one issue on the agenda, and it's not uncommon to know you have nothing in common within the first sixty seconds. In a less focussed social encounter, this is not a problem. Whether they are a perfectly nice person or the Bride of Frankenstein, you can make a pleasantry and move swiftly on. Here, though, you are obliged to make awkward small talk until you can decently leave. Its such a focussed process that it's hard not to take it personally.

Going through this a few times will inevitably leave you feeling like a piece of meat. We not have evolved to process loaded social information like this. If it feels horrible, that is your normal instincts telling you what you need to know.

More importantly, at a larger level it crowds out other options, just like every sphere of technologically optimised life. In this case, this means crowding out the established slower strategies. Slower, non-tech dating suits the majority of people who cannot rely on looks or status. If you have excellent inner qualities that don't come across on the internet, showing them inevitably requires something slower. Dating is emotionally loaded because it touches our most important instincts, and it's loaded and taxing even when it's going well. Slower, more social approaches reduce this pressure. And, ultimately, whilst attractiveness makes for exciting dates, it is slower personal characteristics that make relationships possible. Very attractive people get a lot of attention, but can find reactions based on externals ultimately empty. Eventually, there is no way around slower ways of assessing real personal compatibility.

Slower approaches are more deliberative, by-passing all the pressurised assessing, judging, and deciding that information processing dating puts you through. They have more time to gather more information and richer information and more time to consider it. There are several overlapping ideas:

• Less Tech.

Slower approaches are less reliant on technology. Real life just doesn't have all the extra steps and complicating incentives that the digtial decision space is full of.

• Slowing down the decision

Slowing down the decision making process widens the focus from just attractiveness, and increase the opportunities for showing their character, not just their flirting persona.

• Richer social environment.

Internet dating means being open to responses without the gatekeeping - implicit and explicit - of real life. Internet dating is like looking for dates in an anonymous nightclub or bar: anyone with the price of admission can get in. By contrast, someone in a traditional social dance shows they satisfies some eligibility criteria just by being there, a social link, some understanding of the unspoken rules of the situation. The rules and social links make it safer to let down social defences.

• Not just rootless urban young adults.

Interest groups, cross-generational and family friendly events are richer in emotion and social information, and give more opportunity to observe someone. For example, you are unlikely to find out if someone is good with children whilst flirting in a nightclub; whereas you might flirting at a wedding reception.

• * Locality and connection.

Part of the point of digital dating is to meet people outside your social circle or locality. In old-fashioned social intercourse, you are likely to meet people who have ended up in the same place because they have some link with the locality.

• Shared interests

Shared interests can slow down the decision process. They can take the focus off external attractiveness and lead to repeated interactions and getting to know people, and, building trust.

• Tried and tested

Everything tech-based presents the future as the realm of exciting newness. However, tech is not a guide to our evolved interests. There are centuries of literature that considers exactly this issue. There's nothing radical about any of that. If this seems like dusting off everything that has been done for centuries, well, yes, it is. It deserves restating because, for some reason, it's been nearly destroyed in recent years, and it's very far from how the social world is presented to young people.

What is dating for, anyway?

There is no attractive term for trawling the internet for dates. Whatever you call it, no-one is going to call it courtship. Digitised dating exists in the atomised, transactional realm of technology, stripped of social knowledge. Short-term, low investment hedonism is digitised dating taken to its conclusion, and it's a slow disaster. It gives you nothing lasting. It wastes your time and opportunities. It sours your reputation and wears away your ability to trust others.

Courting in the old-fashioned sense is unlikely to make a comeback, but it must be possible for modern problem solving to re-invigorate slower dating.

That said, better dating is not everything. Mr. Wentworth's letter is not a response to a lonely hearts ad. Its power comes from the emotional investment in another person that can only come from knowing them over a long time; and it is from a social world that had a clear sight of what meaningful courtship involved. Humans thrive in dense webs of sentiment, affection and belonging. At a social level, technology crowds out the slow account of what has value in human flourishing, long term, and in living together.

"We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of "significant others." A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-handed music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing children and adults - this was our idea of a well-ordered household, and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools. We knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by - joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship - they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the "nuclear family." Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit. "

Dating, after all, is the only first act in a long performance of what dating is for, of what you think matters. Without an account of humans as tribal, local, social animals, an account that fits with flourishing in its fullest sense, atomised and transactional is what you are likely to get.

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(1) Jane Austen, Persuasion

(2) Norah Vincent, Self-Made Man

(3) Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven