Dating Apps Turn Finding a Partner Into Shopping, Leaving Real Attraction Unexplored
- Terri DiMatteo, LPC
- Jul 11
- 9 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Educational content only. Not clinical advice. [Read full disclaimer→]
Dating apps ask us to decide before we have had a chance to discover what we feel.
Sometimes, attraction surprises us. You notice a person’s smile, walk, interactions with others, or the sound of their voice. You find yourself paying closer attention to what they say. Something about their presence makes you curious, comfortable, energized, or unexpectedly drawn toward them. You may not know exactly why you are attracted to someone, and you do not necessarily need to. Sometimes your response comes before your explanation.
This is part of what can make the beginning of a relationship feel exciting. An encounter may feel serendipitous—almost fated—not because it proves that two people are meant to be together, but because neither person could have fully predicted the effect they would have on one another.
Dating apps change that order. Rather than encountering someone and gradually learning who they are, we are often asked to learn about someone before we experience them. Before we have heard their voice, watched how they interact with others, or discovered what it feels like to be together, we are given photographs, a biography, an occupation, interests, preferences, relationship goals, and a carefully curated presentation of who they want us to believe they are.
That may seem efficient. But efficiency isn't the same as intimacy.
When Dating Starts to Feel Like Shopping
In everyday life, attraction often has room to emerge before we know very much about someone. You may meet a person at a friend’s gathering, in a class, at work, in a coffee shop, or through the ordinary movement of life. Something about them catches your attention: their warmth, humor, confidence, voice, energy, or the way they respond to you. Only afterward do the questions begin. What do they care about? How do they treat people? Do you enjoy talking with them? Do your values fit? Could your lives fit together?
Dating apps can reverse that sequence. Before meeting, we may know someone’s age, occupation, education, interests, political preferences, lifestyle, height, relationship goals, and even the qualities they consider non-negotiable in a partner. The app invites us to compare profiles, apply filters, reject possibilities, and move toward the person who seems like the best fit.
Caring about compatibility is not wrong. Values, life circumstances, relationship goals, and practical realities matter. It can be useful to know whether someone wants children, lives nearby, or has values fundamentally incompatible with your own.
But compatibility on paper isn't the same as attraction, and it isn't the same as connection.
A profile may tell you that someone loves hiking, but it cannot tell you whether you will enjoy sitting beside them. It may tell you that someone has the career you admire, but it cannot tell you whether their presence makes you feel relaxed, playful, curious, or drawn toward them. It may tell you what someone says about themselves, but it cannot show you how they sound when they laugh, how they respond to your humor, how they listen when you are speaking, or who they are when they are frustrated, disappointed, tired, nervous, or simply not managing an impression.
Most importantly, it cannot tell you what happens between the two of you. That is the basic limitation of app-based dating: you can know a great deal about someone before you know what it is actually like to be with them.
Attraction Is Relational
Dating profiles naturally push us into our heads. We begin asking whether someone is attractive enough, successful enough, educated enough, interesting enough, or compatible enough. These are reasonable questions, but they can quietly turn the beginning of romance into a one-directional evaluation in which one person decides whether another is worthy of selection.
That is not quite how attraction works.
Attraction is relational. It is not simply a quality that one person possesses, and another person evaluates. It emerges through interaction, through the experience of two people responding to one another in real time. Conversation may begin to flow, or it may not. Humor is shared, or it may fall flat. You discover whether you feel at ease with someone, whether your curiosity grows as you talk, whether you enjoy their presence, and whether something about the interaction makes you want to move closer rather than away.
You cannot determine chemistry between two people by looking at one person’s profile. You have to experience the two people together.
And this is where dating apps can reverse attraction. They encourage us to evaluate the person before we have experienced the relationship that may—or may not—exist between us.
Dating Apps Can Encourage Rejection
Dating apps do more than provide information; they provide a seemingly endless number of options. This can make it easier to compare people, focus on perceived flaws, and keep searching for someone who appears slightly better. Research on online dating has found that more potential choices can create a “rejection mindset,” in which people become more likely to reject potential partners as they encounter more options. Other research has similarly associated larger pools of prospective partners with more searching and evaluation, and a lower likelihood of making a choice.
This does not mean people should ignore incompatibilities or settle for relationships that are clearly wrong for them. It means app-based dating can encourage us to treat people as interchangeable options. When a person becomes one profile among hundreds, it is easy to focus on what appears to be missing rather than remain open to what might emerge through actual contact.
The question becomes, “Is this person good enough compared with everyone else I might find?” rather than “What happens when we are together?”
A Curated Profile Is Not a Person
Dating apps do not simply provide information. They provide an opportunity for impression management.
A profile is a carefully managed presentation. People select photographs that show them at their most appealing, write and revise biographies designed to create interest, highlight qualities they believe will be attractive, omit details they fear may deter someone, and compose messages with time to consider how they will be received. Sometimes this presentation is honest but selective. Sometimes it is exaggerated. Sometimes it is intentionally deceptive.
Research on online dating has documented both impression management and deceptive self-presentation in profiles. In a Pew Research Center survey, roughly seven in ten online daters said they believe it was common for people to lie on dating sites and apps to appear more desirable.
The concern is not only that someone may use an outdated photograph or overstate an interest. The deeper problem is that the app puts a manufactured image between two people before they have a chance to meet directly.
Natural attraction needs access to a real person. It needs voice, movement, spontaneity, emotional expression, humor, context, and the unedited interaction that occurs between two people. A curated profile can create interest, but it can also distort, delay, or block the discovery of whether genuine attraction exists.
Trust Develops Through Experience
The beginning of a relationship is not only about discovering whether attraction exists. It is also a period in which two people learn whether they can trust one another.
Each person gradually reveals more of themselves while observing how the other responds. You listen to what someone says, but you also notice what they do. You notice whether their behavior matches their words, how they respond when disappointed or inconvenienced, how they handle vulnerability and disagreement, and how they treat people who offer them nothing.
Over time, these experiences provide something that a profile cannot: evidence.
When someone’s behavior repeatedly corresponds to their words, predictability begins to develop. When they respond to vulnerability with care rather than contempt, emotional safety begins to develop. When they respect a boundary, take responsibility for their actions, and show constancy over time, trust begins to develop.
Trust is not created because someone lists “honesty” on a profile; it develops as you experience who they are and discover, over time, that their behavior is consistent with the person they presented themselves to be.
Why This Matters to the Intimacy Bond™
The Intimacy Bond™ conceptualizes romantic love as a mutual protective bond organized around two co-equal strands: emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy. Neither can be established through information alone.
Emotional intimacy involves becoming known and experiencing another person as responsive, understanding, curious, and emotionally available. Sexual intimacy is more than deciding that someone looks attractive in a photograph. It involves desire, erotic energy, embodied presence, mutual responsiveness, and the experience of being wanted by another person.
Both are relational experiences. They develop through what two people experience together.
A profile may create interest, messaging may build anticipation, and shared interests may suggest compatibility. None of those things, however, can establish whether emotional or sexual engagement will emerge between two people when they are actually together. That requires contact, interaction, and shared experience.
The Story of the Beginning
As a couples therapist, I often ask partners to tell the story of how they first met. I am interested in more than the facts. I listen for the emotional texture of the memory: what they noticed, what surprised them, what they remember about the first conversation, and what it was like to see the other person for the first time.
When people meet naturally and in person, their stories can be vivid. They remember the room, the friend who introduced them, the look across the table, the laugh that caught them off guard, or the conversation they did not want to end. Their story begins with an encounter—an unexpected experience of noticing and being noticed.
When people meet through an app, the beginning can sound different: “We met on Match.com.”
That does not mean the relationship cannot later become loving, passionate, or deeply meaningful. But the first chapter commonly begins with a platform, a profile, a swipe, a match, and a decision to meet—not with the spontaneous experience of meeting someone and discovering what happens between you.
Beginnings matter. They establish the first emotional atmosphere of a relationship and shape whether two people initially meet through mutual discovery or mutual evaluation.
Should You Get Off Dating Apps?
For people who are single and searching for a deeply bonded partnership, dating apps deserve more skepticism than they typically receive.
They may be convenient. They may widen the pool of people available to meet. But convenience can come at a relational cost when the app becomes the place where you evaluate, imagine, invest in, and try to build connection before you have experienced the person in real life.
The question is not whether apps can produce relationships. Of course they can. The question is whether their structure works against the natural beginnings of attraction, trust, emotional engagement, and sexual engagement.
If you choose to use an app, use it only as an introduction—not as the relationship itself. Avoid spending weeks constructing a detailed picture of someone before you have ever sat across from them. When it feels appropriate and safe, meet and let the encounter give you information that the profile cannot.
Pay attention not only to whether the person meets your criteria, but also to how you feel in their presence. Notice whether conversation becomes easier as you spend time together, whether you feel comfortable being yourself, whether your curiosity grows, whether you sense genuine mutual interest, and whether their words, behavior, and emotional expression feel reasonably consistent.
You do not need to decide on a first date whether someone is your future spouse. You need to discover what happens when you are together.
Attraction Needs Room to Unfold
Dating apps can make introductions, but they can also turn discovery into evaluation, surprise into screening, and human encounter into a marketplace of profiles.
They ask us to look, compare, assess, and decide before we have had the opportunity to encounter, experience, feel, and discover.
That is why the problem with dating apps is not simply that they can make romance feel like shopping. It is that they can work against natural attraction.
A profile can tell you who someone says they are. It can offer useful information and help you decide whether someone may be worth meeting. But it cannot tell you who that person will be with you, what they will bring out in you, or what you two may become through real interaction. You can't fully evaluate attraction in advance. You can't place trust in a profile. And you can't build a bond through a screen alone.
A Note About Comments
Because these articles explore sensitive and deeply personal aspects of romantic relationships, comments are disabled. LoveBonds is intended as a space for thoughtful reflection, learning, and intellectual exploration. May you find the articles educational, useful and helpful. If you are seeking support and you live in New Jersey, please visit opendoortherapy.net
Terri DiMatteo, LPC
Founder Open Door Therapy l Creator of the Intimacy Bond Framework™
Specializing in couples counseling, affair recovery and healing from narcissistic abuse. Open Door Therapy offers individual and couples therapy, as well as personal consulting for those navigating a complex life dilemma.
