At the risk of reviving a dead thread, I was looking through the forum to see if anyone shared current/modern day dating experiences and this is the closest I could find.
I am an older millennial as well but unfortunately I got stuck on the app date carousel. Been stuck since around 2016. That said, my online dating experience goes way back to pre-app era and I can tell you that the apps ruined it all, perhaps alongside a shift in culture in the last decade or so.
I had met my last ex which was a solid long term relationship on UK match. It was old school, emailing back and forth and then meeting up for lunch.
When I moved to the US, we broke up around end of '14/into '15-it was a drawn out process with us getting back together virtually for half a year, I tried OKC. Back in OKC it was old school laptop/desktop based, and I think it was before Match Group bought everything and Tinderified it. back then, people typed up at least a paragraph worth messages. Or anyone worth your salt would.
I met s/o and dated him for a while-could have been the love of my life, was local, and my peer, life goals matched to the t, higher ed as well, but he hadn't moved on from a failed marriage (no kids) so it didn't go anywhere.
and thereafter apps surfaced and it's been 55 app 'meetups', on average 85 texting type 'relationships' per year.
When I first downloaded Tinder in '16 I was shocked at the abuse. on neither Match nor OKC in the old days had I gotten abuse. the worst in those times were fizzling convos or sparkless meetups. Now I experienced the whole gamut of abuse-unsolicited pics, first liners about sex, convos randomly turning into 'sit on my face' (at first I didn't know what this meant), and even seemingly polite dudes becoming aggressive bro idiots in a couple of days. One guy who works for my university asked me out to lunch. I never let anyone order me anything; always paid my own. but 2 hours after this lunch date I got a message from said dude asking me 'on a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate your libido' . when I called him out on it, I got the cliched 'you do know you were on tinder right' message as in 'you do know you are a who*'
I pity those people who end up on these apps after the failure of a successful marriage or relationship and esp if they don't have their social networks.
Now I go back and forth between hinge and bumble, with a blase and jaded attitude. The abuse is less than on tinder but I am able to block the profile at the first sign. Recently, a guy in his early 40s so older than me , claiming to be wanting to settle down and knowing what he wants, branched off from a convo about how to pronounce foreign names to 'girls love the rolling rs, all that tongue action' .
So this is how it is nowadays. to be fair, I've had a handful of decent meetups, with not enough spark or no spark to warrant another meetup but at least no abuse. so this is my mindset, I now think if it's a meetup without abuse or an offensive remark, I count that as success.
I get so annoyed with readers, even Yona, who pick up on these app dates and waste minutes of the reading giving info on a rando app guy or app rando, as I refer to them. One reading's entire layout had been dedicated to a sequence of app convos that I couldn't even quite identify-b/c all the guys sound the same, 'the fish photo' and the 'hey how's your day, how's your weekend, any fun plans, how's your x holiday' 'how was the lockdown' type questions. ad nauseaum.
