I’ve been impulsive like the Tinder Swindler’s victims – now I’m breaking up with dating apps

I want to make this year about believing in the potential and possibility of life outside of a screen

‘The Tinder Swindler’ is sadly all too familiar a story – Aviva says more than one in 10 people have been the victim of a romance scam (Netflix/iStock)

You’d be forgiven if you never wanted to go on another date after watching The Tinder Swindler, the new Netflix documentary. It follows the story of fraudster Simon Leviev, who conned multiple women out of millions through dating apps.

According to The Times of Israel, Leviev is believed to have swindled an estimated $10m from victims across the world between 2017 and 2019 alone. Leviev has become a kind of celebrity scammer in his own right, with his Instagram account reaching 100,000 followers by the time the show aired.

It’s a maddening watch, but sadly all too familiar a story. According to Aviva, more than one in 10 people have been the victim of a romance scam, and I’m going to hazard a guess that many happened on dating apps and websites.

I watched the documentary with horror, feeling deep empathy for his victims. We’ve all been there, blinded by infatuation with a handsome stranger, doing questionable things while caught up in a romantic maelstrom. Sure, I haven’t taken out a cash sum from a loan shark, but I’ve made impulsive journeys, taken late-night Ubers and thrown caution to the wind many times in a moment of weakness (passion). I’ve said yes to trips to Paris with perfect strangers and driven through the night to see a not-particularly-kind boyfriend, caught up in romantic delusion.

So, I’m not judging. I do, however, think we need to be re-thinking our relationship with dating apps and – dare I say it – envision a breakup. They create an instability that can only lead to bad things.

As a single person, it’s easy to get caught up in the belief that we need dating apps and won’t meet someone without them. There’s this long-held belief that “the one” is out there, if you only swipe hard enough. You can find yourself thinking that it’s the only way to make a romantic connection, even eschewing real-life opportunities to text your Hinge matches. It’s also often pointless: you can spend weeks texting someone, only to find there’s no real-life spark.

Apps may be the most popular way to date, but I find them problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, they create a scarcity mindset: we feel like we’re choosing from an ever-dwindling pool, and the only people available to us are those appearing within our smartphone. This is especially true if you’re dating within a particular niche or community (I’m Jewish, and Jewish dating is a whole world unto itself). You can find that your matches are limited, which does nothing for your sense of self or belief in the abundance of the world.

I’m sure we’ve all done the thing where we increase the geographical radius or untick some of the “deal-breaker” boxes to get more matches, but this action is actually taken from a place of fear. It’s letting our standards slip. This scarcity mindset is serving no one; it makes you panic about your romantic status and often leaves you feeling dejected by dating, like there aren’t enough good matches to go around.

I think apps are also fairly dehumanising; we stop treating people as people, instead seeing everyone as faceless entities behind a screen, and swipe our way through. I remember a guy unmatching me on an app when I asked if he liked dogs. Perhaps he really hated dogs. I’ll never know. But it’s revelatory of how we treat each other, discarding our way through life based on limited knowledge of each other.

I’ve decided to quit dating apps in 2022. Well, at least for now. For me, this year is about returning to a place of belief in the potential and possibility of life outside of a screen.

I met my most significant partner in a bar. We both ordered a gin and tonic at the same time – and the rest of history. We were together for five years, and I often walk past that bar and smile. Who knows if I would have even gone to that bar, on that night, had dating apps been around then – I might have been at home instead, staring at my Hinge matches.

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Life really opens up when you say yes to chance, and I think by going cold turkey on apps, even for a bit, we could open up opportunities to meet people in real life and remember to put ourselves in the room. We’re trying to “hack” our dating lives through apps, looking for people that fulfil some fairly narrow criteria and assessing based on looks alone, but we’re losing out on the potential for serendipity and chance encounters.

Life is more fun when we’re connected face-to-face, and perhaps we all need to get our confidence back with dating and approaching people in real life. At least that way, we’ll know we’re not getting catfished.

I want to remind you that dating apps are not the only way to date and you don’t have to use them if you’re not enjoying yourself. There’s lots of ways to meet people in real life: join a new gym, take up a hobby, grab some single friends and go to a dating event. Or just get on with your life and believe your ideal partner will present themselves when the time is right.

Let’s make 2022 the year we stop leaning on apps to make connections and remind ourselves what a big, beautiful world it is out there. Your perfect person might be having coffee at the next table right now – you just need to remember to look up.