OUTSOURCING CUPID: THE RISE OF SWIPE-INDUCED DESPAIR

Remember the 70s and 80s? When love wasn’t something you found with a swipe but rather stumbled upon at a disco, laundromat, or your cousin’s wedding? When matchmaking involved actual humans—friends, family, or that nosy neighbour who insisted you’d be perfect for their nephew with the questionable moustache? Fast forward to today, and love has been handed over to the cold embrace of technology. Cupid’s bow and arrow? Replaced by code, algorithms, and an endless supply of profile pictures. Back in the day, romance was a tactile, visceral experience, often facilitated by social gatherings that involved real food, real dancing, and real awkward silences. The options were limited but oddly charming, like a three-channel TV, but, hey? should we bring these things back? Here are some options available for resurrection:

1. Dinner for Six: An innovative concept for the time, this was essentially speed dating with food—three men and three women sharing a meal, hoping the chicken casserole wasn’t the only thing that sparked interest. Sure, it had its flaws. If you liked someone, you’d pray they weren’t smitten with the person sitting to their left. If the evening flopped, at least there was dessert.

2. Blind Dates: Ah, the blind date. A true test of trust in your friends and their questionable taste. "You’ll love him; he’s got a great personality," they’d say. Translation? He looked like a character actor from a spaghetti Western. Still, the bravery required to meet a stranger without Googling their life first deserves applause.

3. Discos: For many, the disco was ground zero for romance. The throbbing bass, spinning disco ball, and polyester-swathed bodies made for a heady cocktail of pheromones and bad decisions. Who needed compatibility when you had Stayin’ Alive blasting in the background? And while the night often ended with a sweaty embrace, the next morning sometimes came with the sobering realisation that you’d exchanged numbers with someone named "Snake."

4. Bars and Pubs: Bars were the analogue Tinder of their day. You dressed up, nursed a drink, and hoped someone would notice your carefully selected outfit. The process was simple: make eye contact, smile, and hope they weren’t already married. No profile pics, no bios, just vibes.

5. Speed Dating: The prototype for modern speed dating involved rotating tables at a community centre or church hall. Five minutes with each participant and then a polite "next!" It was rapid-fire romance, with no Facebook or Instagram to remind you of the ordeal afterward.

Modern romance, in comparison, is an endless buffet of options—but not necessarily quality ones. If the 70s and 80s were about live-action trial and error, the 2020s are about outsourcing effort to technology and algorithms. Here’s how things stack up:

1. Dating Apps: Why risk spilling wine on your shirt during dinner for six when you can craft the perfect opening line from your couch? Swipe left, swipe right, and boom—you’ve outsourced meeting people to a computer program. Dinner isn’t included, but existential despair often is.

2. Virtual Speed Dating: Forget church halls; now you log into a Zoom room and spend two minutes trying to gauge chemistry through pixelated video and awkward internet delays. It’s like a bad work meeting, but with higher stakes and slightly better lighting.

3. Niche Platforms: Looking for love but also want to discuss your obsession with goat yoga? There’s a dating app for that. Today’s options cater to every niche, from vegans to people who unironically enjoy pineapple on pizza. It’s hyper-specific yet somehow still disappointing.

4. Bars with a Side of Ghosting: Bars haven’t disappeared, but their purpose has shifted. They’re less about meeting people and more about taking selfies to post on Instagram so that someone might swipe right on you later. The romance? It’s in the filter, darling.

5. Social Media DMs: Why wait for fate when you can slide into someone’s DMs with a witty comment about their latest post? It’s direct, impersonal, and perfect for today’s short attention spans.

Welcome to the world of dating apps, where love is just another gig in the outsourcing economy. Who needs serendipity when you can have a machine learning model decide if someone’s “your type”? It’s romance, streamlined for efficiency and stripped of its unspeakable chaos. In trading dinner parties for dating apps, we’ve gained convenience but lost the charm of real, awkward human interaction. Today, you don’t have to sit through a bad date—you just ghost them. But where’s the story in that?

The 70s gave us love stories like, “We met on the dance floor, and I accidentally stepped on his foot during Dancing Queen.” The 2020s give us, “He ghosted me after I sent a gif of a penguin dancing.” It’s not exactly the stuff of romantic comedies.

So, are we better off now, with endless choices and AI matchmaking? Or did we leave the best bits of love behind on those disco floors and dining tables?

Now, the romantic landscape is dominated by apps with names that sound like they belong in a sci-fi novel. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge—tools that promise to connect us but often leave us lonelier than before. These apps use algorithms to find our perfect match, as though love were a problem that could be solved with enough data input.

But let’s be real: most of these algorithms are glorified sorting hats for your love life. You’re categorised by your preferences, photos, and whether or not you included a picture with a dog (pro tip: always include a dog). And the matches? They’re often based on proximity rather than compatibility, as though geographical convenience is the cornerstone of a lasting relationship.

It’s a world where “What’s your star sign?” has been replaced by “How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?” A place where people’s worth is determined by how well they can craft a witty opening line about your hiking photo. Romance has become gamified, complete with dopamine hits every time someone swipes right on you.

Who has time for awkward first dates or figuring out if they like long walks on the beach? Just let the app handle it. But what’s the result? A love life that feels more like a tech support hotline. “Sorry, my last match ghosted me. Can I escalate this ticket to Cupid 2.0?”

And let’s not ignore the despair that lurks behind the endless swipes. For every “We met on Bumble and got married!” story, there are a thousand tales of ghosting, mismatched expectations, and existential dread after a drunken 2 am message goes unanswered. If love is a battlefield, then dating apps are the frontlines, with casualties in the form of shattered egos and unread DMs.

Does it work? Sure, sometimes. But love through an algorithm often feels transactional, a checklist of traits and dealbreakers. It’s the IKEA relationship model: flat-packed, requiring assembly, and prone to missing a crucial emotional screw. What’s missing is the magic—the inexplicable spark that algorithms can’t compute. The chance meeting, the awkward flirtation, the realisation that you both hate mushrooms and love bad 80s movies. That’s the stuff of real connection, not something you can swipe into existence.

In outsourcing love to algorithms, have we gained efficiency but lost something deeper? Perhaps it’s time to bring a bit of 70s serendipity back into our lives. To put down the phone, step away from the endless parade of filtered faces, and take a chance on meeting someone in the wild, or organically. After all, the disco ball may be gathering dust, but love doesn’t have to. You just might need to tolerate ABBA again.