Chat Abandonment Is Rampant on Tinder During COVID-19

Each time I send a message to a stranger on Tinder I remember the woman in my graduating college class who wanted to get a job on Capitol Hill. She mailed a resume to each of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and to each of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate, hoping someone would bite.

I don’t know if anything ever came of it, but it struck me as strange that anyone would want to work for any Member of Congress so badly that they didn’t care what their political ideology was.

Using Tinder Is Like Mass-Applying for a Job

Swiping right on Tinder is a lot like blindly applying for jobs on Capitol Hill. Most people provide pictures and skimpy bios — or no bios at all. In most cases, you have no idea whether the person you’re swiping right on is seeking a life partner or someone to shack up with for one night.

Before the pandemic, you could swipe right on the profiles for 10 people on Tinder — or one of their competitors — and feel reasonably confident that you would match with at least five of them within the next several days, if not immediately.

These five or six people might not be what you were looking for in relationship, but you would have good shot at interacting with them long enough to learn whether it was worth meet, or whether, instead, they were duds.

These days, it’s not uncommon to swipe religiously for several days and not get any matches. (Most dating apps limit the number of daily swipes for nonpaying members, and also don’t tell nonpaying members who already ‘likes’ them).

Once you’re out of daily swipes on one app, it’s time to move onto the next app, and hope you have better luck. In a similar vein, one trend that I’ve seen on all the apps during the pandemic is the increase of what I like to call ‘Match Abandonment.’

‘Match Abandonment’ Is Rampant on Apps

‘Match Abandonment’ is the word I use to describe people who you match with — and who you may have significant interaction with — only to see them disappear without a word. They don’t delete the conversation. They just don’t respond to your messages.

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Of course, there may be good reasons for this abrupt cessation of communications. People are busy. Work happens. Pets happen. Family happens. Life happens. And many people are worried about the implications of dating during a pandemic.

In most cases, if a woman doesn’t respond to my message, I don’t follow up with them to encourage them to get the conversation back on track.

You Say You Disappeared Because…???

But an interesting thing happened to me last night. I got the below message from someone I hadn’t heard from in more than two weeks, an eternity in the app dating world. Many people just delete conversations if they don’t hear from their match within that time period. (Sometimes, it can be a period as little as several days).

If you read the above graphic closely, the woman I was messaging with in late February had a concussion — which explained why I hadn’t heard from her in the last two weeks. As she noted in her message to me yesterday, her doctor has advised her to limit her screen time on her iPhone. But, apparently, she just had to say “hello” to me.

I really do appreciate the gesture, but in this case, I would have preferred that she just decided put down her iPhone and to take it easy for the next several weeks. I’m pretty sure her profile would have still been in my queue several weeks from now.

I Get an Idea: It’s Time for An Experiment

But it all made me wonder: What happened to all the women who abandoned their chats with me, absent any signal that they were no longer interested in continuing to interact me with me.

Did they get sick? Were they busy? Did they find someone else? Or did they lose interest in me? I was determined to find out. I crafted a message that I was certain would get their attended, and would also to the bottom of it. Upon reading my message, I wondered whether these women would interpreted it as witty, snarky or needy.

But I decided to go with it anyway. I held my breath, crossed my fingers and sent the below message to every woman in my queues who had abandoned her chat with me on Tinder, Bumble, OK Cupid, Hinge and Facebook Dating. (I also have an account with J-Swipe, which is like Tinder for Jewish people, but since I never get any matches with on J-Swipe, so I have no Match Abandonment queue with the app)

I sent that message last night, so it’s been close to 24 hours since I let it rip. I was surprised with the results. While I’ve only gotten a handful of responses from women who had disappeared like Casper the Friendly Ghost — sometimes months ago — I’m doing mental backflips over what some these women wrote.

The Results of My Experiment

Here is what they said to me. (I’ve blocked out these women’s faces and part of their messages, where appropriate, to maintain their anonymity).

COVID-19 Changed Dating Forever

As I suspected, many people are just too scared to meet people they don’t know during a pandemic. That despite most of the apps providing an opportunity to say whether you are vaccinated — and in some cases an opportunity to say whether you would consider meeting someone who is not vaccinated.

That said, both Tinder and Hinge reported large boost in use and revenues in 2020, the apex of the pandemic, according to MarketWatch. Recognizing some people’s hesitancy to meet in person, Tinder and many of the other apps have provided in-app tools that enable users to chat without exchanging phone numbers. Not all of these video tools work, but I can always fall back on Zoom, which is my default choice anyway.

As an article in Vox noted in November 2020, “Covid-19 has made dating harder and more laborious than it was before … Apps are now one of the only ways to meet people, but it can take weeks or months to take a budding romance offline.”

I’ve certainly felt the growing pains of dating during a pandemic.

Pre-Date Video Chats Never Were Part of the Deal

I never used to talk with most of the people that I connected with a dating app before I met them in person. But now, a video chat is almost a prerequisite as much as confirming that you have a job, and don’t live with Mom and Dad. As the DCist noted in February 2021, “The COVID-19 Vaccine is D.C.’s New Dating App Status Symbol.”

In a similar vein, the Vox article also points out that “being surrounded by disease, death, and financial instability takes an emotional toll.”

But there’s more to it, I soon learned. According to the findings of a study published in The Conversation, Tinder users regularly delete the app after being disappointed about the results — but they keep re-downloading and trying again.

The Verdict

In other words, dating app users are like rats that are drawn to water sweetened by with saccharine, demonstrating the addictive potential of sweets, as the Los Angeles Times has reported. Like saccharine, dating apps can be addictive. Tinder is marketed as liberating and empowering, especially for young women. But the research findings printed in The Conversation suggest that “romantic ideas seem to be replaced by uncertainty and strategies of detachment in the process.

And those types of detachment strategies may account for the Match Abandonment that I’ve experienced, not just on Tinder, but across the board.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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