Is your love life well and truly in the trenches?
Well, join the club.

Dating in 2025 is (for lack of a better term) well and truly fucked - and I fear it’s only going downhill from here.

 

What a revelation, tell us something we don’t already know. It’s common knowledge at this point, and is something I speak about with my friends regularly, both men and women, both in Australia and the UK. So let’s unpack the why. Starting us off strong:

​

Hinge 

 

Oh hinge... the place where all dreams truly go to die.

​​​

Whilst other dating apps do exist, I feel as though none truly capture or characterise dating in our current social climate quite like this one.

​

Re-downloading hinge feels like putting yourself on the clearance rack

 

I saw someone say this on tiktok and I honestly could not have worded the feeling better myself. We've all been there - the classic and cyclical pattern of deleting hinge, getting bored, re-downloading it a few months later, and getting humbled or offended or traumatised (or all three) almost immediately afterwards. ​​I can evidently only provide a female perspective on this one, but the core ideas are not completely gender specific nor bound to heteronormative relationships. 

 

Using hinge has morphed into another form of checking social media. Mindlessly scrolling through profiles as if they were insta stories or reels and carelessly clicking no to profiles as if it were ingrained in our finger's muscle memory. Someone's unsuitability is based on the most minuscule of reasons I don’t like their sunglasses in that photo, their prompt isn’t funny enough, they're only 5'1o", they have too many group photos, they don't have enough group photos, the list goes ON. Essentially, they're all reasons that you probably never would have paid much attention to if you were to meet them in a face-to-face environment.

 

A lot of people use hinge without any intention, or to just chat on the app and never meet up in person, or to meet up and only be after one thing. I understand everyone is not looking to quite literally get married, but why are you in your mid-thirties and STILL figuring out your dating goals?! It's only mildly alarming. 

 

At this point, am I partially just using hinge as a form of research? Well I’m definitely not finding love on there or at the very least, someone half-normal who doesn't want to just be my pen-pal for weeks on end and eventually ghosts me anyway.

​​

Hell. 

​

​

Ghosting

 

Speak of the devil: the ghosting epidemic. Why, and how, has ghosting become so normalised? 

​​

Due to social media and apps like hinge, we now have an infinite multitude of options at our fingertips. We can so easily ghost because it’s so easy for us to just find someone else, with a terrifying immediacy, that probably is hotter, smarter, funnier and more emotionally intelligent.

​

Let’s deep it: form a connection with someone, get to know them, maybe meet their friends, maybe even their family, sleep with them, show them your vulnerabilites, and then just disappear, off the face of the earth? It’s wild. Yes I have been ghosted several times before, and I have also ghosted people, several times before (and I'm not proud of it); but how has this become our default reaction to dating if something goes amiss?

 

We cannot effectively communicate.

​

Which is ironic seeing as we pride ourselves in being so emotionally aware compared to the generations above us. I’ve been in situations recently where I’ve not really been feeling the person, nothing's particularly wrong per se, the vibe is just a bit off. And yet the majority of my friends' responses are the same: just ghost them? As if there would even be an alternative.

​

Personally, I don't think ghosting is ever the answer. Is it really that difficult to take three minutes to type a text out that it was great to meet you but I don’t think we're really vibing in that way. What it ultimately boils down to is our avoidance issues - as a generation.

 

Again, this is ironic because I know that for myself (and almost all of my friends) that if someone were to just randomly cut off all forms of contact, my brain would then  automatically try and piece the puzzle together itself, finding fault in everything I ever said or did in front of them.

 

And this is where the double standard comes in, it's not okay if it happens to us, but we're still happy to inflict the same feeling onto someone else because ultimately, it’s the easier option - better to just leave on read, never respond and block if you really feel like it.

 

And you know what is really ironic? The amount of times I have had a conversation like this with someone on a date, who professes to feel exactly the same way as me, and then proceeds, a few weeks down the line, to ghost me anyway!! Honestly, if you don't laugh you'll cry. 

​​​

​

Australia vs. UK - the differences

 

Okay, steering away from the chronically-online to in-person dating now. Having been on the other side of the world for almost three years now, let’s talk about the differences between going out in Australia and back in the UK (prefacing with the obvious that this is, of course, a generalisation.) 

 

British and Australian men occupy two ends of a spectrum. The former are forward, oftentimes crude and particularly audacious. Going to a bar or club in the UK means subconsciously accepting that within fifteen minutes you probably will have been hit on by someone either ten years older or five years younger than you. Getting wolf-whilsted or verbally harassed for not returning a smile to a fifty year-old man with five teeth missing and a can of Stella in his hand is an almost daily occurrence over there (but let’s save that for another article).

 

Going out in Australia, on the other hand, alternatively grants little to no attention. Men here are, at least on the surface, uninterested, indifferent, and painfully nonchalant, with a few of them possibly still in the closet? I know what you're thinking - maybe I'm the problem here! And maybe I am. But let's spitball an idea out there first:

 

The concept of:

 

Tall poppy syndrome: the idea that to achieve, put effort into, or go out of your way for something is met with criticism and resentment; in simpler terms: why would you try doing that?

​​​

I speak about this concept a lot with many of my Australian and English friends. Australia is characterised by its laid-back culture, a notion which certainly seeps into the dating world. This lack of effort or interest, or want to keep things 'strictly casual', becomes strikingly apparent when you haven't been born and raised here. Whilst I do feel like Melbourne is a slight anomaly to the idea, this fear of trying is still quite particular to Australia as a whole.

​

​The bottom line:

 

Comparing how dating pools operate in two countries sitting on opposite sides of the world has left me more confused than ever. I naively thought this was an issue confined to British attitudes within the UK, but I've now gathered that it most certainly is not.

 

I've been single for around four years now (give or take some very questionable situationships in that time) and I'm more than content with my life as it is, having my cup filled daily by the amazing people that I surround myself with. But this doesn't mean my brain is still itching with the question: if it's proving hellish to meet someone out at a bar, and borderline impossible to find someone you vibe with online, then how will I find myself in a relationship again?

 

It seems like most people I speak to in their twenties share this same questioning; I don't have the answer, and I unfortunately don't think anyone does.  

​

​