Hello and welcome to my new bi-monthly column ‘Quarter Life Single’ where you are going to get to accompany me, a gorgeous and brilliant queer woman who is single for the first time at the age of 25 after a long-term relationship ended. Join me on my adventures in navigating the adult dating world. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until I tell you that the last time I was single was when I was in the 11th grade and demonetisation had not happened yet. Yes, it has been almost 8 years since that fateful day. And yes, we are all officially that old.

This is my first column entry.

I began hearing about dating apps during my first week at undergrad some years ago. I remember comparing them to the arranged marriage process, where you look at a picture and read a biodata to see how you feel about a person. That is not to say that I have dismissed them – in fact, I have spent many evenings advising friends about what kind of people to swipe right on and how to ask them out. But it is a whole new ball game to create your own account on one of these platforms. Over the past few weeks I have tried quite a few of them, and I have THOUGHTS.

Bumble: My newly-single adventure began on this warm yellow app. It seems to have an environment that is as wholesome as its app design. Setting up my profile was actually pretty fun, and I love that I got to add videos as it can give a bigger sneak peak into my personality that pictures do. Swiping is fun too (and pretty instinctual, in terms of haptics) and people seem to have put in a lot of effort in answering questions about themselves.

I don’t really feel like a fan of the whole ‘only women can make the first move’ function because it feels performative in the cis-het context (if I have matched with you that already means that I am interested, and either of us could start the conversation) and makes no sense in the queer context. At this point I almost never know whether or not someone who I have matched with can start the conversation – is Bumble going by pronouns? Is it like non-binary “women” can start a conversation, but not non-binary “men”? What is the messaging of that? What is even happening?!

One thing that I really appreciate is the fact that the app comes with a voice and video calling feature because it takes me a while to be comfortable with sharing my number. This feature helps me get to know people before I feel comfortable showing up on their social media or call logs.

Update: After this piece was written, Bumble was blasted all over social media for a problematic anti-celibacy campaign which had advertisement copies that were shaming women for choosing not to have sex by saying things like ‘Celibacy is not the answer.’ This led to many people leaving the platform. The brand has since apologised.

Also read: Using Online Dating Apps Safely – Look Before You Swipe!

Tinder: I am mentioning this one next because a friend once told me in college that ‘Bumble is for dating and Tinder is from hookups’. But, when I mentioned this to another queer friend right after my break up she told me that it was not the case in Europe, where I live now. In fact, people use Tinder for everything- from looking for one night stands to trying to find the ‘one’. I don’t know if that is the case, but what I did feel is that Tinder is a low-effort dating app. I found people who had answered prompts and written witty bios on Bumble with Tinder profiles that consisted of little beyond 2-3 pictures. It was also a very cumbersome app for me – it seems like the people who popularised the ‘right and left swipe’ decided that it needed to become a little more complicated than that. I had a lot of trouble figuring out the exact angular difference that my finger needed to maintain between a ‘like’ and a ‘super-like’! To be honest, just a few minutes on Tinder made me tired because I could not figure out how to swipe based on pictures alone and it felt like a very anti-conversation interface as it seemed to take more effort to scroll down to read people’s answers. Even as I deleted my profile, I found myself asking scientific questions like ‘would matching with the same person on Bumble and Tinder lead to having two very different dates with them?’

Hinge: Immediately no. A lot of my friends seem to prefer Hinge to everything else and I literally do not understand why. Full disclosure: my first attempt at using this app was an epic fail, because I did not understand how it worked and basically liked every picture with a fur baby in it and ran out of hearts immediately! It feels like a hybrid of a dating app and a social media platform, while not being very good at either. Having the option to like people’s answers or pictures instead of liking THEM feels very non-committal and confusing to me – I really don’t want to enter the ‘but is she actually interested in me?’ thought process WHILE on a dating app. This one was deleted soon because I could not motivate myself to understand the social navigation that seems to take place here.

Also read: The Experience of Dating Online as a Trans-Person

Her: Her is a very cool dating app if you are willing to buy its membership – the free version is pretty meh. One of my favorite things about this app is that it actually has space to write whether you are a top, bottom, switch, etc, because even as a person who does not experience sex through these labels, I understand the amount of time it saves for anyone that this is important to.

It manages to be a platform that has space for both sex-positivity and getting-to-know-me answers (as it should be!) and I saw quite a few people on Her who I did not see on any other platforms. However, as much as we would like to imagine that a utopian queer app exists, there is a lot that Her’s UX team needs to work on. One of my matches shared that she had experienced transphobia on the app, and like most spaces for queer women, this one too had cishet men trying to intrude (what do they think will happen? Like, actually?) At the end of the day, however, this app left me with the exact same question that other dating apps had: Why are ‘fun loving couples wanting to have an adventure with a third’ never looking for a bi guy? Smells like fetishistic misogyny.