Internet Time Machine
My (Mutual) Breakup With Online Dating
Why I’m ending the longest relationship I’ve ever had
This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.
Toward the end, I only did it at night. Penciled it in like a chore I could perform while half asleep, watching whatever new cable drama happened to be capping my days. I could tell with a glance: not so much whether a relationship with the person on my screen could work, but whether it’d even be worth a shot. And 60 minutes later, tired and ready for bed, I’d have no more romantic prospects than when I started. But at least I’d felt like I tried.
It wasn’t always that bad. In the beginning, online dating was like my teenage dream come true: knowing when someone I liked, liked me back. I’d have a date lined up nearly every night, sometimes two in a day, my stomach full of butterflies and happy hour specials. Some dates even turned into relationships, at least for a few months at a time.
But none outlived my relationship with online dating itself, which spanned almost eight years. Looking back, our split was inevitable. Like most breakups, it’s no one’s fault and everyone’s fault. It changed, I changed, the world changed.
