Swipe No More: Why we need to be careful what we wish for online
“Women could write profiles in Sanskrit or their own blood, and it would still be a ‘yes’ if the accompanying photos caused a stirring.” - Jemma Forte
Hope is a powerful emotion. Dating apps, social media, and much of modern technology operate by selling us a slightly improved version of tomorrow: better matches, better jobs, better lifestyles, a better YOU. This is combined with the random reward variance of the slot machine: the next swipe could be the one. The next message could change your life. And yet, increasingly, many people seem exhausted by the very systems designed to excite them.
In this episode of The Great RomCon?, I sat down with broadcaster, author and podcaster Jemma Forte to discuss modern dating, online identity, political polarisation, and why the fantasy of digital connection so often collides with the reality of human behaviour. Jemma has spent years writing about romance and relationships, from novels like ‘Be Careful What You Swipe For’ (2020) to her political and cultural commentary on television and on her satirical current affairs podcast, ‘ The Trawl’. She is, in her own words, “a romantic”. But she is also realistic enough to know that romance in the age of the algorithm can quickly become something stranger.
One of the central themes of Jemma’s work is the distance between our authentic selves and the versions we project online. Dating profiles promise intimacy while encouraging performance: flattering angles, curated interests, carefully rationed vulnerability. As Jemma notes, apps often create the illusion that we can investigate compatibility before actually meeting someone. But real chemistry stubbornly refuses to become data.
“No amount of profile investigation is a substitute for the IRL experience,” Jemma tells me.
Which perhaps explains why so many app interactions feel simultaneously intimate and strangely unreal. You can know someone’s star sign, politics, dog’s name and attachment style, and still have absolutely no idea whether you want to spend ten minutes with them in a pub - or even a short telephone call (Jemma’s trick for pre-weeding out potential duds).
Jemma’s writing asks: what are any of us actually searching for as we swipe away? Love? Validation? Attention? Entertainment? A plus-one for Venice? Probably all of the above. One of the more uncomfortable truths about dating apps is that they collapse vastly different motivations into the same interface. The person looking for marriage and the person looking for a dopamine hit often appear indistinguishable. As with social media generally, aspiration becomes part of the architecture. The apps do not simply help us meet people; they encourage us to imagine a better future self, a healed and happy self, through the people we match with.
Jemma references research showing a familiar asymmetry in online dating behaviour. Women, broadly speaking, tend to prioritise humour, personality, status cues and emotional intelligence, while men often remain far more visually driven. Dating apps have, in some ways, industrialised first impressions. Attraction becomes measurable through height, income, education and aesthetics. The result is a strange hybrid of romance and market economics, what sociologists increasingly describe as the ‘commodification of intimacy’.
If the emotional disappointments of app dating are now familiar - ghosting, breadcrumbing, orbiting, - there are also darker consequences. Jemma and I discussed romance fraud, deception, and the way online platforms can facilitate manipulation at scale. In Jemma’s book, deception from an online meeting is prevalent in the plot. The problem is not simply dishonesty. It is asymmetry. Online, people can construct identities with very little accountability. Perhaps this is with the best of intentions - we present as we would like to be, how we would like to be seen. But as the distance between reality and presentation widens, and technology, by design, tends to reward plausibility over accuracy of reflection.
Like many people, Jemma experienced dating apps at their cultural high-water mark during the pandemic. Covid intensified digital life dramatically. Work became remote, friendships became mediated, and dating became logistical. Apps flourished partly because they were one of the only available mechanisms for possibility. But as restrictions lifted, something interesting happened. Many people did not emerge from the experience craving more digital interaction, but presence. The return of in-person dating events and social clubs perhaps reflects a broader fatigue: swipe, screen and choice fatigue.
Jemma may talk about politics and current affairs for a living, but many daters find this a difficult topic to broach. Politics has become identity, and identity shapes attraction. Gallup poll data from 2024 found an international trend of young people (18-30) sexes are moving apart in their political views over the past 20 years. Women in the US are becoming more liberal (+30%) than men their age. This trend has also been seen in other countries: the same is true in Germany (+30), the UK (+25) and South Korea (+50). Is this because men are becoming more conservative? According to the data, yes in some countries, not in others. It just appears that young women are becoming hyper-liberal on average everywhere.
This could be a potential problem brewing for finding dates, if the views and values of a prospective partner are important to them. They may need to learn to live with someone who is more conservative than them, as there won’t be enough like-minded men to go around. Despite being paid to give her opinions on the news and politics, Jemma is open-minded on the political leanings of a future match. Even Reform, I ask? “They wouldn’t want me!” she laughs.
One of the most striking things about talking to Jemma is that despite everything - despite some bad dates, misleading profiles, performative masculinity, and endless admin of online courtship - she still seems fundamentally optimistic. Perhaps because she understands something many platforms do not: the most exciting part of romance is uncertainty - of not knowing what is going to happen next. Apps attempt to minimise uncertainty through filters, preferences, compatibility metrics and optimisation, but in doing so they may accidentally remove the very friction that makes attraction meaningful. Chemistry is irrational, humour is difficult to quantify, and timing is chaotic. No algorithm has yet figured out how to replicate the feeling of unexpectedly liking someone you thought you would not.
Jemma describes herself as broadly pro-app. She is not arguing for a return to courtship via carrier pigeon. But she is sceptical of the idea that technology can fully solve the complexities of human connection. Because ultimately, dating is not just a matching problem. It is a psychological one, a physiological one, and a social one. Technology can forget that.
Towards the end of the conversation, we discussed romantic comedies: those strange cultural artefacts that simultaneously distort and reveal what people want from love. Romcoms endure because they show something modern technology does not: people do not fall in love through optimisation. They fall in love through timing, awkwardness, vulnerability and surprise. The more efficiently we search for connection, the harder genuine connection can become. Throw yourself into online dating, just be clear on what you want, why you are doing it, and be careful what you swipe for.