1. Introduction
2. Purpose
3. Heads-up
1. Introduction
The title reads like it’s out to flame men, but stay with me. I’m borrowing from Taylor Swift’s Men will let you down. The Eras Tour never will.[1] And you know what happened next. She met her love, now her husband.
Later she wrote about him: I swore my loyalty to me, myself, and I, right before you lit my sky up.[2] So men aren’t that bad after all, right?
When we have been carrying wounds and broken hearts from the past, there are moments when the bitterness takes over and we all want to point at a villain, whether it is a man, a woman or someone in particular. But honestly, I do not think people are the main problem.
No matter how much effort and good intention someone brings to a connection, the outcome is often out of our hands. No one teaches you what to do when a good man hurts you, and you know you hurt him too.[4] This is not to pretend people are without shadows. We do make mistakes that hurt each other. Real humans are imperfect.
Still, I believe the root cause is the experience designed for modern dating. The flows and habits shape how users show up for each other. The dating app system embodies our culture, and its UX makes people get hurt and cause harm. A naive villain, but a villain nonetheless. [5]
2. Purpose
That said, my goal is not to vilify the apps themselves. I’ve been using them. We know that even without dating apps, human darkness still shows up in different forms and behaviors.
This series is me owning my responsibility as a UX practitioner, and my hope as a user — searching for better solutions, to fix the harms hurting us most:
- Part 1. On swipe culture treating people as objects
- Part 2. On labels, casually cruel in the name of going with the flow
- Part 3. On the ghost that haunts you into questioning your worth
- Part 4. On the green/red flag toxicity and the longing to be seen
- Appendix. 3 years of reading, research & real stories.
3. Heads-up
1. My subject:
I respect every ethical choice people make about connections, labels and forms of intimacy. The subject of this series is the design of the app systems themselves, not the choices people make within them.
2. Consent and privacy:
All personal information used in these essays is included with permission from the people involved. I take privacy seriously, which is why I call these personal essays rather than formal qualitative research.
3. Honest limits:
To every survivor of sexual, mental or physical abuse reading this, your pain matters, but I am choosing not to address that subject here because it needs more weight than I can carry.
Even so, I am in the Patient Zero party with you: But if you're sick of him, I got you [...] If he's killing you, I see you.[6]
One thing I promise. My essays are not coloured by blind hope about love. Despite all the curses and prayers we have said over these apps, I am doing this work because I believe we all deserve better design and better chances at healthy connections.