It didn't happen dramatically. There was no final bad date, no particularly cruel ghost, no moment where I screamed and threw my phone across the room. The end came quietly — the way burnout usually does. One evening, I opened an app, saw the familiar grid of faces, felt absolutely nothing, and closed it. Then I deleted it. Then the others. Just like that.
I had been on dating apps for nearly four years. I had gone on probably sixty dates in that time. Some were pleasant. A few were wonderful. None of them became what I was actually looking for. What I'd been looking for all along — something real, with someone genuinely right for me — felt further away than when I'd started.
of Gen Z report feeling drained and exhausted from the cycle of swiping, matching, and ghosting. For Millennials, that number is 80%. Dating app downloads fell 4% in 2024 and sessions fell 7% in 2025. We are, as a generation, collectively tired.
I was not unusual. I was just early in admitting it.
The apps weren't broken. The model was.
Dating apps are extraordinarily good at what they were designed to do: create engagement. Every design choice — the swipe mechanic, the variable reward of a match, the gamified notifications — was built to keep you on the platform. Not to help you find a partner. To keep you looking.
When you understand that, everything starts to make sense. The ghosting. The breadcrumbing. The way someone can be deeply interested on Tuesday and completely vanished by Friday. The app doesn't care about outcomes. It cares about time spent on it.
"The app doesn't care whether you find love. It cares whether you keep coming back tomorrow."
The people on apps aren't bad people. Most of them are looking for the same thing you are. But the environment rewards shallow signals — the photo, the opening line, the quick impression — and punishes depth. When you're evaluated in half a second, you can't present your most interesting self. And when you're evaluating others the same way, you can't see theirs.
Over four years, I had become a very efficient evaluator of first impressions. I had become no better at all at finding someone who deserved a second one.
What most people don't know exists
When most people think of matchmaking, they picture something from another century — a formal service for the wealthy, involving family negotiations and an imperious woman in a great house. That image is so far from the reality of what modern curated matchmaking actually is that it barely deserves refutation.
A curated matchmaking service works like this: you apply. Someone reads your application carefully. If you're accepted, you have a real conversation with a real human being about who you are, what you're looking for, and what kind of relationship you're genuinely ready for. Then — and this is the part that changes everything — they do the work. You don't browse profiles. You don't swipe. You don't wonder if anyone good is out there. Someone is actively working on your behalf to find a person who actually fits.
When they find someone, they tell you why. Not "you both like hiking." Why. What they see in you, what they see in this person, and why they believe the combination is worth your time.
Then you meet. And you already know this person was chosen for you thoughtfully, by someone who knows you. So you arrive differently. You're more open. More curious. Less on guard.
The thing that surprised me most
I expected that the process would feel transactional. I had spent years on platforms that treated me like a product — a photo and a bio to be evaluated — and I assumed this would feel similar, just with a human intermediary.
It didn't. It felt like the first time anyone in the process of finding a partner had actually treated me like a person.
"It felt like the first time anyone in the process of finding a partner had actually treated me like a person."
The intake conversation wasn't a checklist. It was a conversation. The kind where someone actually listens, pushes back gently on things you haven't examined, and reflects back something useful. By the end of it, I had a clearer sense of what I was actually looking for than I'd had from four years of swiping and dating and half-articulating it to my friends.
That clarity alone was worth something. What came after it was more.
The question worth asking yourself
Not everyone is ready for curated matchmaking. It requires genuine readiness — not as a concept you've accepted intellectually, but as a felt reality. You have to be willing to be introduced to one person at a time, with patience and trust in a process that moves at a human pace rather than an algorithmic one.
If you're still hoping volume will solve the problem — that if you just go on enough dates, the right person will eventually appear — this probably isn't for you yet. The apps are better at volume.
But if you've already lived enough to know what you're actually looking for, and you're tired of the speed and noise of a market that was never built to serve your real needs, then the question isn't whether a different approach exists. It does. The question is whether you're ready to take it seriously.
I deleted the apps a year ago. I have not missed them once.
— The Spark Twice Team
