Swiped Out: Why Modern Dating Has Failed

Details

### 💔 Swiping, Ghosting & the Illusion of Connection

Why Modern Dating is Failing the Smart, the Beautiful, and the Serious
An Evening of Wine, Wit, and Philosophical Reckoning

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You’ve built a life. A career. A curated identity of competence and independence. Perhaps even a passport full of stamps and a bookshelf full of insight.
And yet—one question still echoes in the silence between texts:
Why is it so hard to love, and be loved, in our modern world?
This isn’t therapy.
It’s not a dating detox.
It’s not even a how-to.
It’s a Socratic salon on the disorienting world of modern romance.

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### 📊 The Data Speaks:

62% of singles say dating is harder now than ever before.
70% report burnout from dating apps.
(Match.com’s Singles in America Study, 2021)
Tinder’s top 20% of men receive nearly 80% of all likes, creating a deeply skewed attention economy.
(Source: “Tinder Experiments,” Medium)
In 2023, 64,000+ romance scam reports were filed in the U.S., totaling over $1.1 billion in losses.
(FTC)
Women, though often flooded with messages, face disproportionate emotional strain, harassment, and a paradox of choice that leads to paralysis rather than connection.
(Pew Research, OkCupid Reports)

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### 🧠 What We’ll Explore:

Modern dating has become a marketplace—full of frictionless access and endless disappointment. But beneath the code and chemistry lies something deeper: a philosophical crisis of love.
We’ll engage with:

Kierkegaard, who warned that the aesthetic pursuit of pleasure without commitment leads to despair.
Simone de Beauvoir, who challenged the reduction of women to roles, yet feared the loneliness of detachment from meaningful otherness.
Alain de Botton, who argues that marriage is not the culmination of love, but its training ground—and that our search for the “right person” is a modern delusion.

> “The real work of love begins when we realize we are all deeply flawed, and yet still choose to stay.” – de Botton

We’ll also ask: