You Don’t Need A Date-Rating App, You Need A Community

Last year, a Pennsylvania woman named Anjela Urumova filed a police report claiming a man had physically attacked her and tried to rape her behind a Bucks County grocery store. The married man she accused was arrested in front of his children, charged with several felonies, and spent a month in jail while the police investigated the allegations. In January, Urumova pled guilty to making the accusation up. She reportedly told police she’d done it because she thought he was “creepy.”

Thanks to an app that shot to No. 1 on the App Store last week, you no longer have to go to the trouble of filing a police report to ruin a stranger’s reputation. Tea Dating Advice — which boasts of hosting “a community of over 1,647,000 women” — relies on women leaving anonymous reviews on the men they date, and the obvious potential for reputational slander is only the beginning of its problems.

Its defenders tout the app as a helpful safety tool, protecting women from placing themselves in dangerous situations. That’s a noble goal, as far as it goes. I’d offer an alternative rule of thumb — don’t place yourself in a vulnerable situation with any stranger, no matter what randos on the internet say about him! Your physical safety is only one of many reasons a public coffee date is wiser than inviting your Hinge date upstairs.

Vetting potential dates used to happen naturally. Maybe your friends set you up, maybe you met at church or in college. You could find out a man’s reputation from members of the community you shared, instead of from jaded anons behind a screen.

In 1940, the vast majority of couples met through family and friends or in grade school, according to a 2017 Stanford study by Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. By the 1980s, family matchmaking and grade school sweethearts had dropped considerably, while introductions by coworkers or at bars and restaurants were on the rise. Enter the internet, and now dating apps are by far the most common origin story; the study found nearly 40 percent of couples matched via a dating app in 2017, with almost every other category in decline. The study authors put their findings in a striking graph they included in a follow-up 2019 study:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, online dating dramatically increases the risk of sexual harassment. A study published in November by the Australian Institute of Criminology found nearly 3 in 4 dating app users had “experienced some form of sexual violence,” as the New York Post reported at the time. It’s understandable that women want to protect themselves from such dangers.

But anonymously reviewing strangers on the internet is a poor solution that creates a new host of problems. It can ruin a person’s reputation in seconds, with no proof of guilt or presumption of innocence. The entire model is based on a pessimistic suspicion of men that’s hardly a healthy start for dating or marrying one. And it treats human beings like Amazon products, as if there’s an endless supply of men in a warehouse somewhere and a customer service agent waiting to process your complaints about the ones that arrived broken.

In that last regard, the problems with Tea are the same problems inherent in online dating. Both invite the user to treat potential partners as disposable products to be evaluated inorganically and graded before hellos are even said. Dating apps encourage fault-finding by planting the suspicion that there are endless and better possibilities, just one more swipe away. Tea encourages fault-finding by planting the suspicion that your date could be a creepy serial killer. Both dehumanize the person you’re supposed to be considering as a life partner.

If you feel disillusioned with random men you meet on the internet, try asking your friends (or even your family!) to set you up. Go to church, volunteer in your community, get to know your neighbors, join a sports league — heck, buy a dog and take it on walks! If you must meet a guy on the internet, go on a real-life date in a public space as quickly as possible, and vet him by letting him spend time around your friends instead of digging for his online social credit score. The dating world is dystopian enough for Gen Z already.

If you truly feel the need to turn to random online strangers for advice about the guy you’re seeing, you probably don’t have a healthy community supporting you. Building one is an excellent place to start. And if you’re lucky, who knows? That community might have nice, attractive, real-life men in it.

Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.