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Dating Apps Left Me Wondering: Do Men Not Want to Have Sex?

I’m tired of chasing guys who sext screenfuls of porn and emojis

The shivers and stings of sex, men, and intimacy shape my life. Sometimes happily so, but most relationships implode within weeks, or possibly a year or two, if we hang on that long. It’s usually my fault, which is both true and false. My actions and decisions are my own, but they’re also expressions of the complex forms of love and trauma I inherit from my family. The sexism and patriarchy that encompass the world around me impact my relationships too. Mounds of therapy and a commitment to living a sensual life that reflects what I want and who I am as a healing woman are helping reset my relationship compass.

Dating apps play a central role in this process. That might seem like an obvious thing to say because they’re how “everyone” meets nowadays (and not least because I’m also an anthropologist who studies sexuality), but for a lifelong Luddite like me, it’s extraordinary. What’s also unthinkable is how hard dating apps kick my ass. Unthinkable because I’ve been up against some very formidable life challenges—among them, heavy drinking and risk taking to the point of self-annihilation. Yet these platforms crack me open in unanticipated and productive ways.

People definitely date and want to meet one another, but because these aims are not exclusive among all users, it makes sense that the in-person sex I am seeking is sometimes so hard to find. Even guys whose profiles say “interested in meeting new people” might not want to meet at all. Why carry on the charade if they’re only swiping because they’re bored? Are we pixelating away our ability to think about one another with compassion? Or am I the chump for trying to compare my Jurassic Park dating experiences with what’s going on in the digital era? Maybe it’s a 2.0 version of the late 1990s proverb: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Whatever it is, I’m endlessly astounded by the preference for digital versus embodied pleasure. Guys will gleefully text for a few hours or even days, send and request spicy photos, and vanish when I mention meeting. This happens less on Tinder than when I’m on Bumble, yet it remains a constant feature of dating-app swipe culture. Do men not want to have sex? Maybe they’re using dating apps too much, which can reinforce sexting as an acceptable behaviour, often instead of physical sex.

The anxiety about in-person meetings is fundamentally connected with the way dating apps are restructuring traditional dating practices. They are turning what a lot of Gen Xers and other older folks consider to be normative behaviours upside down. By normative, I mean things like bar pickups and meeting people in the wild, which is how dating had worked before swiping. In this primordial terrain, in-person encounters are the first and the most common way to connect with someone, whether at a club, work, or through friends. People were meeting online in the 1980s and 1990s, but there has been a massive global uptick since the advent of dating apps.

In the dot-matrix times, first base was the initial meeting, where some low-key kissing or holding hands might transpire. Second base involved some heavy petting, like a guy going up your shirt or down your pants: note the gendered dating lingo. Third base was a heavier version of second base, and penetrative sex might be in the cards. Having sex the first time you met qualified as a one-night stand. Although the old-timey, hetero, male-oriented baseball metaphors are cringey, I use them because they are part of the cultural dialogue that informed what dating was when my friends and I came of age.

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