Why You Can’t Swipe Your Way to Love

The complaints about dating apps are familiar: everything is reduced to photos, judgments are instantaneous, and whatever actually matters about a person never gets a chance to appear. What if the problem is not that dating apps are too superficial, but that they are not superficial enough? Let me explain.

Consider a deliberately perverse proposal. Imagine a service that allows users to upload a large set of photos of themselves and then aggressively optimize them for impact. The service predicts which images perform best in a given context, such as dating apps, LinkedIn, and social profiles, using contemporary machine‑learning techniques trained on large‑scale behavioral data (clicks, swipes, dwell time, engagement), and then helps users select, refine, or even generate the most compelling version. Resemblance to the “real person” is not enforced. Users decide how close or how distant the image should be.

This may sound dishonest, but anyone who has spent time photographing others knows that people routinely choose images that do not look like them. They reflect how people imagine themselves, how they wish to be seen, or how they already believe they appear to others. There is no neutral or authoritative self-image to defend, and no clear line where authenticity begins or ends. The question is not whether photo optimization distorts reality. It already does. The question is what happens if everyone does it well.

To understand why this matters, we need to talk about desire.

Jacques Lacan’s formulation is blunt: desire is the desire of the Other. Desire is social before it is personal. It requires a symbolic field in which things can be compared, ranked, and validated. We see this constantly outside of dating: the desire to get a reservation at the most hyped restaurant largely because it is hyped; the appeal of carrying a Leica camera precisely because its cost and cultural meaning exclude most people; or the often-cited anecdote about David Bowie, who early in his career was said to have staged the appearance of fans outside venues, understanding that visible desire produces desire. In each case, what is wanted is inseparable from the fact that others appear to want it first.

Physical appearance plays a special role here. Unlike most human traits, looks are surprisingly easy to rank. Large groups of people tend to agree, at least roughly, on who is attractive. This consensus makes appearance an efficient axis of ordering. Desire thrives in this environment. Wanting a highly desirable person is not just about that person; it is about what that desire confirms. Being chosen by someone who is socially ranked high reflects value back onto the self.

However, when two people leave the social field and begin living together, ranking loses relevance. At home, how a partner is valued by strangers matters very little. The gaze of the Other recedes. What organizes daily life is no longer desirability but the qualities that cannot be ranked.

This is where Lacan’s definition of love becomes useful: giving something you do not have to someone who does not want it. As an example, take the familiar story by O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi, where a man sells his watch to buy combs for his wife’s hair, while she cuts and sells her hair to buy a chain for his watch. Each gift stages a lack: each gives what they do not have, money to buy the gift, to someone who does not want them to make that sacrifice, and it is this mutual misalignment, not utility, that reveals what love is. In love, one is not oriented toward desiring something from the other, status, education, humor, kindness, looks, or any other desirable attribute. Love is defined by the urge to give, not take.

You do not choose to fall in love the way you choose a desirable option. It happens, or it does not. And when it does, social ranking becomes irrelevant. You feel you’d be happy disappearing with them forever. Desire and love, then, are not stages of the same process. They operate according to different logics. Desire is public, comparative, and socially mediated. Love is singular, contingent, and resistant to ranking.

The core failure of dating apps is that they collapse this distinction. They assume that love is a function of desire, that if desirability is optimized and correctly matched, intimacy will follow. Users absorb this assumption as well. They pursue visibility, rank, and validation, believing that maximizing desire will somehow produce love.

This is why so many relationships formed under conditions of intense desirability collapse once social ranking fades. The shift becomes unmistakable once children enter the picture: the endless cleaning, shuttling kids from place to place, stopping them from crying, putting them to sleep, functioning on exhaustion with no time left for self-presentation or social performance. In that reality, professional status, attractiveness, education, and symbolic rank simply cease to matter. When desire recedes, and love was never built, there is nothing left to sustain the bond.

This is where radical photo optimization re-enters the picture, not as a cynical trick but as an exposure mechanism. If everyone can produce highly attractive images, through selection, generation, or retouching, then photos lose their power to rank. Desirability inflates. Everyone is beautiful; therefore, beauty no longer sorts the field.

When photos can no longer reliably order people, users are forced to attend to other dimensions: writing, humor, tone, interests, conversational rhythm. These traits are not globally rankable. They do not collapse into a single hierarchy. They matter differently to different people. Such an environment will provide more time and space to fall in love.

Dating apps fail not because they are superficial, but because they mistake desire for love. Making the mechanism of desire fully visible may be a way to reveal why it has nothing to do with love.