Every time I have dinner with my friends, they have a new horror story about a date they went on. Almost all of them have the same origin: dating apps. Whether it is Tinder, Bumble or Hinge, it doesn't matter. The result is always the same, and the conclusion seems obvious: dating apps do not work.

People are often on completely different pages (i.e. hook-up vs relationship). These dating apps are often a common place for creeps as opposed to the origins of real love and relationships, as they often try to advertise. Finding your match on a dating app is less like one-in-a-million and more like one-in-impossible.

In many ways, dating apps fail for logistical reasons: their setups, layouts, lack of vetting and more. In other ways, dating apps are destined to fail because they are trying to breed natural and lasting relationships using impersonal algorithms — a million formulas are trying to capture the complexity of human needs.

Apps try to account for people’s preferences for or identifications with certain groups (religion, occupation, social status — think ChristianMingle, FarmersOnly and Raya). Yet, even within these narrow groups, we find issues and faults. People vary, and often even within the same group, the spectrum is much larger than an algorithm accounts for.

There are exceptions and outliers, as there is for everything. Some people do find love, their soulmate or even a great friend. Some people have had extremely happy and fulfilling experiences. But, we don't determine that something is successful by the few successful outlier events. The majority makes the rule. And every new dating app proves that artificial algorithms will never master the art of facilitating natural, real, long-lasting relationships.