We are living in the digital age, so get on a dating app. Modern society now exists in an online hellscape and the contemporary experience is one where online dating is seemingly unavoidable: frankly, a rite of passage of your twenty-something years. Given the permanence and prevalence of dating apps in the current age, it seems that the only solution is if you can't beat them, join them — abandon the delusion of organic meet-cutes or high school sweethearts and surrender yourself to the whims of algorithmic romance.

Dating apps conveniently filter out all those who are unavailable (by unavailable, I must clarify those in relationships, for the emotionally unavailable continue to plague and contribute to the online hellscape) and create a playing field where everyone is fair game — they might not want you back but that doesn't prevent you from showing interest! The gates of dating apps are narrow to create a space exclusively dedicated to and in service of the lepers of modern society: single people.

If dating is the cure for singleness, then a dating app is the love doctor — you need the app for your prescription, visit them once or twice or however many times until you've recovered from that singleness cough. And the beauty of this doctor is the variety and endlessness of prescriptions they can give — which makes finding the cure, or “the one,” more probable.

Dating apps, just by virtue of accessibility and amplification of options, orchestrate countless opportunities to find love. If the first swipe didn’t lead further than a first date or even beyond the chat, try again. And if the second swipe is the same, try again. Your options, through dating apps, have now expanded beyond the alumni network or the produce aisle of Trader Joe's on a weekday afternoon, and you’re more likely to find your person the more attempts you give it — it's statistically sound.

You can criticize dating apps for being impersonal and vacuous and dehumanizing — after all, you do begin by talking through a screen — but this is all the more incentive to take dating off of the app. Meet online, but grow the relationship in person. It doesn't have to remain digital if it starts so.