The Dating App Era: Love, Choice, Rejection, and Romance on a Screen

Dating once began through neighbourhoods, workplaces, friends, dances, letters, classified advertisements, and chance encounters. Then romance moved onto the screen.

The Dating App Era: Love, Choice, Rejection, and Romance on a Screen is a clear, engaging, fact-based nonfiction account of how dating apps changed modern relationships. From early online dating and the rise of swiping to ghosting, choice overload, safety concerns, romance scams, algorithms, casual dating, serious relationships, LGBTQ+ dating, and the return of offline courtship, this book explores how technology reshaped the way people meet, desire, reject, trust, and search for love.

Written in a flowing, accessible style, the book looks beyond simple praise or criticism. Dating apps have created marriages, families, companionship, and new forms of access, but they have also introduced exhaustion, comparison, deception, harassment, and emotional uncertainty. This is the story of modern courtship in an age where a person can be visible to thousands and still hope to be truly seen by one.