In the age of dating apps, basic decency is apparently a green flag

A man my friend matched with a couple of months ago dumped her via voice note. I was with her when the missive arrived. We could hear, clearly, the very specific acoustic signature of a Zara changing room as he explained, amid dramatic sighs and pauses, that he "really needed to focus on himself right now". I've thought about that moment a lot since that afternoon. Not because it upset my friend. If anything, she almost welcomed the rejection-his 6'2" frame had undoubtedly been animating her fantasies, but the nine-minute soliloquy on his precious gut biome on their last date had torpedoed them without any hope of resuscitation.

That moment stuck with me because of the morbidly fascinating architecture of rejection on both sides.

Gut Guy had ended things with my friend while literally shopping for other things. He hadn't stopped his day to deliver potentially painful news. He'd simply folded my friend into it, the way you would stop at a dry cleaner's on your way to somewhere more important. My friend, let's call her Swiping Sister, had performed the left-right liturgy on at least two dozen guys by the time he held out his consolation prize: "But I'd love to be friends." She paused just long enough to type out, "Thanks. I agree. We're better off as friends." I am willing to bet good money that they will never be friends.


All of us knew exactly what was happening in that moment.

He wasn't focusing on himself; he was focusing on the cotton-to-polyester ratio in the shirts he was trying on. She was aggressively unfazed because she had promptly unbenched two shorter kings on the Uber ride home after her disastrous last date. I, the curious bystander, was very aware that acknowledging a time of death on their relationship's 60-day lifespan-instead of letting it rattle namelessly in romantic purgatory-was 90th-percentile behaviour by 2026 dating standards.

There's something profoundly depressing when the bare minimum becomes the gold standard. How did we get here?

Swiped, left

There was a time-not particularly distant-when ending things with someone required you to be in a room with them and witness their reaction to it. You hoped for them to accept the end with stoicism, but prepared for a meltdown nonetheless. You practised the wretched speech nervously and even enlisted help in figuring out ways to soften the blow. Not because we were necessarily better people, but because cruelty came with lasting consequences. In a pre-app world, few would risk introducing their friends to a person who had acquired a reputation for being a cad or a flake.

For all the many conveniences and freedoms that dating apps afford their users, they are also turning us into awful daters. They are defrictioning cruelty to the point that it barely registers as a conscious decision. Like psychological vandalism at warp speed. I don't think people are any more or less cruel than they used to be. Normal people don't set out to be deliberately unkind on a dating app. Just that bit by bit, we accumulate a rich assortment of individually insignificant but collectively off-putting withdrawals that cement into a pattern. Abruptly lapsing into silence mid-conversation; oscillating between flirtation and frigidity; making plans with no follow-through... until unkindness becomes the default setting.

So now we have endless opportunities to be cruel and an irresponsible number of options to practise our particular brand of cruelty on. Why apologise for benching, breadcrumbing, cushioning, eclipsing, ghosting, negging, roaching, or zombieing someone when profile number six-hundred and fourteen is one thumb-flick away, blissfully ignorant about your fearfully avoidant attachment style? Blocked on one app for messing with one too many heads? No problem. Just hop on to the next. We all know that one person who practises this app-to-app leap like it's an Olympic sport.

And let's be painfully honest about one other thing: apps are evil, yes. But "the algorithm did this to us" cannot and should not become a 24-hour laundry service for the conscience. The apps did not invent the impulse to disappear rather than say something difficult; they simply removed every obstacle that used to stand between the impulse and the act. Ghosting isn't creative, it's lazy. And laziness is still, thankfully, bad manners.

To all the professional ghosters, here's another ugly truth: the ease of an exit doesn't neutralise its impact. Just because an app makes disentangling effortless, the resulting dehumanisation does not get magicked out of the equation. The person left holding the silence doesn't experience the weightlessness of your convenience. They experience the full spectrum of the accompanying unpleasantness-of not knowing whether they said or did something wrong, if you met someone better, or, the worst, why they suddenly became unworthy of a one-line explanation. The potential for pain still exists, it's just that you added humiliation to the mix. And saddled the person who made the mistake of caring more for you than you cared for them with it. Is that really the kind of person any of us wants to be?

Dating etiquette

I say all this with the authority of someone who has been both offender and offendee in this crime. So I'd like to suggest some basic dating etiquette. If you've spoken to someone for more than a week, you owe them one sentence when you are done, even if it's an unkind one. Because unkindness that's stated is kindness compared with the bafflement of a vanishing act. If you have met someone in person, you owe them the same courtesy you would extend to a colleague you didn't particularly like-cordial, brief, over. None of this requires warmth. It only requires the low bar of treating another person's time as somewhat valuable.

I call it etiquette, not ethics. Even though etiquette is ethics, just with more palatable stakes. Nobody wants to be told they are a bad person for ghosting someone they matched with on a bored Tuesday night. But if a three-second voice note can prevent a downward spiral for someone whose only crime is you didn't take to them... I imagine most people would be willing to make the effort. Because deep down we all know that small courtesies matter.

I have watched this declaration tossed carelessly into the dating pool more times than I can count: I don't owe you anything. It is true that none of us is owed love or romance. Nobody is entitled to being chosen, or kept, or even particularly liked by every stranger they match with. But every single one of us is owed the baseline decency due to any person whose time we have occupied, however briefly. That debt doesn't dissolve just because it arrives through apps that make it easy to pretend otherwise.

Sonali Kokra is a Mumbai-based writer