Love Is Not a Job Interview

On dating apps, optimisation, and the quiet anxiety of treating people like candidates

A few weeks ago, during a therapy session, I told my therapist I had made peace with the fact that dating apps are not for me.

Not because I think they are inherently flawed, not because I judge the people who use them, and certainly not because I believe there is a morally superior way of meeting a partner, but because I kept noticing that the entire process made me feel as though I was participating in something that did not match the way I understand attraction, connection, or love.

What I only gradually became able to articulate is that my discomfort was not really about the apps themselves, but about the structure they seem to encourage: a structure that increasingly resembles a job interview.

Not literally, of course, but emotionally and behaviourally: a system built around screening, evaluation, optimisation, and selection, where people are filtered, compared, and assessed as potential “fits” for a role that is already implicitly defined.

And once I started seeing it that way, I couldn’t stop noticing how often that logic appears in everyday conversations about dating.

At first, I didn’t question it. I simply participated in it like everyone else, even while something in me resisted.

Because it is very difficult not to, when everyone around you seems to be operating within the same system. Friends casually mention dates as part of ordinary weekly life, relationships appear to emerge from apps with such frequency that opting out begins to feel less like a preference and more like a risk, as though stepping away from the system means stepping away from the possibility of love itself.

So I oscillated between acceptance and doubt.

Even when I had no real desire to use dating apps, I would still return to them whenever that doubt was triggered — after conversations with friends, after hearing about new relationships, after noticing how easily others seemed to navigate a system that felt unnatural to me.

It became almost ritualistic. I would open the apps, swipe for a few minutes, send a few likes, close them again, and feel a temporary sense of relief, as if I had reassured myself that I was still participating, still available, still doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Not because I expected anything to come from it, but because it quieted the anxiety that I might be doing something wrong by not fully engaging with the system.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that this anxiety was not really about dating, but about exclusion — the fear of being outside a framework that everyone else seemed to accept as normal.

The clearest moment of this became visible to me during a conversation with a friend.

She described her approach to dating with a level of structure that immediately reminded me of how people talk about job searching: an hour in the morning dedicated to browsing, an hour in the evening dedicated to messages, and a steady rotation of coffee dates arranged neatly in a calendar.

Each meeting was short, scheduled efficiently, and treated as part of a broader process of evaluation — a way of determining fit.

There was nothing ironic in the way she described it. It was simply how she approached dating.

And what struck me most was not her behaviour, but the framework itself: the idea that relationships can be approached through the same logic we use to evaluate candidates for a position.

Requirements.

Filtering.

Compatibility.

Long-term suitability.

Emotional stability.

Life alignment.

Financial and domestic expectations.

None of these questions are unreasonable. In fact, they are often necessary.

But I started to wonder what happens when this becomes the starting point rather than something that emerges later.

Because my own experience of attraction has rarely looked like that.

I don’t tend to meet someone and immediately evaluate whether they would fit into my life in a structured, rational way. It usually begins with something far less defined — curiosity, attention, recognition, or the simple sense that someone has become interesting in a way I didn’t anticipate.

And only later do questions of compatibility even enter the picture.

When I think about the people I have liked, none of those moments began with a checklist. They began with conversation that lasted longer than expected, with a sense of ease, with time slightly dissolving into itself, with the feeling of wanting to see someone again without being entirely sure why.

This is why the “job interview” framing of dating unsettles me.

Because a job interview has a clear purpose: to evaluate whether someone meets predefined requirements for a role.

But love does not begin with a role.

It begins with a person.

And only later does it become clear what kind of relationship, if any, might grow from that.

Of course, I also understand why the other approach exists. It is structured, efficient, and protective. It reduces uncertainty. It prevents wasted time. It increases clarity in a domain that is emotionally costly.

I cannot say it is wrong, because it clearly works for many people.

And yet I keep returning to the same discomfort: that something about this system encourages us to become evaluators before experiencers, analysts before participants, people who begin by asking whether someone fits rather than whether someone moves them in any meaningful way.

This is also where my own decision becomes clearer in retrospect.

The reason I eventually told my therapist that I had made peace with the fact that dating apps are not for me was not because I reached a dramatic conclusion, but because I stopped feeling like I needed to override what I had always quietly known.

That the way I naturally relate to attraction does not align with a system built on selection, optimisation, and structured comparison.

And so I remain somewhere in between — fully aware of the logic of modern dating, but still unable to fully inhabit it without feeling as though something essential is being compressed into criteria it was never meant to fit.

Over time, I have learned to trust my gut instinct more, and to accept that what feels right for me is not necessarily right for everyone else, even if it sometimes takes me a while to fully believe that when confronted with other people’s certainty about their own approach.

Although, I still find this job-interview style of dating quite meaningless, in the sense that it does not reflect the way I naturally experience attraction, curiosity, or connection, and perhaps it never will, no matter how rational or efficient it may appear from the outside.