If you’ve caught yourself complaining about how unattractive the people on your dating apps are, you’re not alone — but you’re also not entirely right.

Dating apps and other online spaces have made us believe that attraction and general attractiveness are synonymous, but they’re not. Looks do, undeniably, matter in a romantic relationship — and studies on the importance of the photos you use for your online dating profiles reflect that. But, unlike in-person interactions, dating apps reduce the idea of attraction to be strictly based on physical appearances (unless, of course, you have somehow mastered using Hinge prompts as a way to convey your personality).

Unfortunately, this strictly physical idea of attraction has negatively influenced how people view themselves and others — and, like so many other Gen Z issues, social media is partly to blame.

Attractiveness is defined as “arousing interest or pleasure.” There are real benefits to being considered physically attractive, but a romantic connection is not a guaranteed one. A person does not need to meet the societal standards of attractiveness in order for someone to be attracted to them. General attractiveness and attraction, while related, are not dependent on one another.

If this seems like common sense to you, then you are against the alarmingly normalized online implication that physical attractiveness is crucial to forming a romantic relationship. A TikTok I viewed earlier this week posed the question, “Are conventionally unattractive [people] who marry actually attracted to each other …?” The more than 900,000 likes the post accumulated made me question the sanity of the general population. 

Along with that, the movement of “looksmaxxers” (also on TikTok, no surprise there) is individuals, usually young men, who are focused on “maximizing” their physical attractiveness through using a gua sha, intense workout routines and, in extreme cases, cosmetic surgery. 

When did it become so scary to be considered physically unattractive? Likely when we began thinking, with the help of dating apps, that physical attractiveness is a “must-have” in order to find a romantic partner. 

Romantic attraction is more complex than we often give it credit for.

Part of attraction is built on something called mere exposure: the more we see something, the more inclined we are to like it. Social media uses mere exposure to rewire what your brain considers attractive. The more we see videos and pictures of people with similar features, the more we will like those features. This has transformed mere exposure into favoring looks-based attraction, particularly the physical features we see on influencers and models across our social media feeds. Instead of mere exposure making us more attracted to that person we see in class once a day, it favors the influencer we see on our feeds three times a day.  

Similar to social media, the design of most dating apps encourages quick decisions and short viewing periods of the content shown. Unsurprisingly, this becomes problematic when the content shown is of real people.  

Say you’re on your phone. You swipe through Instagram and TikTok, both of which have algorithms created to boost engagement and favor posts featuring attractive people. Then, bored with social media, you decide to open Hinge. In a few short seconds, your brain switches from viewing influencers, celebrities and models to ordinary people in your area. 

Instead of acknowledging that the people on social media are of unusual attractiveness, many people will fall to the opposite end of the spectrum and decide that the people on their dating apps are unusually unattractive or ugly. It’s a harsh assessment.

There’s reason to believe this skewed perception of attractiveness extends into real life interactions, too. For one, we’ve all heard that viewing too much edited or glamorized social media content can impact our self-esteem and body image. If social media can negatively affect the way we’re viewing our bodies, there’s no doubt it’s also affecting how we view others’ bodies. 

Of course, walking around campus is different from scrolling on an app and being encouraged to make quick judgments on how attracted we feel to another user. 

Still, it makes sense for us to be thinking about attraction in day-to-day life. Our obsession with attractiveness has been around for a very long time. But popularized cultural understandings of what is attractive have had and continue to have serious repercussions for marginalized groups. This is important to understand because beauty standards and cultural attractiveness have always been used as forms of control. By engaging too much with content that reinforces these standards, we’re putting pressure to adhere to them not only on potential partners but also on ourselves.

The corporations that run our digital lives don’t benefit from us building genuine, fulfilling connections with other people. They benefit from more purchases of beauty products, clothing and selling the consumer an idealized aesthetic of attractiveness. In 2024, U.S. sales on TikTok Shop in health and beauty products alone totaled $1.34 billion, making it the platform’s biggest industry.

Basically, it’s more profitable to make you think you need to meet cultural ideals of attractiveness in order to find love. And if you’re holding yourself to that standard, it’s natural you’ll hold a potential partner to it as well — creating an endless cycle of unachievable expectations. At the end of the day, it’s not about being attractive, it’s about finding connection.

Unlike what these companies want you to believe, your ideal future partner probably won’t care if you use a gua sha every morning to sculpt your face or an expensive skincare product to fix your acne. They would care more about your interests, your sense of humor and your values — none of which make for profitable TikTok content. 

In the meantime, take comfort in knowing you’re not alone in being single, or even never having been in a romantic relationship. Only 56% of Gen Z adults reported they “were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years,” according to a survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life. It’s scary to feel like potential partners just aren’t attracted to you and that you must be doing something wrong. Maybe you feel you’re not attractive enough, the people shown to you by your dating apps aren’t attractive enough or your standards are too high.

It’s these feelings that make us panic-install or panic-delete dating apps, but attraction isn’t cut-and-dry, and neither is the search for romantic connection.

The best way to meet someone isn’t through a dating app, it’s by pursuing things you’re interested in with people who interest you. Join an on-campus club you’ve been thinking about, go to a run club (if that’s your thing) or seek out opportunities to do things you enjoy in a group. You’ll already have a common interest, and you won’t have to mindlessly scroll through an app — a win-win situation. Even if you don’t find a crush, you can still make some friends.

Don’t let social media, dating apps and other online spaces make you feel like a romantic connection is something you or anyone else has to earn by being physically attractive. Being single, especially in college, is hardly a life sentence. Developing judgmental patterns and training your brain to only be interested in influencers — well, that seems a lot worse than being single to me.

Nora Harr is a second-year English and computer science combined major. She can be reached at [email protected].

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