One day recently, Alexandra Tweten was browsing Facebook when a woman she knew posted a screenshot of a recent exchange she’d had on OkCupid.

“I want to message you, but I’m afraid,” the man said. The woman didn't respond for 12 hours, after which the man followed up with one word:

"Asshole."

As these things often do, the missive prompted a piling on of similar tales of inscrutably weird or profoundly rude dating messages. Tweten posted an aggressive note she had recently received from a man who had sent her the same OkCupid line three times in the course of a month, asking her if she’d like to chat. After ignoring it repeatedly, Tweten finally wrote back, “No.”

His response: “WHY THE FUCK NOT? If you weren’t interested, you shouldn’t have fucking replied at all! WTF!”

“We can't win,” Tweten told me recently. “If we don't respond, they come back and say, ‘you're a whore.’ If we do respond, we get yelled at and called names. I hate that men think they can talk to women like that. They should be publicly shamed.”

Other women on the Facebook thread agreed, saying they had similar experiences and wanted to see the perpetrators punished in some way, like through a public Instagram account.

Tweten said, “I’ll do it!”

That Instagram account became Bye Felipe, Tweten’s crowdsourced menagerie of mankind’s worst specimens. The name is a play on “Bye Felicia,” a meme used to signify that someone has left a party, and they won’t be missed. Since creating it Monday of last week, Tweten has received more than two dozen submissions.

Tweten, who is 27 and works for an entertainment company in Los Angeles, has been on and off OkCupid since 2010. She acknowledges that these types of messages come from a relatively small number of users. She’s had mostly good experiences with online dating, and she met her last serious boyfriend on OkCupid.

Still, the crude, unsolicited messages are a kind of a bitter aftertaste to what is usually a fun, if sometimes fatiguing, process. “What in society makes them think that it's okay to message someone like that?” she said. “At the same time, it's funny. You can see the desperation.”

Tweten is part of an growing contingent of women who are dedicated to exposing the shady, hostile, and crass entreaties they get from their digital suitors. There’s Straight White Boys Texting, which is exactly what it sounds like: (“You should come eat this dick for desert.” [sic]) Minority women seem to have it especially rough; there are a number of sites devoted to exposing the uniquely disgusting bile that seems to spew forth when certain white men attempt to woo Asian women.

Or, for more run-of-the-mill indignities, check out Dudes of Tinder, a Tumblr collecting a combination of outlandish profile photos and gross messages (“Wanna meet up for some chicken? Maybe some sex?”).

In the words of Elizabeth Bennet, "You are too hasty, sir."

* * *

Online dating is just like regular dating—if it had been sprinkled with radioactive dust and left out in the sun to get bigger, louder, and warped.

Traditional courting norms, in which men usually do the asking and women usually do the selecting, are escalated online. Rather than ask out the one cute girl laying out on the quad, however, the man can ask 50.

And why bother to ask them out in all different ways? One “hey cutie what you doin?” fits all.

Bombarded by all these "admirers," many women feel overwhelmed and leave scores of messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and five fake female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection, day after day, can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters.

“They're trying to make us feel bad about making them feel bad,” Tweten said. “They're just trying to strike at whatever our insecurities are. You were just interested a second ago, and now you're saying, ‘you have a fat ugly nose.’”

To this, add the anonymity of online communication and the ambiguity that results when two strangers try to kindle a romantic connection through a medium that can't convey sarcasm, body language, or even a smile.

One friend recently relayed her own online-dating saga to me:

Men, too, have grumbled online about the fact that all their hours spent browsing photos, writing love notes, and hitting send aren’t “paying off.” Maybe some think they have to send outlandish messages in order to get noticed at all.

“Who wants to expend all of that emotional energy only to get kicked in the metaphorical nuts by that empty inbox every time you log in?” wrote a Texas “dating coach” named Harris O’Malley. “Why the hell won’t people write back?”

Earlier this year, a male Reddit user tried setting up a fake, female OkCupid profile using a picture of a friend (with permission). Seconds after he created his username, he received his first message. He finished uploading the photo and figured he’d check back in about a day. But before he could close the tab, he got another message. And another.

He replied, but “then I got another message that opened with a line that while not wholly vulgar, kind of came off a little strange. I ignored it and went back to send the message to person three now,” he wrote.

He deleted his profile after two hours.

* * *

“I’m sick of hearing that women have it so much better online,” said Holly Wood (her real name), a Harvard sociology Ph.D. working on a dissertation about modern dating.

She's also been on online-dating platforms for about three years. “My guy friends were saying, ‘You don’t have it hard. You’re an attractive girl.'"

"So I said, ‘Do you want to see the crap that I deal with online?'”

Wood also serves as a moderator for OkCupid, a footsoldier in the volunteer army that sorts through messages that have been “flagged” by users for being inappropriate. If Wood or another moderator deem a message too crass, offensive, or hostile, the user who sent it can be banned.

It’s worth noting that, at least relative to online gaming sites or comment boards, harassment in online dating seems to be relatively rare. In a recent Pew survey about online harassment, most people said online dating sites were equally welcoming to both men and women, and only 6 percent of people reported having been harassed on an online dating site.

On the other hand, this is the kind of thing that, when it does happen, can be chilling. If men did this in public, we'd want them arrested. It would be ridiculous if a stranger showed you his penis in a bar and didn't suffer repercussions. So why, these women ask, are online daters allowed to assail each other with impunity?

Wood curates a Facebook album of the nastier messages she comes across in her moderating role. Hearing them read them to me aloud over the phone, it wasn’t so much shocking as it was clinical and kind of funny, like listening to a read-through of a Mamet play. But I could see how, if I was logged into a site where I was trying to find love, or sex, or at least a fun person to eat sushi with, repeatedly being called a "whore" or a "bitch" by perfect strangers would be draining, if not downright scary.

“Hi Isabel ... would you be up for a nice toe sucking foot worship," Wood read. “You know your beauty deserves a five and your mouth deserves a ! so I granted you a three which is ... for fat women who wear makeup.” “Is your hole clean or do I need body armor to make entry?” “You ever watch a guy jack off before?” ... and so on.

Wood argues that the fact that so many women are subjected to so much filth on dating sites amounts to systemized sexual harassment. Women aren’t prepared to deal with the deluge, and OkCupid’s moderators, she argues, can only do so much.

And in this day and age, it’s not like online dating is a fringe activity that women can simply recuse themselves from, she says.

“You can’t go up to people anymore and just flirt with them,” she said. If you’re single, “online dating becomes your only recourse. But it’s sexually hostile, and the predator-prey dynamic seems to be really on fire.”

* * *

It’s unclear whether these online expose projects are truly shaming boorish Tinder users or simply providing catharsis for the women involved. On Bye Felipe, the names of the men aren’t visible, but some of their photos are. Tweten doesn’t crop or alter the messages—they’re all screenshots she’s been sent. Her position is that if a guy chooses to say this kind of thing to a woman, the woman can choose to share it with the world.

It’s a kind of doxing, and the reason it’s so unusual is because dating has traditionally been a private act. But if a man relentlessly spams dozens of women to say he wants to put his penis in their mouths, has he already broken the barrier between private and public conduct?

When Anna Gensler joined tinder, some of the first messages she received were things like, “8==D I love anal.” So she began drawing nude pictures of the senders and posting them to Instagram alongside the content of their messages. In most of the drawings, the men have small, flaccid penises, perhaps to better contrast with the measurements they boast in their messages to Gensler.

She told Slate that some of the men got mad, claiming that she didn’t create an attractive-enough rendering: “Why am I so fat? My facial hair doesn’t really look like that. My nipples are smaller than that!”

A handful responded thoughtfully. Others blocked her. When she created an OkCupid account and threatened, in her profile, to draw anyone who sent her obscene messages, a few men took her up on the offer, writing, “Can you please draw me naked?”

OkCupid’s moderator guidelines state that messages are considered out of bounds if they contain “threats or harassment, hate speech, crude or overt sexual remarks, or commercial solicitations.” Wood thinks the site should go beyond deleting the profiles of offending users, potentially by adding a filtering system so that women don’t get the hurtful messages in the first place. (OkCupid and Tinder’s parent company, IAC, did not return a request for comment.)

In the meantime, Wood says she has managed to reduce the number of offensive messages she receives by honing her profile to ward off creeps. Putting “feminist” in her bio, for example, is a kind of dog whistle that she thinks suggests she’s not one to reckon with.

“Put the buzzwords out there that will kill their joyride,” she said. “But that’s a skill we don’t tell women about when they join the website.”

If you use dating apps, you’ve no doubt had some Bye Felipe moments, when a dude has harassed you or turned hostile when you turned him down. A recent study from Consumers' Research confirms what we already knew — that the majority of women who use dating apps experience harassment — but goes on to fill us in on which apps are worst when it comes to come-ons-turned-insults.

According to the survey, 57% of women report feeling harassed through online dating, compared to 21% of men who report the same. The survey found that Tinder and OkCupid top the harassment list, with 39% of Tinder users and 38% of OkCupid users reporting feeling harassed. Some users reported feeling harassed once or twice, while others said they always feel harassed.

On the other hand, though, users who rely on Match or eHarmony, sites that require a little more profile depth (and payment) experience less harassment. Twenty-one percent of Match users and 17% of eHarmony users reported feeling harassed.

The survey polled a couple hundred people about what apps they use, how they use them and the results. The top-used apps are Tinder and OkCupid by far, with 50% of respondents reporting using Tinder, and 22% on OkCupid. Only 9% reported using Match and 7% eHarmony. The majority those surveyed, 73%, live in the Northeast and are between the ages of 18 and 22 (69%). Most users are seeking long-term or serious relationships, but that cohort only beat out “strictly casual” users at 33% to 30%.

The good news is that all the dating apps the survey included had a pretty good rate of yielding successful relationships — even Tinder. At 57%, eHarmony had the highest rate of successful relationships after any length of use, while 52% of Match users reported the same. Half (50%) of OkCupid users and 47% of Tinder users reported the same.

Though online harassment seems to have become the norm, that doesn’t mean you have to deal with it. If an online dating interaction makes you uncomfortable, hit him with the Bye Felipe and keep swiping.

Related:This Is the Biggest Turn-Off in Online Dating

Sex Ed 101:

I know I can’t be the only one who’s been in a bad mood the past 11 months. Living alone in a shoebox apartment during a pandemic has meant that my social life = Gilmore Girls marathons and awkward Zoom birthday “parties.” I’ve barely seen the sun this year, let alone other human beings.

This plus the cascading terror of the news and feeling a real need to be an emotional support for all my friends and family who are feeling just as garbage as I am has made me a little rage-y. And I realized that I think I’m taking it out on my online dating app matches.

The other day I matched with a man whose first message to me was, “Cute smile—but are you adventurous?” And I took that personally.

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What I heard when I read that message was, “Well, miss, your application looks good, but we’ll need to see how you do out in the field before we take any next steps.” It felt like this guy—who had not only Liked my profile first but also initiated conversation first—was treating me like I was chasing him down.

In response, I wrote, “Why—is there a prize?”

Him: “You can say that. We can’t be friends if you’re not.”

Me: “So just to be clear…you are the prize here?”

I took a screenshot of my message and shot it off to my friend so she could praise my dazzling wit. But imagine my face when she told me I sounded “aggressive.” She pointed out that *I* was the harsh one and that maybe this guy’s message wasn’t so much a case of dickishness as it was odd phrasing and poorly executed banter.

When I really sat down to think about it, I realized I’d been responding like this to a lot of guys. Like the one who wanted to change my mind about Ayn Rand (LOL) or the one who asked for a performance review of our conversation.

Marriage and relationship therapist Shadeen Francis, LMFT, says it’s kind of normal given These Times. “We need right ways to express how we feel that we don’t often have a lot of permission for, and we want to be treated like our feelings matter—and sometimes the way that we go about that is through having harmful impact.” (E.g., verbally throat-punching strange men on the internet.)

It’s most likely because I haven’t been able to find a productive outlet for all my pent-up rage. I feel bad unloading on friends, who are buried under mountains of their own emotional baggage. My cat certainly doesn’t deserve it. And while I do occasionally go off on social media, it runs the risk of alienating family and potential employers.

So I think, without realizing it, I’ve started to direct my anger at the Forever Enemy: single men.

Francis describes this anger as “the feeling that lets you know that a boundary has been crossed.” She explains that this doesn’t have to be just one major thing, like when a Tinder guy reveals he has a wife and three kids living upstate or something. It could be a series of minor and major stresses that build up—like a pandemic on top of a doomscroll on top of a fight with your mom on top of this one freaking guy holding a fish on this dumb app who wants to know “How am I???”

The digital space can be a comfortable outlet for all this anger, in no small part because you don’t have to look at anyone’s face when you angrily type, “NOT WELL, BITCH!”

“So to have conversations that you know further contribute to the sense of strain or discomfort or irritability, [a dating app] is an easy place to release [the anger],” Francis says. “However, they’re getting energy that didn’t come from this conversation.”

And that’s not really fair to anyone. So if you’re all like, hey, hi, hello, this is me, here’s where we should send all that anger without taking it out on Joe, 28, from Seattle*:

1. Just be angry for a second, because you need to send that energy somewhere. And if that means you need to flip off your phone screen, make a burn book, or just stew, go for it. Francis says even if it’s not the most graceful or generous, “if that’s what you’ve got to start with, start with where you are.”
2. Indulge in something physically pleasant, like playing your fave song and pausing for a dance break, indulging in a fried chicken sammie (or whatever your comfort food is), and maybe even good old-fashioned cussing. (Just as long as you’re not targeting another person.) It can be a good release, she confirms.

So, okay, taking a step back, I can see now how the phrasing by Mr. Adventurous Guy was maybe just a sign he’s not so great at flirting. And I probably could’ve handled it a bit better.

But even though it doesn’t look like it’s a love match between us, I’ve since decided to update my profile to include some fair warning like: “I respond badly to messages that sound condescending to me and they will probably get screenshotted.”

Hopefully this way, I won’t feel the need to go from zero to cash-me-outside-how-bout-dah in, like, two seconds just because a match hit me with a, “I see you’re a writer! Actually, I do some writing myself….”

Hey, at least it’s a start.

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In the past week, two of my friends have fallen victim to d*ckwads on dating apps.

The first happened last Friday following a first date.

How to stop letting minor setbacks throw you off track

Sofia* met Jack after chatting on Bumble and they went out for a couple of post-work drinks in Chelsea before we met up for a post-date debrief.

‘I think it went well!’ she exclaimed, bouncing into the beer garden.

A bit keen perhaps (he’d apparently spent the first hour saying how his three-year plan was to find a ‘girl’ he could marry and relocate to Bristol with), but decent.

So she was taken back a bit when she received a message from Jack shortly after saying that the date hadn’t been a success.

‘Let’s be honest, tonight didn’t go that well,’ it read.

‘However, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had any for a while. So if you fancied catching up next week for a few drinks and a shag, let me know.’

We sat around in stunned silence.

Even the guy who was with us was baffled.

Apps have made the process of getting to know someone, of securing dates speed up immeasurably – so it shouldn’t be too shocking when people aren’t prepared to pussyfoot around.

For many, Bumble and Tinder are little more than hook-up services.

But still, we were appalled and Sophia was fuming. Why didn’t Jack just say how he felt at the time? Why not cut it loose before?

The second incident concerned my friend Gina, who had matched with a bloke called Rob – also on Bumble.

She started the conversation and almost immediately was faced with a barrage of abuse.

The guy claimed that they’d matched a number of times before, both on Bumble and Tinder, but that she’d never bothered to chat – meaning that she was now desperate.

After a while, he started calling her a ‘delusional fattie’.

We wanted to find out why someone would spend their time digging strangers out, so a mate took over Gina’s phone and decided to confront Rob.

When asked what the f*ck his deal was, Rob said that he’d called Gina a ‘fat cow’ because she was a time waster – and that it was acceptable to send her abuse because he wasn’t ‘physically connected’ to her.

‘I don’t have to be nice over the internet when someone annoys me,’ he said, ‘but I do in real life as the ramifications are much more severe.’

‘If that makes me a coward, then so be it. I think the way women treat men on dating apps is appalling…(Gina) insulted me, just in a more insidious way.’

In case you’re confused, Gina’s crime was simply not replying to this guy’s texts for 20 minutes.

It’s bonkers. And what’s sad is that the guy isn’t an idiot – he’s an articulate bloke with an MA from Goldsmiths.

Being rude online is completely accepted. There are even apps helping people to come up with snide remarks to use against the people they match with.

Flints is a chat up line service for Tinder, and it’s gems include one-liners like: ‘You’re not hot enough to be this boring’.

Only a complete dick would say that kind of thing to someone at a bar – so why would you send it to someone on your phone? And why are companies encouraging that kind of behaviour?

Mind you, this sort of bad behaviour isn’t just verbal. Blocking people without reason can feel oddly brutal and aggressive.

It’s happened to James a few times.

‘There’s no explanation,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.

‘One minute they’re there, the next they’re not. Getting blocked is mostly fine except for one time when I’d moved from the app to Whatsapp, arranged to meet up, got on very well – only to be told she didn’t have time to date as she’d started a new job (the day of the date, first mention of this) and didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

‘Before I could even reply I’d been blocked on WhatsApp and Tinder and didn’t even have the right of response. AND she looked like Selena Gomez so more heartbreak.’

Can you imagine actively telling someone to f*ck off (apropos of nothing) in real life? Or fat shaming them? Or telling them that while you have no connection, you’re desperate and DTF?

Why do we feel like we can behave like complete b****** online and on apps?

‘I think the answer is a bit intuitive, but nonetheless, dating apps weren’t developed because of the time people would need to spend socialising, but more because they feel comfortable breaking the ice online,’ psychotherapist Ales Zivkovic tells Metro.co.uk.

‘Also, when we meet people online, we have a wide variety of people to choose from and what we see are only their photos—there is no personal contact. Because of that, we objectify people. They are not people anymore for us but articles on the virtual shelf that we choose from. And when a person is objectified like that, we do not feel shame if we are rejected or not approached.’

All too often, Ales says, we depersonalise people on apps to the point that we don’t think twice about rejecting them or saying things that we’d never say in real life.

‘It makes it easier for the user to just shamelessly and un-empathically spill their rage, anger, contempt and their own shame and rejection onto the other person. This will also tend to pull quite “psychopathic” traits out of people that in their real life sometimes seem to go along keeping them under control, repressed and suppressed.’

So what effect is digital dating having over our behaviours in general?

More: Lifestyle

Ales says that Tinder and others are causing us to ‘unlearn’ our social skills.

‘People who use them don’t need any social skills to get a date. The only thing they need to do is swipe and send a pickup line with the right emoji. People who have no regard for others and have no social skills whatsoever can get a date – which they wouldn’t be able to do in real life.

‘So, what dating apps do is stimulate such behaviour and destimulate real life interaction. This creates social cripples who do not know how to engage in real life relationships.’

Of course, when you’re being harassed and abused online, you can just block them or delete the app – which you can’t do IRL.

‘Dating apps also have a narcissistic side to them—as does the majority of social media platforms—so they do attract more narcissistic users that primarily want recognition more than real date or relationship. They will be satisfied with a swipe and interest of another user and not really care for anything else. This is also part of the reason for ghosting.’

‘They will be satisfied with a swipe and interest of another user and not really care for anything else. This is also part of the reason for ghosting.’

Ghosting, breadcrumbing, zombeying – they’re all symptoms of the disease. How can many of us expect to make a connection online if we struggle to see the other user as a real person?

As technology advances to try and make our lives easier and more streamlined, it seems like we’re continuously running into fresh issues. And in this case, perhaps we only have ourselves to blame.

MORE : If I was ‘crazy’ when we were dating, that’s probably because you were awful

MORE : The moments we realised that we were dating absolute d*cks

It’s a tale as old as the internet: when Alexandra Tweten would log into her online dating accounts, she’d occasionally get messages from random guys that made her uneasy. Sometimes it’d be an unsolicited dick pic. Other times the messages themselves were lewd or creepy right off the bat. “I just wouldn’t respond, or I’d think, ‘No, thanks. I'm not interested,’” Tweten tells VICE over the phone. “And then they got hostile.”

She noticed this troubling pattern on Tinder, OKCupid, and other dating apps she was using at the time, but one particular incident left her especially disturbed. “It was this guy who just kept on sending me the same copy and pasted message, over and over and over again. His profile didn't show his entire face, and it just seemed crazy,” Tweten says. “He just kept on sending the same message, so finally I said, ‘No, I'm not interested.’ He flipped out and just was like, ‘WTF! Why would you even respond if you weren't interested?’” She remembers thinking, “‘This guy is unhinged.’ And it kind of scared me.”

Tweten’s experience with creepy dudes on dating apps isn’t unique, of course. “I had this conversation with a bunch of women, and we were all just talking about the abusive messages that we had received online,” she says.

In 2017, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 21 percent of women ages 18 to 29 have experienced sexual harassment online, and 83 percent say that online harassment is a serious problem. According to Rosemary Rade, Director of Digital Services for the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Love Is Respect, online dating platforms can create a feeling of anonymity that makes it easy for users “to say whatever they want, using abusive language with few repercussions,” she tells VICE over email.

Abusers can easily erase evidence of sexual harassment or violent threats by unmatching or blocking another user, effectively letting themselves off the hook. Documenting instances of online harassment can hold abusers accountable, and Rade recommends taking screenshots of threatening conversations—which is exactly what Tweten did.

In 2014, Tweten started posting screenshots of her online dating mishaps on Instagram using the handle @byefelipe (the name is a nod to the “Bye Felicia” meme, used to dismiss a noxious person). Soon, her email was flooded with submissions from other women with similar experiences of harassment on dating platforms. “I realized that it was really common,” Tweten says. “It felt a lot better.”

In August, Tweten released a book titled, Bye Felipe: Disses, Dick Pics, and Other Delights of Modern Dating, a guide to dealing with online harassment. “It's basically the book that I wish I would have had in my early 20s to tell me how to go about dating,” Tweten says. Bye Felipe includes personal stories and dating advice from Tweten and friends, as well as a selection of the best comebacks documented on the @byefelipe Instagram. “I love seeing women put men down,” Tweten says.

The book also includes a breakdown of “all the different types of trolls that find their way into our inboxes, like mansplainers, fat-shamers, and just different types of insults,” Tweten adds. “I tried to piece them together to see if there was a common pattern and how we could combat that.”

Bye Felipe is a feminist takedown of the insidious aspects of online dating, and though the book features plenty of clever comebacks, there’s more to Tweten’s message than putting down trolls. “This is a problem in our society in general, this thing of men becoming aggressive and hostile when they're told ‘no,’” Tweten says.

When men respond to romantic rejection with hostility or threats of violence, Rade explains, they often do so because they feel entitled. But men who feel ownership over women’s bodies, time, and attention—and react violently when they’re rejected—aren’t necessarily solitary jerks or lone trolls. The rise of incels and growing popularity of Red Pill forums point to an insidious, institutionalized sense of entitlement and broader ideologies of violence against women that extend far beyond dating apps. Any abuse, including sexual harassment or hostility in response to romantic rejection “is about power and control,” Rade explains.

“It seems like every month there's a new story about a woman being shot or stabbed or something by a man who she refused to give her number to,” Tweten says. “And I think that a lot of times, men don't understand that the stakes are really high for women, just existing and talking and interacting with men.”

Many of the conversations Tweten posts on @byefelipe are difficult to read, because they confirm the fears many women have, that men will try to kill them. When meeting a stranger from the internet, women can never be completely certain that their date isn’t actually a murderer. That’s partly why when a Tinder reject goes from sending smiley face emojis to sending rape anddeath threats, it can be terrifying. “I think it's really important to highlight and point out the real life consequences for women,” Tweten says.

“Abuse is never ok, whether it’s verbal, digital or physical,” Rade adds. “Anyone should have the right to not respond to an online dating message or request without having to deal with abuse if they do so. The responsibility for the abuse lies with the abuser.”

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“You would have been just one screw anyway because you’re an ugly fat bitch.”

A women told me she received this reply on a dating app after she declined a “hook-up” invitation. She was a 45+ and looking for love online, like many of us are.

How we communicate on dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and RSVP is important to the relationships we then form, what we accept as suitable behaviour in relationships offline and integral to the discussions we have been having as a nation about consent and respect between women and men.

Research from Monash University, funded by dating giant eHarmony, found that dating apps are now the most common method single Australians use to meet each other. Covid social restrictions has seen this popularity soar. In the first quarter of 2020, Tinder reported a whopping 3bn swipes in a single day.

What is going under the radar however is the treatment singletons endure as they use these apps. In my research and work with adults, it has become clear to me that offensive language, disrespectful name-calling, ghosting and having others offload their frustrations on you, have all become common place on dating apps. Sadly, many users have come to expect and even accept such treatment as par of the course when looking for love online.

Research consistently shows that the screen mediates our sense of agency. It makes us braver and bolder. Asking someone for a date or a hook-up behind the protection of a screen is less scary than doing so in person. So is making them feel bad because they don’t find you attractive, because they aren’t indulging your ego, or because they don’t want to drop everything right now and come to your apartment for sex.

By making someone else feel bad, some app users make themselves feel better. And what’s worse, they are doing this behind the semi-anonymous shield of the internet.

Many people justify bad online dating experiences as 'to be expected’

Some have termed this “rejection violence”. Subreddits like r/nicegirls, r/niceguys and r/nicegays, where users share nasty online dating encounters, show that this is happening to women and men of all orientations. Dig deeper, however, and research shows it is mostly happening to women.

A 2020 study by Pew Research found that one third of women using dating apps have been called an abusive name, and almost half of women had men continue to pursue them online after they said no. That’s double the rate that men experience.

Many people justify this as “to be expected” given the marketplace vibe of these apps. The abundance of people online makes us quicker to dump on a person because finding someone else is “easy”. There are hundreds or thousands more potential matches waiting, ready to be swiped.

The problem is this has made toxic behaviour between potential romantic partners more commonplace, and sadly more acceptable. Our bar on these apps is set lower than what we would expect in any other context. One woman gushed to me how a man had said “thank you” to her in an online dating chat. She said manners were few and far between.

We’re at our absolutely most vulnerable when we’re dating

I’m not saying we should avoid online dating. Where we meet and date is not important, but how we communicate with each other is. It’s a common misconception that online complaints, anger and harassment are just a fact of life. We may lull ourselves into a false sense of security by fobbing it off as typical, or think that it doesn’t matter or affect us because it happened online. But the fact is it does.

We’re at our absolutely most vulnerable when we’re dating, and some of the behaviour especially women receive on the apps is not only profoundly demoralising, but also does not stop affecting us once we lock our screen.

It carries into our day and eats into other interactions in our life – at work, socially, with the cashier at the local store. It erodes how we think we deserve to be treated and what we teach our children about relationships. The more it happens, the more damage.

Let’s stop differentiating online dating from dating. Let’s be consistent in how we expect to be treated in all stages of a relationship, no matter where it starts. Let’s not drop our standards to mollycoddle potential new loves who think treating us badly is normal simply because we met online.

Do we really want to be in a relationship, or even hook up with someone like that? The answer is no.

At this point, there’s little dispute that dating apps work. Research has found that the quality of relationships that start online is not fundamentally different from those that start in person, and 59% of respondents to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey said dating apps and websites are “a good way to meet people.”

Good as it may be for your love life, though, swiping isn’t always all fun and games. Here’s how dating apps may be affecting your mental health — and how to use them in a smarter way.

Dating apps may hurt self-esteem

In a 2016 study, Tinder users were found to have lower self-esteem and more body image issues than non-users. The study didn’t prove that Tinder actually causes these effects, but co-author Trent Petrie, a professor of psychology at the University of North Texas, says these issues are a risk for users of any social media network that prompts “evaluative” behaviors. (A representative from Tinder did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.)

“When we as human beings are represented simply by what we look like, we start to look at ourselves in a very similar way: as an object to be evaluated,” Petrie says.

To counter that effect, Petrie says it’s important to keep perspective. “Go into this framing it like, ‘They’re going to evaluate me this way. That doesn’t define who I am,'” Petrie suggests. “Surround yourself with people who know you, support you and value you for all your various qualities.” Petrie says it may also help to build a profile that showcases a variety of your interests and pastimes, rather than one focused solely on physical appearance.

Keely Kolmes, a California psychologist who specializes in sex and relationship issues, also suggests book-ending your app use with healthy activities, such as exercise or social interaction, to avoid getting dragged down. “Do things that would hostility on dating app general support your mental health and self-worth, so that it doesn’t get caught in the cycle of what’s happening on your phone,” Kolmes says.

And when all else fails, Petrie says, just log off. “It can be almost a full-time job, between screening people and responding to requests and having first meetings,” he says. “Limit the amount of time that you spend doing that.”

Endless swiping may overwhelm you

Having limitless options isn’t always a good thing. The famous “jam experiment” found that grocery shoppers were more likely to make a purchase when presented with six jam options, rather than 24 or 30. The same concept may be true of dating apps, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and chief scientific advisor for dating site Match. (Match Group owns Tinder.)

“You meet so many people that you can’t decide and make no decision at all,” Fisher says. To keep yourself in check, hostility on dating app, Fisher suggests limiting your pool of potential dates to somewhere between five and nine people, hostility on dating app, rather than swiping endlessly. “After that, the brain starts to go into cognitive overload, and you don’t choose anybody,” she says.

Kolmes says people may also falsely equate swiping with personal connection. “It almost gives people hostility on dating app sense of having done something they haven’t actually done,” Kolmes says. “It feels like they’ve reached out to a lot of people, but they haven’t made the effort to actually go out and meet somebody, which is really important.”

To keep from getting stuck in this cycle, Kolmes recommends self-imposing rules that encourage you to take your matches into the real world. “Have a system. How much are you willing to engage with somebody before you actually meet and make it real?” Kolmes says. “If somebody is not meeting you in the way hostility on dating app works for you, it’s far better to just let them go.”

Dating apps may set you up for rejection

Rejection is always part of dating, whether you meet someone virtually or in real life. But apps have changed the game in a few fundamental ways.

For one thing, the volume of potential rejection is far greater than it used to be. While you’d likely only approach one person at a bar, you could send scores of app messages that go unanswered — and each one of those can feel like a rejection. Research has also shown that people act differently online than in person, which likely contributes to potentially hurtful behaviors like ghosting (deciding abruptly to not reply to a match or date) and bread-crumbing (communicating just enough to keep someone on the romantic back-burner). A new study also found that online daters tend to pursue people 25% “more desirable” than themselves, which Fisher says may hurt your chances of getting a meaningful response.

Getting over these mini-rejections, the experts say, isn’t all that different from bouncing back from an in-person slight, hostility on dating app. Fisher recommends positive affirmations (she suggests starting with the line, “I love being myself”) and thinking about the future, hostility on dating app, rather than the past. “Planning gives you a sense of control and optimism and something to do,” she says.

Petrie, meanwhile, says dealing with micro-rejections is, again, about perspective. “There are many, many, many reasons why someone doesn’t respond,” he says. “If we are attaching it to the idea that there’s something wrong with us, then that may be a good time to check in with our friends and ground ourselves in the reality that we’re a fine person.”

You may not be innocent

Behavior goes both ways. Swiping through an endless sea of faces “invites us to de-personalize people in some ways,” by “not looking at the whole person and really just going based on an image,” Kolmes says — hostility on dating app you may be doing some of these things to your own prospective matches without even realizing it.

To stay compassionate, put yourself in others’ shoes, and avoid going on apps unless you’re actually trying to date, Kolmes recommends, hostility on dating app. “Think about the kind of attention you would want someone to hostility on dating app to you, and whether you’re ready to pay that kind of attention to people who have put themselves out there looking for a date or love,” she says.

Write to Jamie Ducharme at jamie.ducharme@time.com.

“You would have been just one screw anyway because you’re an ugly fat bitch.”

A women told me she received this reply on a dating app after she declined a “hook-up” invitation. She was a 45+ and looking for love online, like many of us are.

How we communicate on dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and RSVP is important to the relationships we then form, hostility on dating app, what we accept as suitable behaviour in relationships offline and integral to the discussions we have been having as a nation about consent and respect between women and men.

Research from Monash University, funded by dating giant eHarmony, found that dating apps are now the most common method single Australians use to meet each other. Covid social restrictions has seen this popularity soar. In the first quarter of 2020, Tinder reported a whopping 3bn swipes in a single day.

What is going under the radar however is the treatment singletons endure as they use these apps. In my research and work with adults, it has become clear to me that offensive language, disrespectful name-calling, ghosting and having others offload their frustrations on you, have all become common place on dating apps, hostility on dating app. Sadly, many users have come to expect and even accept such treatment as par of the course when looking for love online.

Research consistently shows hostility on dating app the screen mediates our sense of agency. It makes us braver and bolder. Asking someone for a date or a hook-up behind the protection of a screen is less scary than doing so in best dating apps for guys. So is making them feel bad because they don’t find you attractive, because they aren’t indulging your ego, or because they don’t want to drop everything right now and come to your apartment for sex.

By making someone else feel bad, some app hostility on dating app make themselves feel better. And what’s worse, they are doing this behind the semi-anonymous shield of the internet.

Many people justify bad online dating experiences as 'to be expected’

Some have termed this “rejection violence”. Subreddits like r/nicegirls, r/niceguys and r/nicegays, where users share nasty online dating encounters, show that this is happening to women and men of all orientations. Dig deeper, however, and research shows it is mostly happening to women.

A 2020 study by Pew Research found that one third of women using dating apps have been called an abusive name, and almost half of women had men continue to pursue them online after they said no, hostility on dating app. That’s double the rate that men experience.

Many people justify this as “to be expected” given the marketplace vibe of these apps. The abundance of people online makes us quicker to dump on a person because lesbian dating tampa someone else is “easy”. There are hundreds or thousands more potential hostility on dating app waiting, ready to be swiped.

The problem is this has made toxic behaviour between potential romantic partners more commonplace, and sadly more acceptable, hostility on dating app. Our bar on these apps is set lower than what we would expect in any other context. One woman gushed to me how a man had said “thank you” to her in an online dating chat. She said manners were few and far between.

We’re at our absolutely most vulnerable when we’re dating

I’m not saying we should avoid online dating. Where we meet and date is not important, but how we communicate with each other is. It’s a common misconception that online complaints, anger and harassment are just a fact of life. We may lull ourselves into a false sense of security by fobbing it off as typical, or think that it doesn’t matter or affect us because it happened online. But the fact is it does.

We’re at our absolutely most vulnerable when we’re dating, and some of the behaviour especially women receive on the apps is not only profoundly demoralising, but also does not stop affecting us once we lock our screen.

It carries into our day and eats into other interactions in our life – at work, socially, with the cashier at the local store. It erodes how we think we deserve to be treated and what we teach our children about relationships. The more it happens, the more damage.

Let’s stop differentiating online dating from dating. Let’s be consistent in how we expect to be treated in all stages of a relationship, no matter where it starts. Let’s not drop our standards to mollycoddle potential new loves who think treating us badly is normal simply because we met online.

Do we really want to be in a relationship, hostility on dating app, or even hook up with someone like that? The answer is no.

In the past week, two of my friends have fallen victim to d*ckwads on dating apps.

The first happened last Friday following a first date.

How to stop letting minor setbacks throw you off track

Sofia* met Jack after chatting on Bumble and they went out for a couple of post-work drinks in Chelsea before we met up for a post-date debrief.

‘I think it went well!’ she exclaimed, bouncing into the beer garden.

A bit keen perhaps (he’d apparently spent the first hour saying how his three-year plan was to find a ‘girl’ he could marry and relocate to Bristol with), but decent.

So she was taken back a bit when she received a message from Jack shortly after saying that the date hadn’t been a success.

‘Let’s be honest, tonight didn’t hostility on dating app that well,’ it read.

‘However, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t had any for a while, hostility on dating app. So if you fancied catching up next week for a few drinks and a shag, let me know.’

We sat around in stunned silence.

Even the guy who was with us was baffled.

Apps have made the process of getting to know someone, of securing dates speed up immeasurably – so it shouldn’t be too shocking when people aren’t prepared to pussyfoot around.

For many, Bumble and Tinder are little more than hook-up services.

But still, we were appalled and Sophia was fuming. Why didn’t Jack just say how he felt at the time? Why not cut it loose before?

The second incident concerned my friend Gina, who had matched hostility on dating app a bloke called Rob – also on Bumble.

She started the conversation and almost immediately was faced with a barrage of abuse.

The guy claimed that they’d matched a number of times before, both on Bumble and Tinder, but that she’d never bothered to chat – meaning that she was now desperate.

After a while, he started calling her a ‘delusional fattie’.

We online dating market to find out why someone would hostility on dating app their time digging strangers out, so a mate took over Gina’s phone and decided to confront Rob.

When asked what the f*ck his deal was, Rob said that he’d called Gina a ‘fat cow’ because hostility on dating app was a time waster – and that it dating site for old people acceptable to send her abuse because he wasn’t ‘physically connected’ to her.

‘I don’t have to be hostility on dating app over the internet when someone annoys me,’ he hostility on dating app, ‘but I do in real life as the ramifications are much more severe.’

‘If that makes me a coward, then so be it. I think the way women treat men on dating apps is appalling…(Gina) insulted me, just in a more insidious way.’

In case you’re confused, Gina’s crime was simply not replying to this guy’s texts for 20 minutes.

It’s bonkers. And what’s sad is that the guy isn’t an idiot – he’s an articulate bloke with an MA hostility on dating app Goldsmiths.

Being rude online is completely accepted. There are even apps helping people to come up with snide remarks to use against the people they match with.

Flints is a chat up line service for Tinder, and it’s gems include one-liners like: ‘You’re not hot enough to be this boring’.

Only a complete dick would say that kind of thing to good opening line for dating site at a bar – so why would you send it to someone on your phone? And why are companies encouraging that kind of behaviour?

Mind you, this sort of bad behaviour isn’t just verbal. Blocking people without reason can feel oddly brutal and aggressive.

It’s happened to James a few times.

‘There’s no explanation,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.

‘One minute they’re there, the next they’re not. Getting blocked is mostly fine except for one time when I’d moved from the app to Whatsapp, arranged to meet up, got on very well – only to be told she didn’t have time to date as she’d started a new job (the day of the date, first mention of this) and didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

‘Before I could even reply I’d been blocked on WhatsApp and Tinder and didn’t even have the right of response. AND she looked like Selena Gomez so more heartbreak.’

Can you imagine actively telling someone to f*ck off (apropos of nothing) in real life? Or fat shaming them? Or telling them that hostility on dating app you have no connection, you’re desperate and DTF?

Why do we feel like we can behave like complete b****** online and on apps?

‘I think the answer is a bit intuitive, but nonetheless, dating apps weren’t developed because of the time people would need to spend socialising, but more because they feel comfortable breaking the ice online,’ psychotherapist Ales Zivkovic tells Metro.co.uk.

‘Also, when we meet people online, we have a wide variety of people to choose from and what we see are only their photos—there is no personal contact. Because of that, we objectify people, hostility on dating app. They are not people anymore for us but articles on the virtual shelf that we choose from. And when a person is objectified like that, we do not feel shame if we are rejected or not approached.’

All too often, Ales says, we depersonalise people on apps to the point that we don’t think twice about rejecting them or saying things that we’d never say in real life.

‘It makes it easier for the user to just shamelessly and un-empathically spill their rage, hostility on dating app, anger, contempt and their own shame and rejection onto the other person. This will also tend to pull quite “psychopathic” traits out of people that in their real life sometimes seem to go along keeping them under control, repressed and suppressed.’

So what effect is digital dating having over our behaviours in general?

More: Lifestyle

Ales says that Tinder and others are causing us to ‘unlearn’ our social skills.

‘People who use them don’t need any social skills to get a date. The only thing they need to do is swipe and send a pickup line with the right emoji. People who have no regard for others and have no social skills whatsoever can get a date – which they wouldn’t be able to do in real life.

‘So, what dating apps do is stimulate such behaviour and destimulate real life interaction. This creates social cripples who do not know how to engage in real life relationships.’

Of course, when you’re being harassed and abused online, you can just block them or delete the app – which you can’t do IRL.

‘Dating apps hostility on dating app have a narcissistic side to them—as does the majority of social media platforms—so they do attract more narcissistic users that primarily want recognition more than real date or relationship. They will be satisfied with hostility on dating app swipe and interest of another user and not really care for anything else. This is also part of the reason for ghosting.’

‘They will be satisfied with a swipe and interest of another user and not really care for anything else. This is also part of the reason for ghosting.’

Ghosting, breadcrumbing, zombeying – they’re all symptoms of the disease. How can many of us expect to make a connection online if we struggle to see the other user as a real person?

As technology advances to try and make our lives easier and more streamlined, it seems like we’re continuously running into fresh issues. And in this case, perhaps we only have ourselves to blame.

MORE : If I was ‘crazy’ when we were dating, that’s probably because you were awful

MORE : The moments we realised that we were dating absolute d*cks

If you use dating apps, you’ve no doubt had some Bye Felipe moments, when a dude has harassed you or turned hostile when you turned him down. A recent study pua openers for online dating hostility on dating app Research confirms what we already knew — that the majority of women who use dating apps experience harassment — but goes on to fill us in on which apps are worst when it comes to come-ons-turned-insults.

According to the survey, 57% of women report feeling harassed through online dating, hostility on dating app, compared to 21% of men who report the same. The survey found that Tinder and OkCupid top the harassment list, with 39% of Tinder users and 38% of OkCupid users reporting feeling harassed. Some users reported feeling harassed once or twice, while others said they always feel harassed.

On the other hand, though, users who rely on Match or eHarmony, sites that require a little more profile depth (and payment) experience less harassment. Twenty-one percent of Match users and 17% of eHarmony users reported feeling harassed.

The survey polled a couple hundred people about what apps they use, how they use them and the results. The top-used apps are Tinder and OkCupid by far, hostility on dating app, with 50% of respondents reporting using Tinder, and 22% on OkCupid. Only 9% reported using Match and 7% eHarmony. The majority those surveyed, 73%, live in the Northeast and are between the ages of 18 and 22 (69%). Most users are seeking long-term or serious relationships, but that cohort only beat out “strictly casual” users at 33% to 30%.

The good news is that all the dating apps the survey included had a pretty good rate of yielding successful relationships — even Tinder. At 57%, eHarmony had the highest rate of successful relationships after any length of use, dating apps for people with stds 52% hostility on dating app Match users reported the same. Half (50%) of OkCupid users and 47% of Tinder users reported the same.

Though online harassment seems to have become the norm, that doesn’t mean you have to deal with it. If an online dating interaction makes you uncomfortable, hit him with the Bye Felipe and keep swiping.

Related:This Is the Biggest Turn-Off in Online Dating

Sex Ed 101:

It’s a tale as old as the internet: when Alexandra Tweten would log into her online dating accounts, she’d occasionally get messages from random guys that made her uneasy. Sometimes it’d be an unsolicited dick pic. Other times the messages themselves were lewd or creepy right off the bat. “I just wouldn’t respond, or I’d think, ‘No, thanks. I'm not interested,’” Tweten tells VICE over the phone. “And then they got hostile.”

She noticed this troubling pattern on Tinder, OKCupid, and other dating apps she was using at the time, but one particular incident left her hostility on dating app disturbed. “It was this guy who just kept on sending me the same copy and pasted message, over and over and over again. His profile didn't show his entire face, and it just seemed crazy,” Tweten says. “He just kept on sending the same message, so finally I said, ‘No, I'm not interested.’ He flipped out and just was like, hostility on dating app Why would you even respond if you weren't interested?’” She remembers thinking, “‘This guy is unhinged.’ And it kind of scared me.”

Tweten’s experience with creepy dudes on dating apps isn’t unique, of course. “I had this conversation with a bunch of women, hostility on dating app, and we were all just talking about the abusive messages that we had received online,” she says.

In 2017, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 21 percent of women ages 18 to 29 have experienced sexual harassment online, and 83 percent say that online harassment is a serious problem, hostility on dating app. According to Rosemary Rade, Director of Digital Services for the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Love Is Respect, online dating platforms can create a feeling of anonymity that makes it easy for users “to say whatever they want, using abusive language with few repercussions,” she tells VICE over email.

Abusers can easily erase evidence of sexual harassment or violent threats by unmatching or blocking another user, effectively letting themselves off the hook. Documenting instances of online harassment can hold abusers accountable, and Rade recommends taking screenshots of threatening conversations—which is exactly what Tweten did.

In 2014, Tweten started posting screenshots of her online dating mishaps on Instagram using the handle @byefelipe (the name is a nod to the “Bye Felicia” meme, used to dismiss a noxious person). Soon, her email was flooded with submissions from other women with similar experiences of harassment on dating platforms. “I realized that it was really common,” Tweten says. “It felt a lot better.”

In August, Tweten released a book titled, Bye Felipe: Disses, Dick Pics, and Other Delights of Modern Dating, a guide to dealing with online harassment. “It's basically the book that I wish I would have had in my early 20s to tell me how to go about dating,” Hostility on dating app says. Bye Felipe includes personal stories and dating advice from Tweten and friends, as well as a selection of the best comebacks documented on the @byefelipe Instagram. “I love seeing women put men down,” Tweten says.

The book also includes a breakdown of “all the different types of trolls that find their way into our inboxes, like mansplainers, fat-shamers, and just different types of insults,” Tweten adds. “I tried to piece them together to see if there was a common pattern and how we could combat that.”

Bye Felipe is a feminist takedown of the insidious aspects of online dating, and though the book features plenty of clever comebacks, there’s more to Tweten’s message than putting down trolls. “This is a problem in our society in general, this thing of men becoming aggressive and hostile when they're told ‘no,’” Tweten says.

When men respond to romantic rejection with hostility or threats of violence, Rade explains, they often do so because they feel entitled. But men who feel ownership over women’s bodies, time, and attention—and react violently when they’re free dating sites i usa necessarily solitary jerks or lone trolls. The rise of incels and growing popularity of Red Pill forums point to an insidious, institutionalized sense of entitlement and broader ideologies of violence against women that extend far beyond dating apps. Any abuse, including sexual harassment or hostility in response to romantic rejection “is about power and control,” Rade explains.

“It seems like every month there's a new story about a woman being shot or stabbed or something by a man who she refused to give her number to,” Tweten says. “And I think that a lot of times, men don't understand that the stakes are really high for women, just existing and talking and interacting with men.”

Many of the conversations Tweten posts on @byefelipe are difficult to read, because they confirm the fears many women have, that men will try to kill them, hostility on dating app. When meeting a stranger from the internet, women can never be completely certain that their date isn’t actually a murderer. That’s partly why when a Tinder reject goes from sending smiley face emojis to sending rape anddeath threats, it can be terrifying. “I think it's really important to highlight and point out the real life consequences for women,” Tweten says.

“Abuse is never ok, whether it’s verbal, digital or physical,” Rade adds. “Anyone should have the right to not respond to an online dating message or request without having to deal with abuse if they do so, hostility on dating app. The responsibility for the abuse lies with hostility on dating app abuser.”

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