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Dating apps have never been good, but these days there’s a feeling of post-goldrush fatigue to them. Lonely scavengers picking through the rubble of a once thriving and exciting scene, fingers worn to the bone from stubbornly panning in icy waters, hoping that the next batch of rocks and fool’s gold might just be the pay-off that can get them out of these blasted wastelands for good. One lucky haul, the love of your life.
When various goldrushes around the world ended, there were always people left behind in ghost towns, hermits hiding up bare and broken mountains—some too stubborn to concede that the mines had been picked clean and others with simply nowhere else to go. If you’ve been on the apps recently (I’m so sorry), then you know that everyone seems to be struck with something very akin to gold fever, an entire ecosystem of people firing their guns into the air, clicking their hobnail boots together and screaming for one thing: Banter, precious banter!
It’s inescapable. From bios to Hinge prompts to cringey voice notes, someone with good banter of course ranks high on the list of what love hunters declare that they value most in a prospective partner. But it’s almost impossible to clarify what it even is. Quips back and forth, shared references, some light and humorous prodding—or for others, just straight-up bullying. Being funny without making actual jokes.
It’s the flavour of interaction that made a viral hit out of Chicken Shop Date, a video series where journalist Amelia Dimoldenberg’s relentless interview style takes the form of coquettish roasting to destabilise her celebrity guests. ‘It’s called flirting, Amelia,’ actor Andrew Garfield barks at her after lobbing his own playful insult. ‘It’s called flirting!’ It’s a very funny and charming conversation to watch, and when it crackles, seems to approximate and bottle the actual magic of attraction to another human being. There is a feeling that there might be real desire between these two people—such is the power of their repartee.
Dating apps have never been good, but these days there’s a feeling of post-goldrush fatigue to them.
Trends are nothing new in dating apps—I’ve been through several stages of them now, so I’ve seen the waves of people holding fish, the ‘looking for the Jim to my Pam’ types, the pineapple-on-pizza debaters. For me, it’s a useful way to screen people I wouldn’t be compatible with in the first place—anyone that basic, that would follow a trend to such an extent, surely isn’t my type of person. But these days almost everyone is reflecting a desire for banter in some way. Even those self-aware enough not to use the term are looking for someone to ‘yap’ with (Gen Z’s term for normalising the quick intimacy of oversharing).
And I get it. I recently had a mildly disastrous Hinge date. Nowhere near as bad as the person years ago who ended up being a die-hard Kyle & Jackie O fan, or the person who lied about being a ‘giraffe scientist’, or the person who left the date halfway through because they found out I dated men and was ‘scared of AIDs’—but still pretty bad. Afterwards, out of curiosity, I read through our couple of days of chat before the date. Were there warning signs I’d missed? In my mind, we’d engaged with what some people would call ‘banter’ to such a sufficient degree that I’d decided we could move the next stage of the relationship (alcohol and sharing our traumas in person). Was there a red flag I could spot so that I could avoid wasting my time? When I looked back, I realised that there hadn’t actually been any banter in our DMs or in our IRL meeting—I’d just been carrying the conversation so adeptly that I’d accidentally charmed myself.
Thus, the prerequisite for banter in dating is about trying to avoid having your precious time wasted. It’s about throwing a ball and hoping someone quickly catches it and throws it back at you. As a wise woman (Rihanna) once said, we found love in a hopeless place—which could be the slogan for dating apps. The online dating industry’s entire business model boils down to the most time-effective way to build a romantic connection. ‘Banter’ is essentially an attempt to stimulate the mysterious spark that is required to start the bonfire of love—that easy rapport, the spikes of teasing attraction, the joy of relating and understanding through conversation.
In any form of storytelling—film, TV, novels, anything with a narrative—we give dialogue the insane task of fulfilling a function. How will this conversation between characters advance the plot? How will it help us understand the inner psyche of these characters? It’s utilitarian, but half the flair of dialogue is masking just how functional it is. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was first on air, much of the criticism and praise revolved around the highly stylised, quippy slang—‘when the apocalypse comes, beep me’. The sassy exchanges between Buffy and Spike carried us through six of seven seasons. But no one really speaks like that. We aren’t Gilmore girls. Is it possible that the popular idea of ‘banter’ is perhaps an accidental mimicry of the kind of verbal shorthand that films and TV use to signify rapport? Either way, it’s efficient at signposting the early signs of attraction.
‘Banter’ is essentially a futile attempt to encapsulate the mysterious spark that is required to start the bonfire of love.
In the old days, you’d have to meet someone, usually organically, and unspool all the slow moments that form sexual chemistry and connection. But the reality of our fast-paced internet-pilled lives is that more people now meet their partner online than through friends or work combined. We just don’t have time. It’s one of the reasons the ‘love at first sight’ trope in romance novels is so popular—we yearn to ‘cut to the feeling’ as a wise woman (Carly Rae Jepsen) once said. Even in its most crude form, as a form of negging, banter is a quick way of creating the kind of sexual tension we love to read in romance novels (friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers). The app-to-lovers arc just doesn’t have the same ring to it. We hope that there is a version of falling in love that we can glean from the ritualised formula of modern dating, a fast track to a house in the suburbs and a shared plot in a cemetery. But I can’t help but be particularly sceptical of looking for meaning in a performative chat with someone—language is so malleable, so easy to manipulate. The tech companies know this—there are even AI-generated dating apps to help users come up with the right response.
In a world of gamified dating with a never-ending roulette of options, I think that any romantic shortcut is a scam we’re pulling on ourselves. Banter is just another marker on a long-winding mountain road leading to love—and it may be pointing absolutely nowhere. It offers the same kind of gold fever delusions that lead people out into the wilderness to hew and hack at the earth, without any guarantee of finding treasure. But the thing is—there was gold out in them hills, and some people did find it. But when people say they want banter, what they’re saying is they want more. More than swipe rights and likes and dates that go nowhere and the possibility that after all they’ll be ghosted (or feel the need to ghost). They want meaningful connection. All the playful digging in the world means nothing if what’s underneath it isn’t precious at all.
