Why Dating Apps Slowly Destroy Your Self-Worth

The restaurant was located on one of the livelier streets and Nikki oriented herself to it using memory and GPS.

Heels on the asphalt again.

Clothes are worth a lot of money.

An air of luxury about her.

After so many years she knew how to carry them off and show that she was a woman worth paying for, worth waiting for.

It was like her armor.

No one got through it.

Only him.

And he wasn’t there anymore.

But when she wore it on the streets and squares, it was as if she was impregnable and far away from the little girl who crawled under the blanket and played Playstation.

Yes, even far away from the students at ARTAI-Academy.

Here she was kitted out, ready to conquer and be conquered.

But few men stood against her in the arena.

As she walked along the wide street on her way to the restaurant, she was a soldier.

A warrior who people looked at with respect.

Some with lustful glances, of course.

Those who wanted to plunder her and take her for theirs.

Some were serious about doing that too and had come close on several occasions.

But right now, they looked at her with respect and she licked their eyes, which looked at her with admiration, fear, aggression and love.

This was what it was like to be a woman.

This was what it was like to be a woman and carry your body with pride.

Not, like so many women, to emphasize themselves vulgarly and vulgarly and hate their own sex so much that they chose to hate the man.

These women hated her too, by the way.

They hated her because she loved being a woman and because she loved men.

In 2024 it was a mortal sin that she defied with malicious glee as she walked down the street and met the angry women’s looks who would never get what she could get because they had chosen another path that led to hell and could not lead anywhere else.

Yes.

She was a soldier for the women’s army.

The real woman.

The woman who wanted, dared, could and knew.

As she loved it and as she loved her sex.

It was rather herself that she doubted.

Just after 8, she entered the restaurant and looked around for her online date, and he sat a little way in.

He had already spotted her.

The evening was calm.

Eric was nice and he also had a gentlemanly style that reminded her of Fredric in many ways.

But he lacked that thing that made him pass through the filter and to be honest: even though he was right about so many things, Nikki’s thoughts were elsewhere several times during dinner.

One moment they were with Fredric where they absolutely shouldn’t be.

The next second they were at school and thinking about how the project would turn out.

The third moment they were actually on that app, PlaynDate, that Joachim had shown her.

She had liked the idea of playing against other people to gain their trust with games and questions from a card index.

It felt new and actually tickling – a far cry from the casual swiping on Tinder and Dating Line.

Her distraction made her miss what he worked on, his background, and where he lived.

She excused herself by saying she had a lot of school to do, and that was certainly true.

When dinner was over, she thanked him and said they might see each other later, but right now her calendar was full.

A really lousy diss, but she didn’t have anything better to say tonight.

She really just wanted to go home and try to sleep so she could concentrate on the project tomorrow.

There wasn’t much time left.

Her grades had to go up or she wouldn’t have wasted her time at school.

She didn’t write anything on Dating Line.

Since the setup had been deleted, no follow-up was needed, and it was so nice to not have to write and just get home.

On the way to her address, she thought about who she was.

A girl who dated every night looking for love in a big city.

A girl who studied art to get out into the big world and take it in stride in a neighborhood in Paris or a loft in Soho.

It sounded so romantic.

But the reality was not what she saw herself in.

She looked at her Dating Line profile.

“Nikki van der H,25 – Ready to conquer ” and then that picture of her where she was… so pretty.

Next picture: a high kick when she was training martial arts a few years ago.

The picture after.

Drink in the backlight.

Nikki van der Hoebooken.

But that, her in the pictures, it wasn’t her and she knew it.

At the same time, the pages were turning in her and the question was who would win.

Who did she even want to win?

Nikki van der Hoebooken.

Or Nikki van der Hoebooken?

Maybe the real problem was never love — only the way people searched for it.