How Dating Apps Change Human Connection

“The art students will be here soon,” his teacher said for the third time.

They were sitting in the auditorium, and Joachim and his fellow students were waiting for their graduation project to be revealed.

They had been sitting here for a while now, and his friends were whispering that “the art girls can never fit in a single appointment.”

ARTAI-Academy had a stereotypical composition of students.

The art line consisted of predominantly female students while the AI line consisted of the opposite.

They were kept separate and shared nothing but certain halls and common areas, but there was a clear contradiction between the students precisely because they rarely met across borders.

Nikki had almost entertained the idea that it was similar to the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast.

Pimpled teenage boys with dreams of computers that could love them or give them power, and then the art girls who were their unattainable goddesses who perhaps even contributed to their isolation and perhaps even misogyny.

But her image didn’t quite match.

Several of the AI guys were no longer the typical image of just pimply pale trolls but well-trained men with a vision for tech empires a la Google or OpenAI.

On the art lines, on the other hand, there were some feminized guys who thought they were doing everything right to play girls into their hands, but Nikki noticed that few even wanted to grab them with pliers since they didn’t fulfill much of the girls’ wish list that they played out on nights out.

The few times they met across the borders, it turned out that the art goddesses picked on the guys on the AI lines who had money, visions or muscles.

The poor fluffy pimply guys, together with the panel hens on the art line, had to just watch and that’s how it had always been regardless of what time humans lived in.

Nikki had learned the game and knew exactly how to do it.

But if she didn’t make an effort, she could be one of the panel hens too.

That’s how thin her boundary was.

And some days, like this one, she wished she was too.

If Nikki’s problem was to stay in school at all with the upcoming project, Joachim had the opposite problem.

The project was the last thing he needed to get the top job at Q; a newly started tech company that pretty much everyone in the AI program had their sights set on.

During his internship there, he had gotten the impression that he was welcome back as a graduate student, but in that case all his grades would be top notch.

They would be if he got the highest grade on this project.

He didn’t doubt his own competence.

Neither did his fellow students.

But and there was a big but: this time they would be paired with the crazy people in the art department.

His fear was to be paired with a girl who had zero ambition and vague ideas about self-realization, or worse, a hyper-individualistic girl with a huge Dating Line account who wanted to make art by having sex on social media.

Then his chances of getting a job at Q would be ruined.

Joachim was therefore on pins and needles when the girls entered the room.

Because it wasn’t just about Q.

It was about his life project.

A Dating app: PlaynDate .

PlayNDate should be created for people who wanted something slower, deeper and more human.