Dating as Performance

Thoughts on Online Dating, Performative Males, and the Power of Assumption

“Men used to go to war. Now they drink matcha lattes and listen to The Marias through corded headphones.”

This quote encapsulates a topic driving recent online conversation: The performative male.

The performative male is a man who panders to stereotypically “female” interests to woo potential partners. The fact that this typified persona has resonated with so many people online shows the performance and assumption that defines social connection in 2025.

Maureen Dowd recently wrote in The New York Times that social media is driving us apart, fueling less in-person communication and what Rachel Drucker calls “frictionless stimulation” – many men are more indifferent now towards real romance because of the ease of social media (Dowd). There’s a vicious cycle, Dowd says, where women are upset with men for being absent (and express that via the Internet), and thus “ghost” or absent themselves from relationships (Dowd). There’s a dissonance between what we expect online versus what we get in person.

Through this lens, maybe some performative males are attempting to ease friction by becoming what they think is expected of them online. In doing so, however, they come across as inauthentic and create a trope of themselves. But how can you tell the difference between a performative male and a genuine man with seemingly performative interests?

Inauthenticity prevails on social media. As my Northwestern religion and media professor Sarah McFarland Taylor put it, people are now curating themselves through social media (Taylor). When the imperfect people behind the online curations meet in real life, expectations are not met, and dating becomes unsatisfactory because of the very friction that makes in-person interaction special. People become performative or chase unrealistic online standards, and authentic connection wanes.

On social media, we’re all performing. I consulted an expert (my cousin and fellow Substack writer, Adrienne Park) to learn a bit more about the performative male epidemic and how our online selves impact our real-life dating.

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Adrienne is “gafless” about dating online. She only does it when she’s bored.

On dating apps, she said, you feel removed – there’s no connection or community with the people you’re matching with.

“You’re not forced to have a sense of reciprocity because you might never see them again,” she said.

Performance goes both ways, though. I asked Adrienne if she thinks she is being performative in building her own profile.

“In the past, it was like I was playing a little video simulation game,” she said, from the photos she chose to what she wrote in response to Hinge’s prompts. “It’s all a performance.”

Dating online is therefore a simulacrum of dating in real life – it looks like dating, but it lacks dating’s core essence — authentic connection (Baudrillard).

“That’s not normal. That’s not how dating or friendship or any relationship should work, but it’s really normalized," Adrienne said. However, she said this online performance is not dissimilar from social pressures women face in real life.

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Adrienne told me about a date she went on last spring with a guy who seemed great on paper. He suggested a good restaurant, worked in finance, seemed nice and had a lot of friends. But when she went, it was “just really platonic.”

At first, she thought that they had nothing in common because he worked and she was in school.

“We’’re all performing, to some extent, all the time,” Adrienne said.

“But I have conversations with people that are literally 60 who I have nothing in common with that have way more intellectual chemistry or synergy,” she said. “I think it was actually an issue of my mindset, and particularly that I had archetyped him as this perfect guy on paper, and so I just had a really close-minded view.”

Adrienne says she sometimes has a habit of creating tropes of men. She says the performative male archetype to her represents the negative assumptions she made about men, something she is trying to do less of.

“We’re all performing, to some extent, all the time,” she said. Adrienne said she makes assumptions about people based on their social media, but she realizes how unrepresentative it can be.

“What’s even worse than what happened on that date, in my opinion, is if the performance keeps up,” she said. “It’s hard for me to tell now.”

She said you can’t determine chemistry from a dating app, even through texts, because everything is performative.

This gap between what we pursue on dating apps versus what increases satisfaction in real life is actually a scientific fact.

In a 2022 Wired article, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz discussed Samantha Joel’s machine learning study on 11,196 heterosexual couples to uncover what makes a relationship happy and successful (Stephens-Davidowitz). The article points out that people compete “for partners with certain traits, assuming that these traits will make them happy” (Stephens-Davidowitz). Traits like conventional attractiveness, height (for men), wealth and other similar attributes draw people in (Stephens-Davidowitz).

Joel’s algorithm found that the traits with more predictive power for happiness did not align with these desired traits (Stephens-Davidowitz). Joel even found that the traits least predictive of happiness included some of the most desired ones, like height and physical attractiveness (Stephens-Davidowitz).

“In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness,” Stephens-Davidowitz determines. “Single people are predictably tricked by shininess.”

When we chase this so-called “shininess” that is pervasive on social media, it would make sense that fulfillment decreases.

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Elle Hunt argues in The Guardian that there are better possibilities for authenticity than prompts and photos and that dating apps are trying to bridge too big of a gap by pairing partners (Hunt). We need to find ways to “actually be ourselves online” through relationality, she says, rather than misrepresenting ourselves and judging others (Hunt).

Adrienne is trying to be more intentional and authentic in what she posts. She redownloaded Hinge recently, and she says her new profile reflects how in the past months, she’s “become more like [her]self.”

She appreciates the growing trend in society about appreciating people’s differences.

“Having more grace is really important, and just giving people the benefit of the doubt online” she said.

Still, she values in-person connection. She said the best dates she’s had are ones where she didn’t have expectations and was able to be present.

“There’s something nice about… having a community that’s tight knit or has things authentically holding it together, and that requires overlap and uncomfortable things happening,” she said. On a dating app, on the other hand, you’re separated from this in-person friction and the connection that comes with it.

“It makes people really unable to have any resilience to the awkwardness and uncomfortableness of real-life experiences,” she said. “But that’s what life actually is.”

In our current state of judgement and division, maybe trying to foster connection online will always be coded as performative. On the other hand, though, perhaps there is a way to bring ourselves authentically to online and in-person spaces with greater compassion.

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Sources

Dowd, Maureen. “Men + Women + Apps = Bad Romance,” The New York Times, 6 September 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/06/opinion/men-women-apps-bad-romance.html. Accessed 16 September 2025.

Drucker, Rachel. “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” The New York Times, 20 June 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/style/modern-love-men-where-have-you-gone-please-come-back.html. Accessed 16 September 2025.

Hill, Kashmir. “She Is in Love With ChatGPT,” The New York Times, 16 September 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html. Accessed 16 September 2025.

Hunt, Elle. “We’ve ‘gamified’ dating - and I am part of that problem. But there are ways to make it human and fun again,” The Guardian, 25 September 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/25/gamified-dating-apps-ghosted-behaviour. Accessed 16 September 2025.

Kibbe, Kayla. “Who Is the ‘Performative Male’?,” Cosmopolitan. 12 August 2025. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/relationships/a65656459/performative-male/. Accessed 16 September 2025.

Park, Adrienne. Personal Interview. 5 September 2025.

Taylor, Sarah. Introduction to Religion, Media, and Culture, 24 April 2025, Kresge CentennialHall, Evanston, IL. Class Lecture.

Taylor, Sarah. Introduction to Religion, Media, and Culture, 6 May 2025, Kresge Centennial Hall, Evanston, IL. Class Lecture.

Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth. “People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science,” Wired, 10 May 2022. https://www.wired.com/story/data-marriage-behavior-love-psychology-romance/. Accessed 16 September 2025.