Online dating has transformed not just how people meet but how intimacy is conceived, delayed, or distorted. Where past generations relied on proximity and physical encounters, today’s romantic initiation often begins with disembodied glances in the form of swipes or algorithmically prompted matches. Contemporary poets—many of whom participate in these platforms firsthand—respond not with technophobic alarm but with formal and thematic recalibrations that foreground absence, simultaneity, and digital proximity.
The poet’s task has long involved making the invisible felt: desire, longing, estrangement. Yet online dating recasts these elements within an entirely new framework—one that reshapes poetic intimacy from shared presence to deferred attention. In this environment, the erotic unfolds asynchronously: one message begets another hours later, filtered through predictive keyboards and dating app templates.
This recalibration can be observed in the work of poets like Olivia Gatwood, whose pieces often examine performativity and digital personas in the realm of desire. Similarly, Kaveh Akbar’s meditations on spiritual hunger often parallel the kind of seeking native to online platforms—not just for connection, but for affirmation and legibility. Though not explicitly about Tinder or Hinge, many contemporary poets address an undercurrent of mediated vulnerability that speaks directly to the conditions fostered by app culture.
Lexicon of the App Interface
Language sourced from dating apps—“match,” “swipe right,” “ghosted,” “seen,” “unmatched”—has migrated into the lexicon of contemporary poetry. These terms, once confined to tech user guides or casual slang, now serve as potent metaphors for selection, absence, algorithmic fate, and emotional ambiguity.
The word “ghosted,” for instance, evokes more than mere rejection; it suggests vanishing, non-resolution, and the erasure of narrative continuity. It supplies a perfect descriptor for poets exploring relationships that dissolve without climax, closure, or confrontation. This term now appears in contemporary poems such as Rachel Long’s My Darling from the Lions, where the ghost functions both literally and figuratively to suggest failed attachment and social disappearance.
Meanwhile, verbs like “swipe” appear with increasing frequency, recontextualized to evoke violent or dismissive motion—moments of near-connection severed in a single gesture. “Seen” becomes a double entendre, indexing both acknowledgment and abandonment: the message viewed but unanswered. These terms create tonal instability—casual, sterile, transactional—and poets use them to complicate traditional tropes of romantic pursuit.
Poet Franny Choi, in her collection Soft Science, incorporates technological language and machine-human relations in ways that echo app-mediated intimacy. Her use of cyborg imagery offers a radical commentary on how dating platforms sculpt identity through optimization, data profiling, and simulated connection. Her poem “Turing Test” implicitly critiques the standardization of language in digital spaces, mirroring the mechanical logic of romantic automation.
Fragmentation and Form
Online dating conditions interaction around fragmentation: an endless scroll of profiles, a thread of half-conversations, notifications interrupting moments of solitude or focus. This nonlinear, discontinuous rhythm finds formal equivalents in the structural choices of contemporary poetry. Line breaks echo notifications. Disjointed stanzas mimic the disorienting flux of emotional states when dialogue unfolds across devices and time zones.
Where traditional love poetry often favors flowing lines and cumulative metaphor, many app-era love poems rely on interruption. The lyric is increasingly typographic, modular, interface-aware. A good example is Chen Chen’s work, where desire is often embedded in language that resists totalization. His poems refuse closure, reflecting how dating app conversations themselves often dangle without conclusion.
The brevity of messages exchanged on apps also influences poetic economy. Many poets have adopted minimalist structures, emulating the clipped syntax of texting. In Morgan Parker’s poetry, this compression becomes a strategy of both resistance and intimacy: holding complexity inside aphorism, reclaiming reduced emotional bandwidth. Her collection There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé often navigates online romance by compressing contradictions into tweet-sized ironies.
Emoji, too, have entered poetic form—not always literally, but structurally and semiotically. Their function as carriers of affect, substitution, and ambiguity parallels poetic devices like metaphor and synecdoche. Contemporary poets mirror the function of emoji through abrupt tonal shifts, disembodied voice, or the flattening of speech into gesture.
Rewriting the Erotic
Online dating reframes the erotic as a performance—text-based, self-aware, curated. Desire is no longer just projected or imagined; it’s strategized, versioned, branded. Contemporary poets now grapple with the paradox of seduction on platforms built for immediacy and disposability. What does it mean to long for someone whose profile is designed for replication? What becomes of sensuality when it’s mediated through interface, filter, or autofill?
Poetry has historically preserved the slow burn of erotic anticipation, but dating apps compress courtship into seconds. In this environment, the body is both hypervisible and abstracted. Poets like Danez Smith, in their work Homie, navigate the charged terrain of queer desire in digital contexts, often invoking Grindr and other location-based apps as terrains of danger, humor, and intimacy. Their poems collapse the sacred and the profane into lines that mimic the volatility of online flirtation.
Similarly, Sam Sax, in collections like Bury It, explores hook-up culture through the lens of mourning, memory, and repetition. The erotic becomes not just a site of pleasure but of reckoning—with history, with shame, with repetition. Digital intimacy appears not as liberation but as terrain shaped by inherited trauma, coded desire, and algorithmic misrecognition.
Online dating’s influence also intersects with racialized and gendered scripting of desirability. Poets now use the interface of dating apps as critique: a way to interrogate how bodies are filtered, ranked, or fetishized. By writing against the grain of algorithmic logic, they reclaim the erotic as a space of disruption rather than optimization.
V. Anonymity, Ephemerality, and Disposability
Online dating platforms foster interactions characterized by anonymity and transient connections. This environment has influenced contemporary poetry, leading to the emergence of themes centered around fleeting encounters and the ephemeral nature of digital relationships. Poets often explore the emotional impact of being “ghosted” or the sense of disposability that can accompany online interactions. For instance, in the poem “Modern Dating” by Ashleigh M., the poet delves into the fracturing of identities through dating apps, highlighting the performative aspects of online personas and the longing for genuine connection. (Medium)
Elisa Gabbert, in The Word Pretty, writes poems that carry the tonal dissonance of online exchange—where sarcasm, flirtation, and despair occur without preamble or aftermath. The effect is emotional flatness punctuated by sudden spikes of revelation, capturing the emotional fatigue of repeated romantic beginnings. Her style frequently emphasizes syntactic fragmentation, as if each new phrase might be a new chat, a new hope.
Disposability, too, becomes metaphor. The lyric subject is not merely unloved but unremembered—ghosted not by one individual, but by a system designed to erase. In works like Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus, this loss of continuity becomes political: a meditation on how identity—especially racialized and gendered identity—becomes algorithmically flattened, consumed, and forgotten. Mao’s use of persona poems (speaking through historical or fictional figures) reflects the fractured, performative nature of dating profiles.
The poetic “you,” long a stable addressee in love poetry, becomes unstable. In many recent works, the second person shifts from intimate to generic, reflecting how online dating pluralizes the beloved. There is no singular “you”—only a series of projections, echoes, approximations. Monica Youn’s Blackacre demonstrates this instability, where the “you” becomes an object of fixation and misrecognition, at once present and absent, repeated but unreachable.
VI. Case Studies in Poetic Response
Several contemporary poets have directly addressed the complexities of online dating in their work. Pamela Denyes’s “A Poet’s Online Dating Profile” presents a self-portrait that intertwines sensory imagery with emotional vulnerability, offering a nuanced take on digital self-presentation. Similarly, Bartholomew Barker’s “Online Dating Haiku” succinctly captures the disillusionment that can accompany the search for meaningful connections in the digital realm. (Tangled Locks Journal, Bartholomew Barker, Poet)
Courtney Sina Meredith’s Tail of the Taniwha includes poems that document flirtations across time zones and devices. Her lyrical voice moves fluidly between physical and digital presence, interweaving Pacific identity with mediated desire. The dissonance between bodily geography and virtual nearness becomes an expressive tension in her work.
Tommy Pico’s IRL serves as a foundational example. Composed as a single long poem, it fuses queer desire, urban exhaustion, and app-based disconnection into a digital epic. References to Grindr and Twitter appear not as ornamentation but as structuring devices—markers of thought disruption, compulsive checking, and the fragmented attention of post-millennial desire. Pico treats the phone screen as both mirror and barrier, a portal of intimacy and alienation.
Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche (Faber & Faber) also explores digital courtship, especially in the context of queerness and migration. Her poems contain messaging syntax, abbreviated cadence, and second-person ambiguity—all of which mimic the rhythms of online longing. The constraints of queer visibility in traditional contexts are re-expressed through the ambiguities and liberations of app-based engagement.
Caleb Parkin’s This Fruiting Body addresses online dating’s bio-political dimensions, especially how bodies are visualized, categorized, and ranked. Parkin critiques the quantification of desire—how metrics like age, weight, and height become sorting mechanisms that reduce complexity to preference. His poems often carry interface grammar into their forms, integrating dropdown menus or profile-style inventories to reveal how platforms mediate desire.
VII. New Poetics of Visibility and Desire
The interface of dating apps often commodifies identity, influencing how individuals present themselves and perceive others. Contemporary poets are critically examining these dynamics, challenging the algorithms and societal norms that dictate desirability. Through their work, they seek to subvert the homogenization of attraction and reclaim agency over self-representation. This involves exploring themes of race, gender, and body image, and how these intersect with digital visibility. (arXiv)
Online dating foregrounds visibility as a double-edged condition. To be seen is a kind of affirmation, yet to be seen through an app is also to be assessed, categorized, swiped past. Poets today interrogate how race, gender, body type, and disability shape algorithmic desirability—and how poetic voice can respond or subvert these norms.
For marginalized communities, dating platforms replicate systemic bias. Black women, Asian men, trans and non-binary users, disabled bodies—all report measurable disparities in swipe rates, message frequency, and content of interaction. Contemporary poets transform these experiences into site-specific critique.
Fatimah Asghar, in If They Come for Us, addresses how visibility intersects with danger and misrecognition. Their poems reject the commodification of cultural identity and reframe desire as a space for re-claiming narrative control. Rather than erase racialized difference, Asghar’s work centers it—using the language of online erasure to expose broader structures of exclusion.
Raymond Antrobus, a deaf poet, explores how desire manifests through layers of visibility and voice. In poems that blur digital and physical, he engages how technology shapes self-presentation—and how absence (of sound, presence, or contact) can be both loss and strategy.
Poets like Kay Ulanday Barrett use disidentification to destabilize the desirability economy. Their works resist legibility through poetic refusal: resisting expected syntax, default pronouns, or neat arcs. Dating app logic demands simplification; Barrett’s poetry insists on multiplicity, contradiction, and improvisation.