Dating exhausts me. I hate the rigmarole of small talk under most circumstances - the forced laughter, the faux interest - so doing it in a romantic setting, even when the going is good, tends to take it out of me. But during the busiest time of the year for singletons on Tinder and Bumble, few things are quite as exhausting to fat, black women like me, as having to navigate the race and body-based fantasies and insecurities of potential suitors, while trying to kick our love lives into gear. Especially, in my experience at least, when trying to do it online.
Perhaps the most cited study when it comes to the ways in which discrimination affects online dating, OkCupid’s race and attraction blog from 2014 showed that all men of all races considered black women less attractive than the average, with 82 percent of non-black men on the dating site showing “some bias against black women”.