Can robots help men to improve their dating game?

I’ll never forget the time my late grandpa took me, aged about 14, to meet my cousin, Pete, for a film. When Pete was two minutes late for our appointment, the expression on my grandpa’s face began to darken. At the five-minute mark, he began furiously declaiming that my cousin had no manners. What sort of boy leaves a girl waiting? He arrived 10 minutes late, and Grandpa never forgave him.

It was clear to me then that Gramps belonged to a different age – an age of chivalry and manners. But he would have fallen over seeing what is going on today. By that, I mean ghosting.

Ghosting is when someone you’ve been dating suddenly goes quiet on you, seemingly out of nowhere. It’s profoundly disconcerting and can be very upsetting. It’s hardly a surprise, either, that ghosting is so widespread

– it is, after all, fostered by a digital dating landscape that encourages callousness and desensitisation.

To me, the rise of ghosting is part of a broader failing in decent manners and – on the part of young men – a near-total desertion of any sense of chivalry or gentlemanliness.

It’s sad, but I’d have thought its cure can only come from within, or from general social change. I should have known better. The hubris of the tech industry means that, of course, it thinks it can be the cure. Two dating apps – Bumble, the womanfriendly version of Tinder, and Badoo, known colloquially as a “hook-up” service – have said they were going to fix social ills by intervening against ghosting and ghosters.

Bumble has brought in a “ghosting specialist”, journalist Kate Leaver, to dispense cheering advice and offer a virtual shoulder for ghostees to cry on. Badoo is to insert forceful prompts encouraging ghosters to write back to their would-be ghostees, making it easier by offering canned messages.

Leaver’s analysis is that “people are too frightened, or too lazy, or too cowardly to have the difficult conversations that need to be had”. This may be so. But prompting by a robot seems a very shallow kind of fix.