In the Old Country, matchmakers made matches. Things were arranged, options were limited, and love cost extra. In the less old country, people met at bars and dances, taking a shine to the boy at the jukebox or the girl next door. Now, they swipe on a myriad of dating apps. No one doubts that there are more fish in this virtual sea. The problem is what to do with all of them. It is a story everyone is talking about, but not enough people are really thinking about.

Here to help is the buzzy new podcast “This is Dating” from Magnificent Noise, the production studio most famous for partnering with Esther Perel on a you-are-there therapy experience. This show, whose first two episodes dropped this week, does the same for dating — it’s basically an audio version of Netflix’s “Dating Around.” It takes for granted that your beshert will be on Bumble.

It’s not all fun and games. The series opens by forthrightly stating how hard dating has become. A chorus of voices then chime in to articulate the reasons why. It’s difficult to find a person who “gets the struggle of a black woman.” It is exhausting “shopping for someone on your phone,” not to mention the challenge of being gainfully employed as well as excelling at “the full-time job” that dating has become. Never has romance sounded so unromantic.

The series profiles four daters (the episodes released this week introduce us to the first two) who have struggled in the world made by Tinder, Hinge, and Raya. Help is on the way. “This is Dating” sets each of its protagonists up with a dating coach and then lets the audience listen in on a recorded first date, while the show producers feed them prompts like, “What is one thing you don’t usually admit on a first date?” Occasionally, the hosts will cut in with color commentary — invariably positive — about how the date is going, like a former quarterback breaking down offensive strategy during a halftime show.

The first two guests, pseudonymously named Aziz and Virginia, are in one sense diverse — she is a straight woman, he is a gay man — but in all the essentials they are the same. Both have dated a lot, yet remain dissatisfied. Their standards are high, but their experiences are poor. They say they are serious about settling down, but they are relentlessly on the move. While they have a lot of experience (Virginia has been on 50 dates in five years), they seem somehow callow, as if their cynicism has come full circle into innocence.

What is most interesting about the show thus far is just how hesitant it is to acknowledge its own paradoxes. Here are a few: Why do these ostensibly successful adults need a dating coach? At a time when there are more potential romantic partners than ever before, why do these people need help finding one? Never have there been fewer restrictions on young people, so why do they require podcast hosts to chaperone their dates?

“This is Dating” is not actually that much fun to listen to. The idea of eavesdropping on a date is more fun in theory than in practice, and the hosts are relentlessly positive (“I would totally date him”) when much of the fun of this project would seem to be the opportunity for critique. The best dating stories often involve the worst dates. The show hosts insist that the date is “going well,” even when an awkward silence feels like it could swallow up the known universe.

I’m cheering for the show to catch its footing as it goes along, because we need art and criticism that is alert to the revolution in dating and sex that has transpired in the last decade or so. Dating apps are now a multibillion-dollar business, and they are coming to define the shape of romance. They have done to romance what Amazon has done to shopping and Facebook to friendship: fundamentally altered its meaning.

When Aziz is pushed by the hosts to commit to following up with his date, he says he wouldn’t mind but that “there are a lot of people in the queue.” When Virginia is asked whether she and her match will meet for drinks, she admits, “I liked him, but I don’t feel any need to follow up.” In other words, why this person and not that one? Aziz and Virginia are too puritan for the hedonists, and too hedonistic for the puritans. They are stuck in a kind of dating fugue state.

“This is Dating” made me think of that old Antonio Gramsci line: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Aziz and Virginia are so generic as to be avatars of their time, wandering somewhere between analog and digital, the bar and the screen. I hope they, and we, find our collective way.

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Correction: Virginia is the pseudonym of one of the participants in the dating podcast. An earlier version of this article misidentified the participant.

Image: Dating apps on a phone. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via https://www.scribbler.com/.