I downloaded Tinder the day I moved into my university dorm. Setting up the app felt like a rite of passage, and in some ways, I think it was: curating my profile felt exciting and foreign, like I was designing the new, shiny person I wanted to be. I went on to spend a couple good years with Tinder (and Bumble and Hinge, although I never felt like they measured up), but eventually, they started to make me feel like a gambler parked in front of a slot machine. I set my sights offline and never looked back.
I’m of course very happy for anyone who’s found love on Bumble, but I’m perplexed by the cult following that herald these apps as the best and only way to date. In fact, I think the vision of relentlessly optimised interpersonal relationships that the e-dating business has built and sold is fundamentally dehumanising — and utterly devoid of romance.
I’m not interested in writing a total anti-tech screed. I know many people who’ve found beautiful and loving relationships on Tinder or Hinge, and many of the people I met on the apps ended up becoming good friends that I treasure to this day. Notably, corporations pretend like this retention is both the most common result and the end goal of their algorithms, when I think it’s likely much closer to an undesirable fluke.
I am interested, though, in the instinctual contradiction that we feel in so many parts of our technological landscape. How does a system that offers you more romantic prospects than all your ancestors combined leave so many of us feeling so alone? Why does an app that claims to have perfected the romantic experience feel so obviously devoid of romance? Why do we remain so devoted to a method that often feels so palpably uncanny?
As with genies and weight-loss plans, many of the dating app’s biggest scams are nestled inside its wildest promises. The app promises you that you’ll never have to settle. It offers you a seemingly endless stream of beautiful people with passably witty bios and fun-looking lives. It shoos away visions of an awkward blind date or bar bathroom hookup; now, you can know everything about someone before you decide whether or not you want to get to know them.
Having a wider dating pool isn’t all bad — dating apps can be essential for queer people in unwelcoming or small communities, for instance. I just think it’s undeniable that something is lost when we begin to see people as nothing but a collection of pros and cons, flipping through brain-melting numbers of Facetuned hotties in search of a mythical one-true-person who will meet all our needs instantly, requiring no effort or compromise. Is it really “settling” to meet someone you’re willing to work for?
The rise of the infamous “ick” has coincided with the ubiquity of dating apps too, in a way I think isn’t unrelated — in a landscape that views the messiness of human interaction as a flaw to be fixed in backend, of course indicators of humanity would start to feel disgusting. The desire to make love risk-free borders on totalitarian. It requires dehumanisation, both of our potential partners and inevitably of ourselves.
“Tinder is designed to feel like a video game where you’re the only human player and everyone else is an NPC — no wonder, then, that everyone feels like they’re losing.”
Most of the common gripes about dating app culture are encouraged and even necessitated by the format of the apps themselves. Ghosting, ‘lovebombing’, catfishing: these are hardly bugs in a system that actively encourages interpersonal disposability, lack of commitment, and curated performance. No amount of pastel infographics about text etiquette are going to fix a problem that’s effectively endorsed by the medium itself. Tinder is designed to feel like a video game where you’re the only human player and everyone else is an NPC — no wonder, then, that everyone feels like they’re losing.
Paradoxically, the kind of accountability that people seem to crave from their dating app matches is out-of-reach in large part because of their absence from your real, tangible life. You can’t really ghost someone you met through your extended friend group; you can’t be catfished by the guy you met in your building’s elevator. There are consequences to both. Proximity is humanising. Of course, though, the capacity for painless disposal is perhaps these apps’ principal appeal. The tantalising promise of the dating app is the eradication of discomfort — the second something isn’t exactly as one wants it, it can be swiped out of sight and mind. If a date got awkward, no worries! You never have to see or speak to them again, unless their face happens to show up in your feed after you un-match (a glitch you hope Tinder fixes quickly, lest you feel a pang of guilt).
The dating app experience is smooth and streamlined and clean, like the formless crotch of a Ken doll. Like Ken, it’s optimised to the point of sexlessness. What the corporations missed in their quest to monetise human connection is the fundamental truth that the weird, confusing parts of love and sex are also the parts that make it all so worth it. Most compelling of all, is there not something fundamentally unsexy about swiping through snap-judgements on people before hearing the sound of their voice or feeling the electricity of eye contact?
I can’t help but wonder what we miss when we’re trained to throw away a person at the first sign of a crooked tooth, a boring hobby, a lame joke or an awkward moment. In my real relationships, those have been the things I ended up loving the most about my partners, and it makes me wonder about all the people I swiped left on because they didn’t listen to the right music or take cool enough photos. Most importantly, I fear a future in which nearly everything about our lives is decided by profit-generating algorithm aimed to minimise discomfort and maximise time spent alone — I can’t imagine anything less romantic than that.
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