Online dating was created to help foster romantic relationships, but has it really done so?
So, you’re looking for love.
That’s not unreasonable– images of impassioned whirlwind romances from movies and songs and poetry have stirred in many, even the most jaded of us, the desire to have something uniquely of our own in this world.
But reality isn’t always so rose-tinted.
Society is hardly conducive for the noble conquest of love – burnout and exhaustion after long hours at work that is unmeaningful along with juggling social, financial, and fitness commitments simultaneously leave little capacity for the romance we’ve all dreamed of at some point in our lives.
In an ironic turn, it also conditions us to strive towards finding “the ideal one”. Online dating therefore becomes a convenient solution – by providing us with endless opportunities to seek out romantic partnership, it gives us an efficient method to let Cupid work his magic without over-committing towards a courtship that is, by nature, potentially unrequited.
But therein lies a catch: the paradoxical nature of abundance. An experiment found that when you sell six kinds of jams, 30 percent of all people who stop by your booth are likely to buy a jam, whereas if you were to sell 24 different kinds of jam in your booth, only 3% are likely to buy any kind of jam.
The reason behind this is simple: with greater choice comes greater risk of information overload, because the sheer availability of options in turn adversely impedes one’s capacity to make judgements.
This analogy very aptly encapsulates the mindset presiding over these apps – with endless romantic prospects come both the endless opportunities for success and for rejection. All things perfectly balanced, it becomes an act of simply casting out your net and seeing what sticks.
The Online "Market" for Love
The very trait traditionally associated with the enchantment of romantic love – excitement – has become irrational in today’s world.
Because investing so much into every person that is just as likely to turn you down is not the most productive thing to do, as rational individuals, one is forced to use techniques to maximize cost-benefit efficiency.
Time is money, and we can’t afford heartbreak.
Be it sending the same standardized message to every match, cheapening the intimate process of getting to know someone to that of telemarketing; categorizing “Sarah from Tinder”, “Sarah from Bumble” and “Sarah 2 from Tinder” likes and dislikes into excel sheets, the goal has become to gain the most out of people and relationships with the lowest possible risk.
Relationships become transactional, weighed in the cost of the time and energy it requires: why go all-in in for a high-risk, negligible-reward gamble? We make a snap judgment of someone based on their dating profile, primarily through their appearance and a quick skim-through of their attributes, before swiping thoughtlessly.
“It doesn’t matter if this one doesn’t work out”, we tell ourselves, already preoccupied with our next prospect, that ”I’ll try my luck at the next.” With over 349 million people registered on dating apps worldwide, it’s only a matter of time before someone else who likes traveling, hiking and bubble tea shows up on our feed.
Another 98% match!
That’s what the visualization of all our prospective partners does to us – it tells us that people are replaceable, nothing but products in a market replete with alternatives.
But that can’t be further from the truth – as social creatures, we are deeply wired for connection which goes beyond these transactional market dynamics, experiencing each other in a way that cannot be reduced to mere exchange value.
Trapped within the Screen
In the physical presence of another, we connect through our immediate shared experience of each other and others, and the awareness that we’re both seen and being seen.
This mutual understanding and adjustment that teaches us to accommodate for another forms the practical basis of sociability and real-life relationships.
Dating apps, however, operate on a fundamentally different set of rules. Far from being grounded in the unique interplay of human intimacy, they begin on a foundation rooted purely in imagination and fantasy.
For starters, dating app profiles don’t give us much to work with. What exactly makes someone “funny”, anyway? Or “interesting”, or “kind”? Of course, there are several objective metrics that qualify one to be "Funny" or "Good" to some universal extent, but as we’ve all eventually came to realize in life, these abstract qualities mean wildly different things from one person to another.
Kindness can mean opening the door for someone the same way donating a kidney is to the next.
In short, the complexity in human personality is lost through the mediation and uniformization of language in dating apps, because we aren’t seeing people for who they are, but rather how we perceive these traits as we know them through our own lived experiences.
The network to a million different people, ironically, becomes a practice of looking right into the mirror.
In fact, the process of getting to know someone on a virtual platform is very much unlike that of the organic Jack-and-Rose style dramatics. Unrealistic – sure, but the way Jack coaxed a distraught Rose back on board, recognising her vulnerability and humanness is something that is now lost.
The scene begins with Rose on the verge of flinging herself off a ship and doesn’t end with Jack “ghosting” into the night after the conversation ends. He acknowledges her emotional state, complexity, and pain, in a shared moment characterized by empathy and a genuine, felt presence– all that is necessary for creating long-lasting relationships, and all that is absent in the economy of online dating.
Admittedly, mindlessly swiping or sending humorous messages with zero repercussions can be a fun bonding activity during sleepovers. But what this behavior reflects on a wider level is the lack of humanness that pervades these dating sites.
We see people not as people but rather as disembodied entities that exist within textual eccentricities; we have no basis of what they’re like as a person beyond the way they want to be perceived and how we’d like them to be in turn.
Two layers of disillusionment don’t make a right – rather, they deepen the disconnect.
Getting to know someone in the age of dating apps means analyzing layers of text, teasing out meanings that fit our narratives and biases rather than observing them over time – the way they carry themselves, how they respond to different scenarios or absentmindedly trace patterns across a surface when they’re bored… everything that makes a human human is lost.
False Fantasies
When the nuances in personhood and individuality are stripped down to items in a checklist, it’s no surprise that first (and second and third) dates have become a masterclass in disappointment.
Ask someone what they look for in a partner on a dating app, and they probably already have a pretty fixed idea in their head — of a person who doesn’t exist.
Arbitrary semantics flatten individuality into something commodifiable and replaceable in an unending market– think “manic pixie dream girls” and all the Tom Hansen's of the metaverse– which all the more places a greater emphasis on superficial qualities like style (say, the color of their hair or boldness of their piercings) and linguistic novelty (“Ya like jazz?”).
It’s easy to project our fantasies onto vacuous molds that can be whatever we want them to be, and for whatever purposes we wish – be it validation, a distraction, or short-term sexual gratification, et cetera.
As a result, interactions on these apps often lack the depth and authenticity of real-life relationships, propelled only by shallow conversation towards ends rather than means. And it’s not easy to break out of these dynamics— by commodifying others, we in turn commodify ourselves by reducing our own identities to consumable fragments that fit the transactional nature of these interactions.
From advertising ourselves through shallow indicators, who are we outside of a “Murakami Reader”, “Taylor Swift Enjoyer”, or someone’s fast-track fantasy?
Love in the Digital Age
But of course, dating apps aren’t all negative— for instance, they provide avenues for people to connect with their wider communities. Apps such as Black People Meet or Christian Mingle, among others, allow people to find people like them that they are unlikely to chance upon organically in their social circles.
Not every connection needs to go deeper than a casual friend, but dating apps — with its rules and subjectivity — obscure communication because human decency isn’t a requirement for creating an account.
Forgive me for being cynical, but with the bottom line of virtually every guide to online dating 101 essentially summed into “managing your expectations”, the spirit of disillusionment haunting these sites eventually wears one out, making it difficult for one to create something lasting.
Concluding Thoughts
So where do we draw the line between recreational use, and finding a long-term partner?
This can be difficult, especially since these apps are designed to encourage casual encounters, with algorithms tailored to keep people on them for as long as possible.
With the future of human relationships heading towards the digital realm, such as the rise of the metaverse and even Bumble looking towards expanding into AR, these indistinct lines can become further blurred as we venture into the fringes of a digitalised future.
At the end of the day, it is vital to remember that every interaction involves another person behind the screen.
Whether we choose to pursue casual encounters or long-term relationships, the foundational principle of respect and empathy should always guide our behavior, no matter how advanced technology inexorable evolves.
However the nature of our interactions — whether our connections last a brief conversation or a lifetime or how we treat one another is a reflection of ourselves and perhaps the only real thing in such a world.
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