On the 20th anniversary of The New York Times’ popular Vows column, a weekly feature on notable weddings and engagements launched in 1992, its longtime editor wrote
that Vows was meant to be more than just a news notice about society
events. It aimed to give readers the backstory on marrying couples and,
in the meantime, to explore how romance was changing with the times.
“Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they’d met through their
friends or family, or in college,” wrote the editor, Bob Woletz, in
2012. “For a period that ran into the late 1990s, a number said, often
sheepishly, that they had met through personal advertisements.”
But in 2018, seven of the 53 couples profiled in the Vows column met on dating apps. And in the Times’
more populous Wedding Announcements section, 93 out of some 1,000
couples profiled this year met on dating apps—Tinder, Bumble, Hinge,
Coffee Meets Bagel, Happn, and other specialized dating apps designed
for smaller communities, like JSwipe for Jewish singles and MuzMatch for
Muslims. The year before, 71 couples whose weddings were announced by
the Times met on dating apps.
Matt Lundquist, a couples therapist based in Manhattan,
says he’s started taking on a less excited or expectant tone when he
asks young couples and recently formed couples how they met. “Because a
few of them will say to me, ‘Uhhh, we met on Tinder’—like, ‘Where else
do you think we would have met?’” Plus, he adds, it’s never a good start
to therapy when a patient thinks the therapist is behind the times or
uncool.
Dating apps originated in the gay community; Grindr and
Scruff, which helped single men link up by searching for other active
users within a specific geographic radius, launched in 2009 and 2010,
respectively. With the launch of Tinder in 2012, iPhone-owning people of
all sexualities could start looking for love, or sex, or casual dating,
and it quickly became the most popular dating app on the market. But
the gigantic shift in dating culture really started to take hold the
following year, when Tinder expanded to Android phones, then to more than 70 percent of smartphones worldwide. Shortly thereafter, many more dating apps came online.
There’s been plenty of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over how Tinder could reinvent
dating: Maybe it would transform the dating scene into an endless
virtual marketplace where singles could shop for each other (like an
Amazon for human companionship), or perhaps it would turn dating into a
minimal-effort, transactional pursuit of on-demand hookups (like an Uber
for sex). But the reality of dating in the age of apps is a little more
nuanced than that. The relationship economy has certainly changed in
terms of how humans find and court their potential partners, but what
people are looking for is largely the same as it ever was:
companionship and/or sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the underlying
challenges—the loneliness, the boredom, the roller coaster of hope and
disappointment—of being “single and looking,” or single and looking for something, haven’t gone away. They’ve simply changed shape.
***
Sean Rad and Justin Mateen,
two of Tinder’s founders, have said in interviews that the inspiration
for Tinder came from their own general dissatisfaction with the lack of
dating opportunities that arose naturally—or, as Rad once put it jokingly, “Justin needed help meeting people because he had, what’s that disorder you have where you don’t leave the house?”
Tinder has indeed helped people meet other people—it has
expanded the reach of singles’ social networks, facilitating
interactions between people who might never have crossed paths
otherwise. The 30-year-old Jess Flores of Virginia Beach got married to
her first and only Tinder date this past October, and she says they
likely would have never met if it weren’t for the app.
For starters, Flores says, the guys she usually went for
back in 2014 were what she describes as “sleeve-tattoo” types. Her
now-husband Mike, though, was “clean cut, no tattoos. Completely
opposite of what I would usually go for.” She decided to take a chance
on him after she’d laughed at a funny line in his Tinder bio. (Today,
she can no longer remember what it was.)
Plus, Mike lived in the next town over. He wasn’t that
far away, “but I didn’t go where he lived to hang out, so I didn’t
really mix and mingle with people in other cities,” she says. But after a
few weeks of chatting on the app and one failed attempt at meeting up,
they ended up on a first date at a local minor-league baseball game,
drinking beer and eating hot dogs in the stands.
For Flores and her husband, having access to a bigger
pool of fellow single people was a great development. In her first few
years out of college, before she met Mike, “I was in the same work
routine, around the same people, all the time,” Flores says, and she
wasn’t exactly eager to start up a romance with any of them. But then
there was Tinder, and then there was Mike.
An expanded radius of potential mates can be a great
thing if you’re looking to date or hook up with a broad variety of
people who are different from you, says Madeleine Fugère, a professor of
psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University who specializes in
attraction and romantic relationships. “Normally, if you met someone at
school or at work, you would probably already have a lot in common with
that person,” Fugere says. “Whereas if you’re meeting someone purely
based on geographic location, there’s definitely a greater chance that
they would be different from you in some way.”
But there’s also a downside to dating beyond one’s
natural social environment. “People who are not very similar to their
romantic partners end up at a greater risk for breaking up or for
divorce,” she says. Indeed, some daters bemoan the fact that meeting on
the apps means dating in a sort of context vacuum. Friends, co-workers,
classmates, and/or relatives don’t show up to flesh out the complete
picture of who a person is until further on in the timeline of a
relationship—it’s unlikely that someone would introduce a blind date to
friends right away. In the “old model” of dating, by contrast, the
circumstances under which two people met organically could provide at
least some measure of common ground between them.
***
Some also believe that the
relative anonymity of dating apps—that is, the social disconnect
between most people who match on them—has also made the dating landscape
a ruder, flakier, crueler place. For example, says Lundquist, the
couples therapist, if you go on a date with your cousin’s roommate, the
roommate has some incentive to not be a jerk to you. But with apps,
“You’re meeting somebody you probably don’t know and probably don’t have
any connections with at a bar on 39th Street. That’s kind of weird, and
there’s a greater opportunity for people to be ridiculous, to be not
nice.”
Many of the stories of bad behavior Lundquist hears from
his patients take place in real life, at bars and restaurants. “I think
it’s become more ordinary to stand each other up,” he says, and he’s
had many patients (“men and women, though more women among straight
folks”) recount to him stories that end with something along the lines
of, “Oh my God, I got to the bar and he sat down and said, ‘Oh. You
don’t look like what I thought you looked like,’ and walked away.”
But other users complain of rudeness even in early text
interactions on the app. Some of that nastiness could be chalked up to
dating apps’ dependence on remote, digital communication; the classic
“unsolicited dick pic sent to an unsuspecting match” scenario, for
example. Or the equally familiar
tirade of insults from a match who’s been rebuffed, as Anna Xiques, a
33-year-old advertising copywriter based in Miami, experienced. In an essay on Medium in 2016
(cleverly titled “To the One That Got Away on Bumble”), she chronicled
the time she frankly told a Bumble match she’d been chatting with that
she wasn’t feeling it, only to be promptly called a cunt and told she
“wasn’t even pretty.” (Bumble, launched in 2014 with the former Tinder
executive Whitney Wolfe Herd at its helm, markets itself as a more
women-friendly dating app because of its unique feature designed to curb
unwanted messages: In heterosexual matches, the woman has to initiate
chatting.)
Sometimes this is just how things go on dating apps,
Xiques says. She’s been using them off and on for the past few years for
dates and hookups, even though she estimates that the messages she
receives have about a 50-50 ratio of mean or gross to not mean
or gross. She’s only experienced this kind of creepy or hurtful behavior
when she’s dating through apps, not when dating people she’s met in
real-life social settings. “Because, obviously, they’re hiding behind
the technology, right? You don’t have to actually face the person,” she
says.
Perhaps the quotidian cruelty of app dating exists
because it’s relatively impersonal compared with setting up dates in
real life. “More and more people relate to this as a volume operation,”
says Lundquist, the couples therapist. Time and resources are limited,
while matches, at least in theory, are not. Lundquist mentions what he
calls the “classic” scenario in which someone is on a Tinder date, then
goes to the bathroom and talks to three other people on Tinder. “So
there’s a willingness to move on more quickly,” he says, “but not
necessarily a commensurate increase in skill at kindness.”
Holly Wood, who wrote her Harvard sociology dissertation
last year on singles’ behaviors on dating sites and dating apps, heard a
lot of these ugly stories too. And after speaking to more than 100
straight-identifying, college-educated men and women in San Francisco
about their experiences on dating apps, she firmly believes that if
dating apps didn’t exist, these casual acts of unkindness in dating
would be far less common. But Wood’s theory is that people are meaner
because they feel like they’re interacting with a stranger, and she
partly blames the short and sweet bios encouraged on the apps.
“OkCupid,” she remembers, “invited walls of
text. And that, for me, was really important. I’m one of those people
who wants to feel like I have a sense of who you are before we go on a
first date. Then Tinder”—which has a 500-character limit for bios—“happened, and the shallowness in the profile was encouraged.”
Wood also found that for some respondents (especially male respondents), apps had effectively replaced
dating; in other words, the time other generations of singles might
have spent going on dates, these singles spent swiping. Many of the men
she talked to, Wood says, “were saying, ‘I’m putting so much work into
dating and I’m not getting any results.’” When she asked what exactly
they were doing, they said, “I’m on Tinder for hours every day.”
“We pretend that’s dating because it looks like dating and says it’s dating,” Wood says.
***
Wood’s academic work on
dating apps is, it’s worth mentioning, something of a rarity in the
broader research landscape. One big challenge of knowing how dating apps
have affected dating behaviors, and in writing a story like this one,
is that most of these apps have only
been around for half a decade—hardly long enough for well-designed,
relevant longitudinal studies to even be funded, let alone conducted.
Of course, even the absence of hard data hasn’t stopped
dating experts—both people who study it and people who do a lot of
it—from theorizing. There’s a popular suspicion, for example, that
Tinder and other dating apps might make people pickier or more reluctant
to settle on a single monogamous partner, a theory that the comedian
Aziz Ansari spends a lot of time on in his 2015 book, Modern Romance, written with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg.
Eli Finkel, however, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage,
rejects that notion. “Very smart people have expressed concern that
having such easy access makes us commitment-phobic,” he says, “but I’m
not actually that worried about it.” Research has shown that people who
find a partner they’re really into quickly become less interested in
alternatives, and Finkel is fond of a sentiment expressed in a 1997 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper on the subject: “Even if the grass is greener elsewhere, happy gardeners may not notice.”
Like the anthropologist Helen Fisher,
Finkel believes that dating apps haven’t changed happy relationships
much—but he does think they’ve lowered the threshold of when to leave an
unhappy one. In the past, there was a step in which you’d have to go to
the trouble of “getting dolled up and going to a bar,” Finkel says, and
you’d have to look at yourself and say, “What am I doing right now? I’m
going out to meet a guy. I’m going out to meet a girl,” even though you
were in a relationship already. Now, he says, “you can just tinker
around, just for a sort of a goof; swipe a little just ’cause it’s fun
and playful. And then it’s like, oh—[suddenly] you’re on a date.”
***
The other subtle ways in which
people believe dating is different now that Tinder is a thing are,
quite frankly, innumerable. Some believe that dating apps’ visual-heavy
format encourages people to choose their partners more superficially (and with racial or sexual stereotypes in mind); others argue that humans choose their partners with physical attraction in mind even without the help of Tinder.
There are equally compelling arguments that dating apps have made
dating both more awkward and less awkward by allowing matches to get to
know each other remotely before they ever meet face-to-face—which can in
some cases create a weird, sometimes tense first few minutes of a first
date.
And for some singles in the LGBTQ community, dating apps
like Tinder and Bumble have been a small miracle. They can help users
locate other LGBTQ singles in an area where it might otherwise be hard
to know—and their explicit spelling-out of what gender or genders a user
is interested in can mean fewer awkward initial interactions. Other
LGBTQ users, however, say they’ve had better luck finding dates or
hookups on dating apps other than Tinder, or even on social media.
“Twitter in the gay community is kind of like a dating app now. Tinder
doesn’t do too well,” says Riley Rivera Moore, a 21-year-old based in
Austin. Riley’s wife Niki, 23, says that when she was on Tinder, a good
portion of her potential matches who were women were “a couple, and the
woman had created the Tinder profile because they were looking for a
‘unicorn,’ or a third person.” That said, the recently married Rivera
Moores met on Tinder.
But perhaps the most consequential change to dating has
been in where and how dates get initiated—and where and how they don’t.
When Ingram Hodges, a freshman at the University of
Texas at Austin, goes to a party, he goes there expecting only to hang
out with friends. It’d be a pleasant surprise, he says, if he happened
to talk to a cute girl there and ask her to hang out. “It wouldn’t be an
abnormal thing to do,” he says, “but it’s just not as common. When it does happen, people are surprised, taken aback.”
I pointed out to Hodges that when I was a freshman in
college—all of 10 years ago—meeting cute people to go on a date with or
to hook up with was the point of going to parties. But being
18, Hodges is relatively new to both Tinder and dating in general; the
only dating he’s known has been in a post-Tinder world. When Hodges is
in the mood to flirt or go on a date, he turns to Tinder (or Bumble,
which he jokingly calls “classy Tinder”), where sometimes he finds that
other UT students’ profiles include instructions like “If I know you
from school, don’t swipe right on me.”
Hodges knows that there was a time, way back in the day,
when people mostly met through school, or work, or friends, or family.
But for people his age, Hodges says, “dating has become isolated from
the rest of social life.”
Hailey, a financial-services professional in Boston (who
asked to only be identified by her first name because her last name is a
unique one and she’d prefer to not be recognizable in work contexts),
is considerably older than Hodges, but even at 34, she sees the same
phenomenon in action. She and her boyfriend met on Tinder in 2014, and
they soon discovered that they lived in the same neighborhood. Before
long, they realized that they’d probably even seen each other around
before they met.
Still, she says, “we would have never interacted had it
not been for Tinder. He’s not going out all the time. I’m not going out
all the time. The reality is, if he is out at a bar, he’s hanging with his friends.
“And he’s not gonna be like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ as
we’re both getting milk or something at the grocery store,” she adds. “I
don’t see that happening at all anymore.”
The Atlantic’s Kate Julian found something similar in her recent story on why today’s young people are having less sex than prior generations:
Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore … But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg effect when it comes
to Tinder and the disentanglement of dating from the rest of social
life. It’s possible, certainly, that dating apps have erected walls
between the search for potential partners and the normal routines of
work and community. But it’s also possible that dating apps thrive in
this particular moment in history because people have stopped looking for potential partners while they go about their work and community routines.
Finkel, for one, believes that the new boundaries
between romance and other forms of social interaction have their
benefits—especially in a time when what constitutes sexual harassment,
especially in the workplace, is being renegotiated. “People used to meet
people at work, but my God, it doesn’t seem like the best idea to do
that right now,” Finkel says. “For better or worse, people are setting
up firmer boundaries between the personal and the professional. And
we’re figuring all that stuff out, but it’s kind of a tumultuous time.”
Meanwhile, he says, dating apps offer separate environments where
finding dates or sex is the point.
But, naturally, with the compartmentalization of dating
comes the notion that if you want to be dating, you have to be active on
the apps. And that can make the whole process of finding a partner,
which essentially boils down to semi-blind date after semi-blind date,
feel like a chore or a dystopian game show. As my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2016,
Now that the shine of novelty has worn off these apps, they aren’t fun or exciting anymore. They’ve become a normalized part of dating. There’s a sense that if you’re single, and you don’t want to be, you need to do something to change that. If you just sit on your butt and wait to see if life delivers you love, then you have no right to complain.
Hailey has heard her friends complain that dating now
feels like a second, after-hours job; Twitter is rife with sentiments similar in tone. It’s not uncommon nowadays to hear singles say wistfully that they’d just like to meet someone in real life.
Of course, it’s quite possible that this is a new problem created by the solving of an old one.
A decade ago, the complaint that Lundquist, the couples
therapist, heard most often was, “Boy, I just don’t meet any interesting
people.” Now, he says, “it’s more like, ‘Oh, God, I meet all these
not-interesting people.’”
“It’s cliche to say, but it’s a numbers game,” Lundquist
adds. “So the assumption is, the odds are pretty good that [any given
date] will suck, but, you know. Whatever. You’ve gotta do it.”
Finkel, for his part, puts it a little more bluntly. To
him, there’s one thing that all these wistful romantics, longing for the
days of yore when people met in real life, are missing: that
Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge—like eHarmony, OkCupid, and Match.com before
them—exist because meeting in real life is really hard.
“I’m not saying that it’s not a hassle to go on bad
dates. It is a nuisance. You could be hanging out with your friends, you
could be sleeping, you could be reading a book,” he says. But, Finkel
adds, singletons of generations past would “break out the world’s
smallest violin” for young people who complain about Tinder dates
becoming a chore.
“It’s like, Ugh so many dates, and they’re just not that interesting,” Finkel adds with a laugh. “It used to be hard to find someone to date!”
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