The new phenomena of hook-ups being available at the swipe of a finger has left it more difficult than ever to find a meaningful relationship.
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The popular dating app Tinder was founded by Sean Rad in 2012. By 2014, it had an estimated one billion daily swipes. This was just the beginning of a huge cultural shift towards a digital age of dating. A world of swiping and matching was quickly born; one fuelled by a reliance on instant gratification and the chance of a quick shag, simply by clicking a few buttons.
Since the invention of Tinder, many cunning entrepreneurs followed suit, eyeing up the opportunity to capitalise of us singletons’ quest for love, and an array of other dating apps were created: Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, and Thursday to name a few.
Although genuine relationships have been found through dating apps, they have also become a site of disappointment, where hook-up culture is normalised. Whilst the de-stigmatisation of casual sex and pleasure undeniably has its positives, research suggests that online dating could be negatively affecting our experiences of love, sex, and intimacy, as physcotherapist Andrea Freira explains how and why our emotional needs might not be being met.
It’s Friday night and I’m getting ready for a date with a guy I’ve matched on Hinge. He looked perfectly normal. Attractive. Nice eyes and smile. Good dress sense. His profile had the right ratio of selfies and pictures with friends and family, confirming he wasn’t a serial killer. We chatted for a couple of days and seemed to have a lot in common, so decided to go to the pub.
Now six pints, a hangover, and a ghost later, I’m wondering where it all went wrong. If you’re fortunate enough to not know what ghosting is, the urban dictionary coins it as, “a person cutting off all communication with zero warning.”
That week, the front room of my shared house was host to many feminist chats, with me the angry ringleader. I was consoled by the girls that of course, this was his loss; that there was nothing wrong with me. However, it wasn’t insecurity or fear of rejection that was niggling at me. I was genuinely confused by the online dating world and the lies that seemed to accompany it.
As a newly single person, I was totally unfamiliar with the convoluted subtext that came with dating. “I’d love to take you on another date” seems to translate as “You will literally never hear from me again.”
But I’m not the only one. A study directed by the Pew Research Centre found that 45% of online daters were left feeling frustrated by the experience, compared with a mere 28% that felt hopeful.
Could we, Gen Z, be quite literally fucked?
We are the generation that have grown up with an endless pool of options, in all aspects of life. Netflix presents us with a dizzying array of entertainment, where the maximum effort required is moving your fingers to remote. To accompany our movie night, we click a few buttons, and a McDonalds magically appears at the door.
The notion of minimum input, maximum output, has unfortunately trickled into our love lives. As 19-year-old Tinder-user Honor Newman explains: “One of the issues with dating apps is that it’s so easy to find somebody. You don’t have to put it any effort. It’s not a chase, it’s just there you go.”
The art of communication is being lost in translation. When singles enter the online dating world and meet their match, there is no blueprint stating how serious a connection that person is looking for. (Unless of course, they write it on their profile, which is a rarity.) “I think more men use Tinder for a quick shag, to just have sex with lots of different people really easily,” says Newman. “Women aren’t necessarily just looking for sex, we actually want to find somebody.”
When two people are online dating with different intentions and not communicating, problems can arise. Communication issues can of course also occur in same-sex relationships, but psycho-therapist Andrea Freira explains the part gender roles play when it comes to heterosexual dating.
“The male and female brains are wired differently, so biologically speaking we are different, women are a lot more attuned with their emotional side. Men often go into dating with less expectations and that’s sometimes where the conflict occurs, as men are perhaps just looking to get to know you and are typically a lot harder to get to commit to a relationship than women are.”
If a vast majority of men are using these apps just to find different sexual partners, it’s no wonder emotional connections and meaningful relationships are not being found.
Another issue that occurs when using dating apps is the immense build-up. Often, when you match with someone online, you start to create an idea of that person in your head, creating a false narrative of what you think they’re like – or, what you want them to be like. This is where meeting a potential partner in person, as opposed to on a dating app, could be more beneficial.
“When you are meeting someone in real life you can use your intuition to guide you, whereas when you are engaging or getting to know someone online there is always an expectation,” Freira explains. “Usually, people go into online dating with an outcome in their mind. Whereas as if you were able to go into it just looking to know that person and experience that person, without any expectation of an outcome it could be a lot more fulfilling.”
So, perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom. Perhaps it’s about actively changing our mindsets.
There is still hope.
Along with the many of us still single and exasperated online-daters, there are a notable number of couples whose modern love-stories began at the swipe of a finger. According to The Future of Dating report by The Imperial College Business School and eHarmony, 32% of relationships that started between 2015 and 2019 met online, and by 2035 they estimate that more than 50% of couples will have met through online dating.
Among them is 21-year-old *Katie Thomas* who met her now boyfriend on Hinge. After over a year on the app with no luck and a string of unsuccessful matches, she explains how this time was different. “He made it clear from the get-go what he wanted. There was no messing around, there was no game playing,” she says. Communication was key from the offset. “There was consistent effort on his part, which gave me the space to also put effort in and be honest without feeling silly or feeling like it wasn’t going to go anywhere.”
The answer could be in the way we approach online-dating and the kind of communication we use. As Freira says, “It can work if two people can go into it with the right mindset and allow things to develop and really enjoy getting to know the other person. Go into it with an open mind and don’t attach yourselves to any potential outcome. Just allow it to just flow.”
Making a conscious effort to have no pre-conceptions about your match while being communicative and honest from the beginning, could be key in using dating apps to your full advantage, and not hurting anyone else in the process.
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