Love at First Swipe
There is no denying it, dating apps have changed everything.
While services like Match.com and eharmony trailblazed the online dating scene in the late 90s, it wasn’t until the 2012 release of the now-infamous dating app, Tinder, that online dating became the norm. Spreading like wildfire through college campuses and local dive bars, Tinder used geolocation services and bulletpoint dating profile matchups to bring local singles together. While there are many folks from those early days who actually found the love of their life on Tinder, the app-sphere has snowballed into a behemoth industry, spawning narcissistic enterprises and changing the way that people use the app. This oversimplified approach to love allows users to swipe left or right on people’s headshots as if they were picking out a hat to pair with their outfit. Because of that lordly yay-or-nay power, the integrity of the users themselves crumble first. Shallow, driven by libido and the need to doom scroll, dating app users became more interested in showing off than genuine love.
Via u/Apasheboy
It’s not entirely the fault of dating apps that made relationships shallow and short-sighted, it’s the internet as a whole. Shallow, serial daters existed before the apps, of course, but technology has just made it effortless to be a player with basically no consequences. Under the guise of “looking for love,” casual hookup culture is the real culprit of love lost, permeating every facet of dating apps, online love, and modern romance. Under the guise of pursuing lifelong partnership, self-obsessed users chase after flings for the weekend and one night stands, eroding the integrity of dating apps altogether.
As the apps became more transparently shallow, singles became more desperate for authentic connection, and who can blame them?
Dating apps reward flaming narcissism, creating an easy source for complimentary likes, swipes, and matches that fuel the ego more than the soul. “The problem is that it becomes difficult to navigate the apps when there appear to be many more toxic people on there than emotionally healthy people,” says Medium writer, who goes by “All Things Narcissism.” Another fundamental problem with the apps is that they boil down a person’s complex persona to a checklist of priorities. Do they like to hike? Check. Do they love dogs? Check. Are they over 6-feet tall? No? Oops, too bad, swipe left. And onto the next match…
Before the dating profiles took over, you had to actually talk to a person to get to know them, judging their appearance, character, and pheromone disposition in real time. Gauging your connection based on your heart rate and the flush to your cheeks, you fell in love with the entire, flawed package instead of judging a book by the cliffnotes.
Via u/Amani Vidal
These days, it’s not even just the apps that have become careless. A survey by Deutsche Telekom reports that in the USA, France, and Poland, lovers are leaving their heartfelt gestures to artificial intelligence. Using tools like ChatGPT and Gemini and Co. to woo their crushes. Over 40% of respondents reported they depend on generative AI to write love letters to their significant other. However, the act of resorting to AI to create a supposedly meaningful declaration of love diminishes the gesture altogether.
Despite the ways that technology is eroding romance, our preferences are not evolving to mirror the modern age. According to Azadeh Aalai Ph.D. from Psychology Today, 70% of women would rather receive a poem or a love letter than some form of digital communication from a significant other, with the majority of males surveyed in agreement. “Technology has made finding a partner harder than ever [and] dating app users describe their experience as transactional, exhausting, and de-humanizing.”
It’s for this reason that romanticised romance is on the rise, praising the days before technology made people to be easy to reach, easy to summarize, and easy to ghost. In many ways, absence really does make the heart grow fonder, and the absence of technology makes it easier to fall for someone. Not just their highly-edited dating profile self, but their true, flawed, and imperfectly perfect self.
Learn to Yearn
There’s a whole laundry list of reasons why people are tired of technology, but for those searching for love, the cure for chronic loneliness may be as simple as a digital detox. According to modern movie remakes, the key to falling in love is going back in time before technology had a chance to ruin love. Reflecting this desire for an unplugged romance, time-period pieces are gaining popularity again. From Wuthering Heights to Bridgerton, audiences are swooning over seductive, historically-inaccurate romances, wishing they too had their own knight in shining armor arranging secret meetings in the sitting room. Not some Hinge boy looking for a cheap date.
To older generations, the concept of in-person love being a “new thing” is silly and somewhat obvious. However, for young people under 25 who have always had a cellphone in their pocket and a computer in their bedroom, the return to analog relationships is a novelty, and may even become a necessity. Driven by app fatigue and a desire for authenticity, preemptively jaded Gen Z singles are embracing a tech-free romantic life, learning to yearn like the characters in their favorite novels, movies, and shows do. The idea of analog romance is so powerful that it surpasses the fear of rejection or the social anxiety that comes with in-person connection.
Via u/Luiz Woellner
But that’s just it, though, isn’t it? Ultimately, the most meaningful relationships spawn from organic interactions where each person is welcomed to be themselves, their genuine selves. Technology may facilitate a surface-level meet up, checking off all of the boxes that indicate a potential suitor, but it could never replicate the intimacy of bonding in real life, having whispered conversations in the dark, or spending an afternoon daydreaming about a future rendezvous
There are some things that math, algorithms, and apps could never truly decode, and falling in love is one of them.
