Imagine telling someone in the 60s that one day there’d be a world where you could spend your evenings swiping yes or no to a filtered stream of seemingly infinite faces. Would they think it was a dating utopia or a sterile marketplace, where prompts start to read like the back of a cereal box?
With approximately 53% of people aged 18-29 having used dating apps such as Hinge or Tinder, online dating is a modern normality and, although it’s hard to deny these apps work for many people, it poses a lot of questions about what it means to date in the digital age. One of the clearest ways apps like Hinge have reshaped dating is the control it gives us over how we are perceived.
It is true that, to an extent, we curate ourselves in real life too, through our clothing and the way we choose to speak to people. However, from our favourite angles to witty prompts and personal stats, online dating allows us to meticulously craft our first impressions in a way that’s unique to the online world.
Even in the talking stage, texting gives a person hours to think of replies that they may not be able to on the spot. So when we then meet a person, the idea of them we carry is formed not only by the snapshots they’ve chosen to share, but the version of themselves that texting allows them to be: a much more controlled first impression than previously possible.
Online dating cuts to the chase as you glimpse a person’s dating intentions before you even interact. From the straightforward short-term and long-term to the more ambiguous ‘figuring out my dating goals’, you can usually gauge what someone is looking for.
It also cuts out a lot of that slow-burn uncertainty between people, since it’s usually safe to assume people are there with romantic, or at least non-platonic, intent. And although this may save time, is that slow-burn uncertainty not the part that some of our favourite stories centre around? Then again, if stories are built on conflict, perhaps we wish to avoid it in real life.
Never before have dating options felt so infinite. Like with any other social media app, dating apps are designed to keep you hooked, gamified with features such as ‘superlikes’ and ‘roses’ and making you wonder if a better match is just one swipe away. The immediate swiping feature places emphasis on appearance, encouraging snap judgments before a person’s character has a chance to show.
As hundreds of profiles flicker before us, people can begin to feel less like individuals and more like hazy possibilities consumed like content. Similar to social media likes, matches can slip into a form of validation, with focus placed on the number of matches a person can receive rather than on their compatibility.
Online dating has reshaped how we date as the logic of social media has entered romantic life. Much like with Instagram, through apps like Hinge we can learn about people or at least the version of themselves they’ve chosen to display before we even interact. They are hyper efficient: perhaps at the cost of something slow-burn.
Like with TikTok or Instagram, online dating presents us with the illusion of infinity where there is always another profile, another possibility and another swipe.