Trivializing​ Tinder

The movies paint a picture-perfect image of how we meet the perfect person and fall in love and somehow end up living happily-ever-after. Yet this story-tell ideal of romance is very much detached from the reality of dating. Of course, there are some cases where two people meet and it sticks and they end up being one of those “forever couples” who stay together no matter what, but then there is the rest of us. We are the vast majority who find ourselves wondering how we will ever meet “the one.”

It appears that the prospect of dating in 2019 is not looking prosperous for millennials. The chances of meeting someone in real life in today’s culture seems impossible. We go about our lives, rarely stepping outside of our circle of friends and acquaintances and thus our lives become insular. In my experience, we don’t have the same opportunity as previous generations to meet someone by pure chance. If there is a rare chance that you come across someone who you are attracted to, it is not, however, socially acceptable to randomly approach someone who you don’t know in most social settings. Doing so often comes across as creepy and unwanted by the receiver. So how do we meet someone in a world where we are too concerned with how we are perceived?

It seems that we turn to our trusted little side-kick, our smartphone and the apps that it provides. Tinder, Bumble, and the likes provide us with what seems to be the perfect way to browse potential partners from the comfort of our own home. We become bystanders to the world around us as we aimlessly swipe away, rejecting profile after profile without considering the person behind the profile.

Our love lives have been reduced to a swipe of the finger, a mere initial aesthetic judgment dictates our prospects of meeting someone. In a split-second, someone can decide whether we are worthy of becoming a match. Whilst it could be argued that this practice occurs in real life too when we make snap judgments about someone based off of their physical appearance solely, it is evident that there is the opportunity in real life to change our opinion if we get to know the individual. On dating apps, however, the minute we decide against someone, 9 out of 10 times they are then lost forever.

In recent years, I believe that the utility of apps such as Tinder have been reduced to hook-ups. It seems almost impossible and moreover implausible to search for anything more concrete than a one night stand on such apps. Furthermore, in my experience, nobody seems to take apps such as Tinder seriously anymore. It simply facilitates boredom as users take to swipe for the purpose of merely having something to do.

On the other hand, apps such as Hinge propose to base matches off of more than just first impressions which are artificial and aren’t based on any empirical knowledge. From a mere picture, we form unintuitive judgments about the individual, whether we mean to or not.

Hinge, however, uses a system of three questions which is supposed to give us an insight into the personality of the individual. Whilst this seems promising amongst the redundant subjectification that most dating apps foster, I believe that in reality, Hinge (https://hinge.co) falls into the same categorisation of attractiveness that other dating apps are susceptible to. The presence of the questions, or prompts, does allow us to know more about the individual in question, yet I believe we still base our decisions on the visual prompts. For example, I would be no more likely to want to match with someone if I find their answers to the prompts compatible with my own opinions, if I do not also find myself physically attracted to them. Now you may construe this as narcissistic and promoting the cult of judging a book by its cover, however, upon reflection I believe that this is due to the lack of any substantial interaction. There is something evidently critical to the interaction of meeting someone in real life that is distinct and unique that cannot be recreated through any digital means. In this sense, even if we can to some extent get an idea of who the individual is through these prompts, we still do not get a real sense of their personality. Therefore we divert to something which is tried and tested, our visual perception. Whilst this often gives us a false impression of the person, we find it more reliable than a short description of the person.

So where does this leave us? If we don’t have the opportunity to meet people in real life and the chance to meet someone on a dating app doesn’t prove to be useful, how are we ever meant to meet someone? Are the prospects of dating in 2019 damned? We could argue that online dating through sites such as Match.com could be a visible alternative to dating apps, but it seems highly unlikely that people in their late teens and early twenties would ever venture on to such sites. There is a stereotype that those sort of websites are strictly reserved for people in their thirties who are searching for someone and therefore it would be almost unheard of for a young adult to be a member of one. I believe that to some extent dating in 2019 is next to impossible to actually meet someone outside of your social circle and have a genuine connection with them. It seems that we need to re-evaluate how we approach dating in modern society and allow ourselves to step outside of our comfort zone and take chances to break out of the bubble that we impose upon ourselves.