Janelle Ward Mendix, the Netherlands. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 participants, this study explores how urban gay singles in China develop social relationships on dating apps. It reveals that relationship development is often driven by casual conversations, which are not motivated by clear pragmatic purposes. Casual conversations tend to unfold around common hobbies or experiences, serving as a source of sociability, or satisfaction in socializing itself.
In contrast to casual conversations, two forms of conversations are deemed highly instrumental and undesirable: one is the sex-oriented conversation aimed at immediate sexual encounters; the other is the interrogative conversation in which people ask private questions in a nonreciprocal and rigid way.
Users also exploit the affordances of different media platforms and capture the relationship potential by platform switching. They switch to the mainstream media platform WeChat for more synchronous communication and to collect more identity cues from each other. Platform switching also signals willingness for relationship development and mutual trust.
Nevertheless, users keep going back to dating apps for new possibilities for social relationships. Email: wu eshcc. Keywords affordances, casual sex, Chinese gay men, dating apps, hook-up, online dating, platform switching, polymedia, relationship development, sociability.
Given the mixed motivations reported by users, combined with a tendency of researchers and the media to promote a primarily casual sex script, dating app studies could benefit from a broader perspective on how and why people use dating apps. With this question, we look at the Chinese context. Dating apps have gained millions of Chinese gay users. With this research, we hope to understand how single metropolitan Chinese gay men develop social relationships on dating apps.
