Now reading: How dating apps sold us an unromantic, dehumanising idea of romance. Rayne Fisher-Quann. I downloaded Tinder the day I moved into my university dorm. Setting up the app felt like a rite of passage, and in some ways, I think it was: curating my profile felt exciting and foreign, like I was designing the new, shiny person I wanted to be. I went on to spend a couple good years with Tinder and Bumble and Hinge, although I never felt like they measured up , but eventually, they started to make me feel like a gambler parked in front of a slot machine.
I set my sights offline and never looked back. In fact, I think the vision of relentlessly optimised interpersonal relationships that the e-dating business has built and sold is fundamentally dehumanising — and utterly devoid of romance. Was settling the norm? Or did everyone just happen to be romantically compatible with the person sitting nearest to them in class?
I am interested, though, in the instinctual contradiction that we feel in so many parts of our technological landscape. How does a system that offers you more romantic prospects than all your ancestors combined leave so many of us feeling so alone? Why does an app that claims to have perfected the romantic experience feel so obviously devoid of romance?
Why do we remain so devoted to a method that often feels so palpably uncanny? It offers you a seemingly endless stream of beautiful people with passably witty bios and fun-looking lives. It shoos away visions of an awkward blind date or bar bathroom hookup; now, you can know everything about someone before you decide whether or not you want to get to know them. The desire to make love risk-free borders on totalitarian.
It requires dehumanisation, both of our potential partners and inevitably of ourselves. Most of the common gripes about dating app culture are encouraged and even necessitated by the format of the apps themselves. Paradoxically, the kind of accountability that people seem to crave from their dating app matches is out-of-reach in large part because of their absence from your real, tangible life.
