Two of my children met their wonderful spouses on dating apps, so I have to acknowledge that, at least sometimes, they can help good people to find each other. But I also think their ubiquity in the modern dating scene is a net negative, that they have an insidious dampening effect on more organic ways of assessing whether or not you’d like to get to know a person better.
I’ve been curious about them for a long time. So when a friend who is on three dating apps—Hinge, Bumble, and I can’t remember the third one—offered to show me what’s up and how they work, I was pretty psyched.
My friend had another friend over when I went to her house for my Dating App Workshop. That friend of my friend was on Tinder, and demonstrated how the swipe right, swipe left thing works.
This friend of my friend opened up her Tinder app and started looking at a gallery of photos of men who, as I understand it, had been presented to her by the app. She literally looked at each photo for a fraction of a second, said, “He’s cute” when she swiped right and “Nuh-uh” when she swiped left.
That’s the assessment process? I thought to myself. Look at a photo and decide: Cute/Not Cute? And then, I guess, if you swiped right, you initiate or invite text threads, which will be their own kind of assessment, leading to meeting in real life or not.
Until the Phase 3 Meeting-in-Person portion of the process, if it happens, the whole she-bang seems pretty antiseptic, completely curated, and, of course, curiously two-dimensional. And at the risk of being a total square killjoy: The Phase 3 bit sounds icky to me too. Meeting someone somewhere that you don’t really know anything about except the eight things they want you to know? Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds like one of Dante’s circles of hell.
Is this “just the way it is now,” what people of many different generations and backgrounds tell me? If so, why is this “the way it is now”? People still go to work, go to class, do various things in three-dimensional life, right? Why has this displaced other ways of meeting and getting to know people? Because I think “the way it is now” kind of sucks.
Watching my friend’s friend do nanosecond-long considerations of potential—I don’t know what exactly. Mates? Conversation partners? Hookups?—was interesting and also creepy to me. I wish I had asked her what her purpose was in swiping right or left. What’s the end goal here? My other friend showed me in more depth the information that her apps offered about different potential whatevers. In their profile, users choose from a menu of “Dating Intentions” that includes “life partner,” “long-term relationship,” “casual dates,” or “intimacy without commitment.” I’m puzzled by the chronology. You select a category of seriousness of relationship before you meet a person. Doesn’t that seem backwards?
I fully acknowledge that the way someone presents visually is a big factor in whether they intrigue us or not. But for the assessment to hinge on a single still photo, as with my friend’s friend, used to discern whether or not a particular guy is “cute,”—Ugh.
Even if the assessment is more involved—looking at several photos, reading brief responses to prompts, perusing a 300-character bio—it’s not much to go on. And most importantly, it’s all handpicked by the person who is selling themselves to you.
I remember a Gary Snyder poem that I read many years ago. I’ve often looked for it since, unsuccessfully. The poem was about the profound difference between animals in captivity and their counterparts living in appropriate wilderness habitats. Is a giraffe in captivity really a giraffe? Is an integral part of being a giraffe moving freely across vast plains in herds, having to evade predators, and eating leaves from the highest branches of many, many trees? Or is a giraffe just a collection of genetic material that manifests in a certain shape? Does that genetic manifestation still express giraffeness in a zoo enclosure?
In one line of the poem, Snyder wrote something like, “Is the salmon the flash of silver tail swimming upstream in a river?” Or is just salmon DNA?
There’s something about the reductionism I witnessed in my informal Dating App Workshop that makes me think of that Gary Snyder poem. Each of us, we’re more than an expression of DNA presented in a photograph.
When I see all the people I love now and have ever loved in my mind’s eye, I see a particular way she raises her eyebrows while she talks animatedly, or the way her eyes crinkle when she laughs, or his mischievous, crooked smile. I recollect the sound of his voice, or how she looked when she learned she had won a scholarship, or when he learned his father had died. I see how one eye is charmingly bigger than the other. I remember and cherish their capped teeth. I recall times when I’ve seen them act with deep integrity, present a minority opinion with composure and skill, cry and apologize and experience authentic remorse, and clearly do the wrong thing.
I don’t know how you assess whether or not you want to know someone better based on responses to a couple of fill-in-the-blank questions and some still photos. (I guess some apps—maybe all?—allow voice recordings too. That’s nice-ish, but it’s still a curated tidbit from a living organism plucked out of his or her environment like a beached whale—anti-contextual and thus weird.) “I like his muscles,” “She’s got great tits,” “That’s a bitchin’ bod,”—Sure, yeah, but wasn’t this one of the tasks of feminism? Weren’t we all supposed to be objectifying people less? At least before feminism morphed into selling yourself on Only Fans and other variations of using sex to get others to pay your bills.
We’re complex mammals and we exist in a habitat. It seems so antiseptic and bizarre to me to not know anything about someone except the couple of informational morsels they curate about themselves. Is their house messy or neat? Do they cook or Door Dash everything? What are their parents and siblings and friends like? Do they look at their phones all the time? Do they smell weird?
I guess you could argue that that’s all stuff for Round 3, after you’ve decided that the photo that pops up on your screen is sufficiently cute, and the text messages pass muster. You don’t need to know all that for Round 1 or Round 2. I would argue that there’s something ineffable about attraction and interest in another person, whether romantic, platonic, creative, intellectual, or professional. I’ve seen people and thought, “I want to get to know him better,” or “I want to make her my friend,” based on something they were doing or saying. It feels more fleshed out, more real. Because it is. Often, that attraction will be based on the human equivalent of the slivery flick of the salmon’s tail—something ineluctable that’s just not available to us in Two-Dimensional Land.
To me, the little bit I’ve seen of dating apps makes me think that they require profound objectification and reductionism. This objectification and reductionism means that the people represented on these apps become commodities in a flesh marketplace: another corner of our lives where we are turned into consumers and product at the same time. We’re greater than a simple manifested collection of DNA. At least, I hope we are.
The primary goal of businesses in the online dating app space is to make money money. It’s not about developing or promoting the sweetest ways for humans to meet and get to know each other.