It had been years since I touched a dating app, so I recently took a brief foray back into the Tinder world to see what I’d been missing. I wasn’t expecting anything to be vastly different from the last time I used the app — get a few matches, send a few back and forths — then call it a day. More of an experiment really, so I created a half-assed profile with a few photos and went through the experience . . . this was my experience and subsequent thoughts.
PAY TO PLAY
The first thing that I remembered was that these apps are like fucking vacuums pointed at your bank account, they’re designed to suck your money from you. The visual presentation is almost like a video game where you want to pay to get to the next level. My initial swipes were stopped after a certain number and the party stopped until I forked over some more cash — I didn’t — however, “likes” started to collect and the app urged me to pay so that I could see who had liked me. I resisted the urge and simply waited until I could start swiping again, no problem, right?
ADDICTIVE ADDICTIVE ADDICTIVE
The next thing that I remembered is how addicting they are. Before getting back into the app I was able to be at work and not bother looking at my phone for a couple of hours, now I was checking my phone every twenty minutes to see if I had gotten any likes. I was starting to check my phone first thing every morning for likes — I had to resist the temptation to take my phone to bed and swipe myself to sleep. Even worse was the negative feedback loop I was creating where if I checked my phone and hadn’t received any likes there was a mild tinge of disappointment that I hoped would be soon remedied by a like. These apps turn our phones into mini-slot machines that we compulsively put a quarter in the slot to get a quick high. It’s no surprise that people report dating app fatigue — they’re like binge watching a show when you get to episode five and you’re not even enjoying it anymore but you keep watching anyway, ‘I mean it’s only four more hour long episodes to go, right?’
More troubling of a thought is that the side effects of using the apps aren’t consciously discernible — meaning at least when you’re smoking you’re aware that what you’re doing is bad for you — you start coughing and subsequently imagining how difficult it will be to suck food through your neck, but when you’re compulsively checking your phone every five to ten minutes you’re not even aware that your brain is re-wiring itself to have the attention span of a cocker spaniel (don’t worry your newfound adderall addiction will cure this, thanks Tinder!). Worse is that some people will pay an exorbitant amount to go through this process — some people will pay a mind boggling $500 a month for a premium subscription (you might want to save that for your newly acquired adderall addiction.)
HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU HEARD SOMEONE SAY ‘THE DATING APPS ARE TERRIBLE?
Do a google search of dating apps and it won’t be long until you find and endless sea of disenchantment, but in-spite of all this are dating apps really to blame here for peoples frustrations with their lack of success in the game of love? I don’t think so. I think they work for some people, I just think they’re like the cheese cake of technology and when you start mainlining cheese cake for breakfast you shouldn’t get angry and call your lawyer when you need a forklift to carry you out of your front door. They’re specifically designed to exploit our inherent weakness for pleasure seeking without having to put in any work — it’s the GrubHub of love that’s designed to make things easier but ironically makes us less happy and more depressed.
In almost every corner of the world people are having less sex by and large, which if that’s the case almost begs the question: why are people are even on the apps to begin with? For me I was running a half-assed experiment with the closeted optimism of finding a good match, now extrapolate that and consider that there are probably a good number of people who use the apps for reasons other than seeking a relationship or getting a date — they’re bored, seeking validation, etc. — and don’t tell me about your friend Cheryl who found the love of her life on Tinder and posts about how awesome her marriage is on instagram every day, I’m talking about the majority, not the outliers here.
It’s symptomatic of something much larger at work here. There’s a mental health crisis taking place. Suicide and depression levels are at all time highs — scroll through your instagram and there are endless people to compare your life with and endless motivation porn telling you to be better than who you currently are. There’s a natural discontentedness with life that makes the technology of a dating app almost impossible resist. If you don’t have purpose, or any real engagement with your work or what you’re doing in life, you’re going to drift into meaningless pleasure seeking and Tinder is pleasure seeking on steroids.
WOMEN HAVE THE UPPER HAND AND GUYS . . . WELL . . .
Now I can legitimately understand why women would use Tinder because they have a massive advantage in the process, but for men I’m not sure what’s their reason for use. Men outnumber women almost four to one, and a doing a quick google search will show you that the average woman has a matching rate of 10.6% compared to that of the average man who matches at a paltry 0.6%. This article, further substantiated by a legitimate study from one of the workers at Hinge shows that the average looking guy is going to be facing an uphill battle when it comes to matching with the most desirable women. I was recently on a date with a woman — met her the old fashioned way, crazy I know — and she told me that the number of matches she gets per week is in the hundreds, that she feels overwhelmed with the number of messages that she receives from guys and that in all of those matches she only went on two dates over a several month time span — guys — this is what you’re up against when it comes to going on dates with attractive women from dating apps.
REJECTION NO MORE
The dating apps are brilliant in that they disguise rejection. One does not have to feel the sting of a rejection, instead one’s feelings are preserved through hundreds of quiet rejections while simultaneously receiving the dopamine hits of swiping and matching — the side effects aren’t present until two weeks later when you decide that you need to do an app cleanse and change your life so in a month when you’re feeling good and ready you can go through the whole process again.
So what does Tinder do for us? I do not believe the majority of us are seeking love and fulfillment, instead perpetual dissatisfaction with what we currently do and have allows us to always seek the possibility of having something better, and something like that is always going to have massive allure — ‘cause who the fuck is happy with what they currently have? Smart people. And by and large we are not smart folks — the app creators have created technology that gets us to behave like the rats in “rat park” who when given the choice between a bottle of water and a bottle of water laced with heroin will forgo the aforementioned for the latter until we overdose. Perhaps in a future edition of this article I will delve further into this idea but I don’t actually think the analogy is as farfetched as it might appear — these apps are technological drugs invisible to the person using them.
There are other points that I’m interested in exploring but for the sake of simply posting this I’m going to cut it here — so in the meantime, I guess we’ll all just have to keep chasing possibility.
“Pleasure disappoints, possibility, never.”
—Soren Kierkegaard
