Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Every now and then, a certain chart goes viral. Based on an ongoing research project, it tells a simple and shocking story about how American couples meet in the age of the smartphone:
For the people who share it, this data seems obvious, alarming, or both. In one view, the problem of meeting partners has been solved by modern technology, which makes finding, sorting, and communicating with new people easy. (Wow!) In another, one of the most essential parts of being a human being has now been mediated by a few large companies who have turned dating into a bleak monetized grind. (Look, just another way we live in hell!) Either way, the dating apps have thoroughly and completely triumphed, which is important to keep in mind when you hear about what they’re doing now, per the Financial Times:
Online matchmaking apps are seeking to push users off screens and towards getting to know each other in person in their latest effort to address concerns about “dating fatigue” among Gen Z users. Dating group Tinder has followed the lead of new apps such as Doubble and Fourplay to offer a “double dates” feature, where matched people each bring a friend to the meet up. Meanwhile, Breeze, an app where users do not chat over text but simply arrange a time and place for a date, has seen its monthly active users double to more than 200,000 in the past 12 months.
Some apps have been rolling out AI dating assistants, which is conceptually funny but also emphasizes the degree to which users conceive of these apps as a form of work, full of mandatory drudgery and inefficiency. In the context of claims about Gen-Z “dating fatigue,” though, the chart tells another story. While all but the youngest millennials can clearly remember a time before dating was primarily an app-based activity, there’s a growing group of people who can’t — and for whom dating fatigue isn’t so easy to separate from dating-app fatigue.
This leaves the apps in a strange situation. There are clear signs that the market is saturated, for one. It also leaves them associated with a much wider range of anxieties and worries than simple fatigue. Users who employ apps to successfully partner off forget they exist; users who remain on the apps associate them not just with the challenges of dating but with general desire for a partner or with feelings of yearning, depression, loneliness, and rejection. There is evidence that the public’s general opinion of online dating has, after a period of rapid increasing acceptance, stabilized and even started to turn. In political terms, the apps are vulnerable to something like thermostatic shifts in public opinion: Whatever solution they offer to a complicated (or emotionally fraught) problem tends to drive negative feelings in response. In both a practical and an emotional sense, it’s increasingly seen as Tinder’s fault that any particular user can’t get a date or keeps going on bad ones.
The problem these apps are trying to solve, in other words — with an emphasis on “real life,” AI dating coaches, and a broadening of scope into friendship — is themselves. They’ve managed to install themselves in between a significant share of the world’s potential sexual partners, who are now dependent on them, and they’ve made lots of money in the process. Why wouldn’t they be hated for it?
