Tinder, a consumerist love

Dear peach’z,

You have all already experienced Tinder. 24 hours, several weeks, many years, or a lifetime, to each his own experience.

You have to admit, at first it’s very funny, and especially very practical to meet people, whatever the purpose. Anyway, what is undeniable is that once you have succumbed to it you will live quite a social experience ! The little problem is that you always get tired of it… After several bad experiences,  that sometimes make us laugh with hindsight, we discover the real face of Tinder, and must say it is really creepy.

And we, as we adore everything that is raw, defective, and even disturbing sometimes, I will dissect this famous social network and all the things it has damaged, transformed or destroyed. It is clear that dating apps have affected how we view dating, sexuality and the couple.

Today our greatest enemy is choice. Drowned in this mass of potential and interchangeable partners, we no longer know what to choose and these endless possibilities offered by dating applications project us in a terrible indecision. We can no longer choose because we are always afraid to miss something, or rather someone. We have the unfortunate tendency to believe that we can always find better and that makes us eternal dissatisfied. So dating apps and especially Tinder have had a deleterious effect on our desire. We go there frantically, mechanically, but desire is not, it is fragile. On Tinder we are imprisoned in the immediacy of the match, we no longer have time to desire. Tinder has created a kind of insatiability of desire since it no longer has time to emerge.

Tinder bets on speed and quantity. People don’t want to waste time anymore. Pascal Lardellier sums up this phenomenon with humour by saying:: « In Billy Wilder, love lasted seven years, in Frédéric Beigbeder, three years, and on the Internet, sometimes twenty minutes.». Thus appearance took a prominent place in our relationships. Dating applications are platforms where images dominate. They work on an avatar model, a digital and upgraded version of oneself. We are judged on external signs, on the physical and no longer on an exchange, a shared moment. We no longer take the time to discover. We no longer take time when love takes time.

Tinder has also changed the nature of engagement. Romanticism still exists, of course, but now prevails a representation of the couple as a partnership. Nowadays we commit to a relationship for some years, not necessarily for a lifetime. And this clearly reflects a new loving fear, that of commitment. Futhermore, suffering in love now seems to come from the difficulty of defining one’s feelings, from the incommunicability, and from the fear of infidelity. Everything seems so easy and accessible. It is like you are three clicks away from cheating on or being cheated on.

Moreover, the definition of commitment has also been affected since Tinder accelerated this assumed dissociation between sex and feelings, which has existed since the 1970s. With Tinder came the dynasty of the one-night stand. People have freed themselves when the screen became a kind of protection. And this protection, that answers under the name of virtual distance, created or at least promoted disinhibition, and led to dehumanization of relations and dating.

Paradoxically, the Internet brings us as close as it separates us. Dating apps have created a great confusion between virtual proximity and real distance which has had a real impact on the nature of our relationships, since today physical encounter sometimes ends up no longer being a goal in itself.

Finally, all these changes stem from the fact that dating apps have created a consumerist vision of love. In the end, Tinder is only a meeting market governed by competition, calculation and self-marketing. As sociologist Eva Illouz explains in her book The Feelings of Capitalism “dating sites have introduced in the field of dating the fundamental principles of mass consumption—abundance, freedom of choice, efficiency, rationalization, selective targeting and standardization”.

Calculation, efficiency, selective targeting… It comes back to this idea that people don’t have time to waste so they rely on the illusory promises of dating apps. Indeed, they have appropriated themselves an adage that dates from the night of time, « Birds of a feather flock together", to make it their first selling point. It is the authoritative algorithm. It replaced chance by becoming the destiny 2.0.

With these dating apps we have moved into the age of emotional capitalism. But in these supermarkets of meetings where everything starts on a screen, do we not end up developing a dehumanized vision of human relations ? Even though some of them had a « match » that changed their lives, don’t dating apps turn love into a mirage ?

Finally in this market, subject to the laws of supply and demand, where the temptation to find better is doubled by the fear of finding no one, it is difficult not to develop disorders of desire and self-esteem.

By Juliette Bigot