Ladies, let me begin by asking you, are you single? If you are, have you tried taking a chance on a dating app? If you’re not single, did you meet your current significant other through a dating app?
The reason why I wanted to ask this question is because obviously, dating apps have become a HUGE part of the dating scene all over the world. While I’ve heard some good and bad stories, I’m still undecided whether it has a positive or negative impact on the dating scene.
Nancy Jo Sales, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, wrote a piece back in September 2015. It was titled Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse. The story garnered plenty of opinions from people because of it’s real-life revelations from Tinder users. But to summarize the piece, it shared how the most popular dating app Tinder is destroying the dating scene.
How exactly? For one, Tinder lets you pick someone to date by simply swiping left and right. Actually, that’s quite similar to online shopping except with e-commerce, you shop for goods. According to Sales:
It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.
Another reason is the so-called short-term mating strategies. To put it in layman’s terms, Tinder is promoting a “hook up” culture which obviously isn’t directed to helping people meet someone who they can marry someday. Plus, men know there are lots of single women out there, which makes them care less about being romantically involved.
David Buss, University of Texas Psychology professor shared this thoughts about online dating:
Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there.
One dimension of this is the impact it has on men’s psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.
These are really good points made if you ask me and I do agree with them too. Dating apps like Tinder have made it so easy for men and women to find a short-term partner or may I say, a hook-up as there is a thinking that they can always find guy or girl the next day.
There is nothing romantic about it. You don’t get to know each other or have enough time to do so before you meet. Moreover, one of the features of Tinder is matching a user with someone nearby, hence, another reason why people just easily hook up for a night and forget about each other the next day.
True enough, there has been a huge increase in people resorting to online dating in the past years. The Pew Internet and Life Project did a study in 2013 and this is the result:
Global Web Index also did a study on Tinder users. The results showed that there’s 42% of users who are committed but still uses Tinder.
This study from Global Web Index is indeed a shocker. So now, not only is Tinder a favorite app for single people looking for hook-ups… apparently, even those in a relationship or are married are looking to hook up too! This begs another question, are dating apps contributing to cheating and infidelity? I’ll leave that question to you.
Tinder quickly backfired and said these numbers are preposterous.
Tinder on Twitter
Our actual data says that 1.7% of Tinder users are married – not 30% as the preposterous GlobalWebIndex article indicated.
On the other hand, I’m an optimist and I refuse to see things one-sided. Referring back to Pew’s study, many people still people that online dating allows them to meet new people and possibly help them find a good match. Numbers do not lie and for me, it shows that there are people out there who use online dating and dating apps with a serious intention of finding a long-term relationship too.
Nonetheless, I did take into consideration that the generation gap can be a huge factor here as marriage rates continue to decline over the past years. The younger generation may prefer to date short-term as they are more focused on studies and career as opposed to people who are already settled in their careers and are now focused on finding love.
Now that I’ve reached the end of my piece, I am still undecided. Good or bad? Positive or negative impact? Right now, I cannot give you a straight answer but I can tell you one thing, dating apps have opened doors for people to search for a significant other in their life. These chances are for everyone’s taking. But at the end of the day, it is a person’s choice whatever he or she wants to do with those chances. Short-term mating or long-term relationships, it is really up to the person and maybe, we cannot simply just put the blame on the internet and dating apps.