Image credit: Gaze, by Xiaohan
by Finn Bader
Read the Faculty Introduction.
“But every boy I’ve ever met is a fuckboy”. This is the voice of Ashley, a 20-year old college student interviewed for a Vanity Fair piece titled “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’” (Sales). The article delves into the intentions and overall psychology of Tinder users, attempting to shed light into the app’s darkest corners. The author, Nancy Jo Sales, concludes that Tinder has changed the dating landscape, with one of the interviewees reaching the gloomy verdict: “Romance is completely dead.” In particular, she denounces the superficiality of the relationships that are created through the app, which focus solely on the physical rather than the emotional aspects of a relationship. For instance, she introduces and describes the attitude of Marty, a Tinder user: “‘We don’t know what the girls are like,’ […]. And yet a lack of an intimate knowledge of his potential sex partners never presents him with an obstacle to physical intimacy” (Sales). Here, Sales problematizes the types of relationships Tinder fosters, by pointing out how the app objectifies Tinder users, promoting the idea of quantity over quality, and making the individual Tinder user replaceable. Besides Vanity Fair, many other publications have released articles engaging with this question, using provocative titles, such as “The End of Courtship?” (from The New York Times), “Tinder: the shallowest dating app ever?” (The Guardian), and “The Five Years That Changed Dating” (The Atlantic).
But its controversial concept seems to work: Tinder has racked up an astounding 5.9 million paying users for their Gold and Premium features (Iqbal), who account for around 70% of Tinder’s total revenue (Bromwich). And while I understood and sympathized with the experiences and observations of authors such as Sales, who decry the superficiality of the app interface, I was skeptical about the claim that Tinder has changed the dating landscape. Does Tinder really have such a far reach, such a significant impact? Is an app able to single-handedly change an entire generation’s concept of dating and love in the span of a few years?
These far-reaching implications of Sales’ claims prompted me to look into the matter, so I decided to create a fake account for myself.1 I had seen my friends use Tinder before but decided that it was time for me to personally try it out. But right before I finished setting up my account and could start swiping away, I encountered an advertisement for a Tinder Gold subscription. In its free version, Tinder users are limited to 50 likes in a time frame of 12 hours. Additionally, the geographical distance from the potential match, automatically determined by the device’s GPS function, and the user’s age were always shown on the profile. Cue the Tinder Gold features: unlimited likes, and the ability to hide one’s age and location. After everything I had read and heard about Tinder, this surprised me; despite being criticized severely for its shallow approach to romantic matchmaking, Tinder seemed to double down on its approach by offering a paid version, giving users more power in the app by extending the features they can access. By taking away the limit on likes, Tinder aims at increasing the pace and quantity of matches. At the same time, by rendering information about age and location optional, they reinforce the idea that the user’s pictures and their physical attractiveness are the only things that matter (Tyson et al. 461). Tinder relationships are bound to be of a superficial nature, as the profile layout only allows for a short description of 500 characters, not allowing for much connection on an emotional level. Additionally, a large majority of the screen is taken up by the user’s photos, resulting in users matching with each other by virtue of physical attraction. In fact, Tinder explicitly promotes this value of superficiality — and casualness — in its Gold features. In its blog post titled “Introducing Tinder Gold — A First-Class Swipe Experience,” they promote how these features aim to make the user’s experience as easy and casual as possible: “Now you can sit back, enjoy a fine cocktail, and browse through profiles at your leisure.” (Tinder Blog).
Browsing through Tinder’s website, I was surprised to find that Tinder nonetheless advertises with couples who claim to have found their “love of [their] life” or “soulmate” (Tinder), which stands in stark contrast with the superficial relationships that Sales criticized. Confronted with these seemingly conflicting concepts of love and relationships, I decided to read up on the different definitions of love from a research perspective; the conclusions in this paper will largely draw upon, and be applicable to a European and North American context.2 When talking about romantic love in relationships, researchers often distinguish between the concepts of companionate and passionate love, which are often connected and related in a romantic relationship (Felmlee and Sprecher). While companionate love is less intense and most present when partners commit to a romantic relationship, passionate love develops first, playing an especially significant role in initial attraction that often dissipates over time (Sprecher and Felmlee). Defined as a “state of intense longing for union with another,” passionate love is thought to be closely related to sexual desire, similarly defined as “longing for sexual union” (Cacioppo and Hartfield). Researchers often use these terms interchangeably, highlighting the physical nature of passionate love. To examine match-making in Tinder Gold, I will focus on the concept of passionate love, as it pertains to the initial physical attraction in a relationship, which is the exact superficial approach that Sales decries in her article.
As the app’s layout demonstrates, Tinder clearly intends to encourage the formation of passionate love through physical attraction. In Tinder Gold, physical attractiveness is reinforced as a value and consequently takes on an even more important role in the matchmaking process. Research has shown that physical appearance is one of the main factors in determining attraction and desire for a romantic partner, thus providing the basis for passionate love: “[our research] revealed that physical attractiveness predicted romantic evaluations with a moderate-to-strong effect size […]” (Eastwick et al. 623). Furthermore, physical attractiveness as a determining factor in subjects’ ideal partner preference was found to be equally significant for both sexes. This finding is interesting, as it disproves the evolutionary perspective of ideal partner preference — the idea that there are sex differences in ideal partner preferences, where men value physical attractiveness while women value earning prospects, and that “ideal partner preferences are functional” based on these sex differences (Eastwick et al. 626). Instead, physical attractiveness seems to be a determining factor in measuring attraction across both sexes in a Western research context. Additionally, Eastwick et al. found that in a speed-dating context comparable to Tinder, physical attractiveness often influences the subject’s choice, regardless of what they previously stated as valued attributes in a romantic partner:
[…] people’s spontaneous affective reactions to physical attractiveness in a romantic partner were entirely independent of their conscious judgments about whether they believed physical attractiveness to be a valuable attribute in a partner.
(Eastwick et al. 642)
Overall, these findings strongly indicate that physical attractiveness has played and continues to play a deciding role in determining human attraction, regardless of the individual’s previously stated preferences.
These findings directly apply to the logic behind Tinder and its Gold feature. By giving the user the ability to hide their location and age, Tinder Gold lessens the value of such information. The user’s sole focus becomes the profile of their potential match, i.e. physical appearance. Furthermore, removing the limit on the number of likes a user can give places emphasis on the value of quantity, generating as many matches as possible, thus lessening the value of the single match. The user is encouraged to keep swiping, to keep matching, as there is no need to be thrifty with one’s likes. Tinder Gold consequently enhances superficiality of the app by increasing the focus on physical appearance and quantity of matches, building on the premise that physical attractiveness alone is able to generate sufficient attraction and produce matches in the app (Cacioppo and Hatfield). Tinder Gold’s enormous potential and success is hardly surprising then, as it directly pertains to and encourages our innate human propensity to be attracted by physical appearance, in the context of passionate love.
Although the underlying factors influencing attraction are thought to be constant and inherent in humans, the expression and experience of passionate love and sexual desire depends heavily on what is acceptable in society (Regan). Romantic partner choice for both companionate and passionate love is continually shaped and influenced by social factors, changing and evolving over centuries with society (Kuchler and Beher 7). The purpose of the simplest forms of human interaction and cooperation — out of which love later sprang — was to acquire an evolutionary advantage to guarantee survival and create offspring (Henrich and Muthukrishna 215). This utilitarian approach to love remained for a long time in the Western hemisphere until the Industrial Revolution in around 1800, when work and private life became increasingly separate, and the individual became removed from societal structures such as class or the extended family structure (Kuchler and Beher 12). The concept of love became increasingly complex after this, with a higher focus on companionate love as a governing quality of relationships (12). More recently, the internet has proven itself to be a contributing factor to change. It encourages and creates new forms of connecting with people, as well as enables almost immediate communication across the globe. It completely upends the nature of our relationships, eradicating rigid social structures and placing more emphasis on the individual. Sociologist Barry Wellman from the University of Toronto aims to depict this shift with his theory of “Networked Individualism”. According to this theory, an individual’s social environment has been transformed from intimate, contained social circles towards a much larger, broader network with an increased scope of flexibility to move around in it (Boase and Wellman). There are three main characteristics to this theory:
1. Relationships are both local and long distance.
2. Personal networks are sparsely knit but include densely knit groups.
3. Relationships are more easily formed and abandoned.
(Boase and Wellman)
In summary, Networked Individualism claims that the internet facilitates communication, by expanding our network regardless of location and making relationships less binding. In the context of Tinder Gold, the app promotes the formation of relationships regardless of distance, by rendering age and location as optional information. Previously, the app retrieved the user’s location and only showed profiles in a customizable radius, limited to 100 miles. Since this information was always shown in the profile, it arguably influenced the user’s swiping behavior, as it indicated availability and feasibility to meet up with the match. With Tinder Gold, the user is not subject to this restriction anymore; in fact, Tinder recently added a “Passport Feature,” which allows the user to set their location to anywhere in the world and use the app in this area, completely eliminating any geographical barriers.
Removing the limit on the number of likes furthermore allows the expansion of the user’s network and facilitates the formation and abandonment of relationships, as there are always a myriad of other users that are just a swipe away — which is the exact behavior of collecting Tinder matches and building a network of superficial acquaintances that Nancy Jo Sales observes in her piece on Tinder dating culture (Sales). Referring back to my own experience of using Tinder, the theory of Networked Individualism might serve to explain the three likes that I got; despite having no picture of myself and no description in my profile, there was still a one-sided attempt by some other users to establish a connection. The app allows this simple formation of a relationship with a single swipe, and the relationship can be abandoned as easily, by not responding or even blocking the other user. Tinder Gold and its functions are thus in line with the development of Networked Individualism, and can be seen as part of a larger societal development in Europe and North America that has changed the way in which we think about relationships.
Sociologist Eva Ilouz makes similar direct observations about the effects of the internet on dating in Western societies. In her research on online dating platforms, she claims that the internet’s “disembedding of individual romantic choices from the moral and social fabric” has culminated in the “emergence of a self-regulated market of encounters” (41), where partner choice — especially for passionate love partners — becomes an individual choice independent of previous social structures. Furthermore, she claims that media, consumer culture, and the internet have directly promoted superficiality in human attraction. In modern media, the value of “sexiness” — emphasizing sexuality and physical attractiveness — has become increasingly portrayed and idealized (42). “Sexiness” has become a characteristic of its own, independent of a person’s character and detached from emotions: “‘sex appeal,’ ‘sexual desirability,’ or ‘sexiness’ reflects a cultural emphasis on sexuality and physical attractiveness as such, detached from a moral world of values” (42). Though her research does not focus on Tinder specifically, this cultural emphasis includes apps such as Tinder with its Gold features, exploiting our propensity for superficial attraction to a person’s physical attractiveness. Illouz further claims that sexuality has taken on a more central and deciding role in relationships as a consequence of the increasing depiction of sexuality in media and culture:
Undoubtedly, along with the feminist and bohemian claims to sexual freedom, consumer culture has been the most significant cultural force that has contributed to the sexualization of women, and later of men. […] The commodification of the body through the signifiers of youth and beauty entailed its intense eroticization, and its close proximity to romantic love as well.
(Ilouz 42-44)
The increased significance of sexuality in relationships, combined with a general liberalization of societal norms pertaining to the expression of sexual desire, consequently allowed people to pursue passionate love more easily and freely.
In short, societal developments influence the way we choose our romantic partners and the freedom with which we can pursue them. While the concept of romance has changed significantly over time, the underlying mechanisms of our bodies that ultimately determine attraction and desire are uniform across both sexes and have remained the same in a Western context. More recently, the barriers limiting partner choice have broken down and technology has opened up new opportunities to meet romantic partners. Encouraging the value of superficiality as a medium to meet partners, Tinder Gold fits perfectly into this societal development. Against a backdrop of a society developing towards a focus on open sexuality and expanding social circles, Tinder Gold takes advantage of these developments by providing a simplistic medium for meeting romantic partners. Its success in recent years is therefore not surprising.
My time as a Tinder user remained short-lived and despite my curiosity, I did not decide to purchase Tinder Gold. Trying out Tinder and flipping casually through profiles is superficial and felt weird, and I could certainly sympathize with the experience of Nancy Jo Sales and other authors. But returning to my original question of whether Tinder destroyed romance and changed a generation’s concept of dating, I realize that this is not the case. While Tinder may have changed how we find our partners, it has not changed how we become attracted to them. And this is exactly why Tinder — and Tinder Gold — have found such success. Physical attractiveness has always played a deciding role in determining initial attraction, and it will only continue to do so in the future, strengthened by societal developments in Europe and North America towards heavily individualized societies that cherish sexiness as a value.
We should see Tinder as a product of these larger societal developments towards expanding social circles and superficiality in human relationships. Being one of the largest and most popular dating apps, Tinder obviously plays an active role in promoting these values, and exploits the human propensity and societal changes towards a more sexualized society, but its reach is certainly not far enough to be a driving factor. Ultimately, whether this new way of meeting new partners is “right” or “wrong” is not the point of this paper — and I am highly doubtful that there are “right” or “wrong” ways to meet partners — but studying Tinder Gold and its success can reveal the role that superficiality plays in modern human relationships. No offense, but maybe Ashley had a point after all: we have some fuckboy qualities in all of us. Swipe on then.
Endnotes
1 Giving a false name (simply the letter G), age (27), no bio, and adding a single picture of the lake in the local park, I was actually able to garner three likes on my profile. I don’t know who they were though; only Tinder Gold knows…
2 However, it would be interesting to investigate further how these findings could apply to the way Tinder is used in other dating landscapes, e.g. in societies with more traditional or conservative dating customs.
Works Cited
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