Swiped — Hooking Up and How We Get Addicted to Apps

So, I remember long time ago, in a kingdom far far away… . (joking, it was just my house), I was sitting on this step leading into our house, in the backyard. I was with a guy (who’s name I can’t remember now) that I had started dating not long ago. We were talking about how we met.

I remember I told the guy X, “you know, I really don’t know what we should tell people about how we started dating, like how we met and such. It’s just so embarrassing to say to someone that we actually met online.”

He told me not to worry, that it’s not that bad. Then he followed up with, “why don’t we tell people that we met at a grocery store while shopping?”

“Yeah,” I said, “good idea. Let’s do that.”

This was more than 10 years ago, and the guy and I met on OkCupid. Tinder wasn’t invented yet.

Now that I think about Tinder, I feel like what it does is it provides instant gratification, at least if you’re someone who’s just looking for sex, to hookup, you can get it via Tinder. And it can happen fast. Like, tonight.

I also think about how my son, Lukas, would not exist if it wasn’t for Tinder. I met his father, Pranao, an airline pilot from India, on Tinder. We dated for a time, and then my son happened, unplanned, by accident. I remember how confused and shocked I was when I found out that I was going to be a mother. But, I knew that I wanted to keep him. He was my miracle-boy. And, well, Tinder, quite honestly, made it happen.

However, I get it that many bad things have come out of Tinder, and other online dating platforms. The HBO movie “Swiped: Hooking up in the digital age” seemed to very much focus on the negatives of online dating, all of their questions and stories seemed to show the ‘doom’ of online dating and how online dating has basically invented hooking up. I’m not disclaiming this. But, I also have a critical mindset and I know that there are always two sides of the story. Shows, movies, and documentaries like this HBO movie have the power to influence based on how they spin it. I think it is better to be objective and not so negative. Anyways, I will discuss here some of the things they mention.

“As part of $2.5 billion dating industry, a growing number of apps and sites are rapidly changing the rules — expanding and accelerating access to potential mates for hookups to long-term relationships… [for those] who use these apps to navigate a seemingly unlimited stream of potential partners.”

• Tinder gives people secrecy. You can pretend to be anything you want to be on Tinder. It is very easy to catfish on it if you want.

It’s funny, because that was how I met one of my exes. I had no idea that he was using someone else’s picture when we first started talking on Tinder. I actually didn’t even realize that it wasn’t him when we first met because of how alike the picture was. Only later I learned that he was lying to me, and many other things he told me that weren’t really true. But, I did really enjoy the times and experiences we had together, so I’m not sure where the line should be drawn. Tinder created that experience.

• Tinder gives people choices, lots and lots of choices, so it’s easy to end a relationship or dating someone and date someone else, or have sex, fast.
• It is super easy to cheat these days, and to hookup. You can message someone at 2am and it goes right to their phone. In the old days you’d have to call the family’s phone and risk someone else picking up, or you’d have to leave a voice message. No one calls and leaves voice-messages anymore — not in the dating context anyways.
• Casual sex, especially in the Western world, has become very normalized. Sex used to be special, but today it’s kinda rare to experience ‘special sex’.
• Dating apps have created an instant-sex gratification culture, an instant access to sex. You have to almost fight this instant sex-gratifying experience if you want to create a long, lasting relationship. Unless the relationship comes out of this instant-sex gratifying hookups, which is possible and maybe happens more often. How we understand relationships and sex has also been changing. Fascinating.
• Technology has transformed the way we date, and have been dating, over the years.

“If you called someone today, you’d probably be labelled a psychopath,” a guy interviewed by HBO. He said that he remembers the time when people actually talked on the phone. He said he used to do that.

Then the camera shows a normal scene of friends in a coffee shop, and almost everyone is on their phones, not talking, even though they’re sitting together around a table.

Justin Garcia, a Research Scientist, “So, we’ve really seen two major transitions since the evolution of social monogamy, some 4 to 4.4 million years ago. [Something interesting I just read about monogamy from CNN’s website: “Scientists believe that monogamy emerged so males could protect their infants from other males in ancestral groups who may kill them in order to mate with their mothers.” Apparently monogamy has only really become a norm about 1,000 years ago. Super interesting!]. The first major transition was the rise of the Agricultural Revolution, 10 to 15,000 years ago. And the second major transition, I think, has been the rise of the Internet. [If you think about it, a lot of people today don’t even want to have children, or women wait so long that they can’t have kids, or it’s just so much more difficult to find a partner to mate with and have a family]. And, with the rise of the Internet, we are in evolutionarily unprecedented waters. We are experiencing a time that people can engage with each other, and particularly around issues of romance and sex, in ways that are totally novel. [I think that people’s needs are changing. In most cases, if at all, we don’t have to protect our children from being killed by other males so that the man could mate with that woman. Internet has made access to an unlimited number of partners a reality. So, is it a wonder that we are changing too? That how we are thinking is changing? I know that I would never, ever want to marry or live with someone who had other partners, but maybe that is going to change in the years to come? Maybe in the future monogamy is going to be a thing of the past. And, what does it mean to love or want several people at once? Is it really that abnormal? Or is it just the primitive brain speaking?]

Now, that’s not to say that we’re not going to activate ancient biological part of our behavior as we use the Internet and as we use technology to engage, but what it does suggest is that as a platform, it is totally novel, it is totally unprecedented.”

• 40 million Americans use online dating.
• Adults ages 18 to 30 spend an estimated 10 hours a week on dating apps.

David Buss, evolutionary psychologist, “We evolved in the context of small groups, where say ranging from a 50 to 150 individuals. In small group living with limited geographical mobility, you would have only encountered perhaps a few dozen potential mates in your entire lifetime. So, what’s weird is that we take this small-group mating psychology, where the number of potential mates is very limited, and transplant it to the modern world where we have thousands and thousands of potential mates that we can keep swiping through, and it tiggers this short-term mating psychology in a way that never would have been triggered ancestrally.”

• People use social media to hide behind. There’s no vulnerability of rejection that there would be in real life.
• You get to choose what you share
• Because you see the picture, it tends to swamp all the other information. In the past you’d have to spend time in actually getting to know the person.
• What’s interesting is that on Tinder men tend to present themselves in a very stereotypical way, muscles (the idea of strength and protection), and women do the same, showing breasts and sex (idea of reproduction and fertility), even though the initial idea of Tinder has been hookups.
• Sex sells. Sex always sells.
• If there’s an opportunity to see women as sex objects instead of whole human beings, that opportunity will be taken, and a lot of dating apps exploit that opportunity.
• A lot of silicon valley companies have been started by hormonal, geeky, educated boys, who want to get women, to get laid.
• Why is Silicon Valley so awful to women?
• The dating industry was extremely shunned upon in the young, hip, millennial college market. Back in the day you would only use dating apps or websites if you were desperate.
• “We have 1.5 billion swipes a day,” Tinder.
• Tinder is making more money than any other app.

“I think guys are way harsher today, and they think they deserve a perfect 10… cause they got so many choices… and women are competing.”

“Tinder is like a catalogue for guys.”

“Right, left, left, right. It’s like a little video game. I find myself bumping into people on the streets while walking, and swiping.”

“Gamification is turning and experience that is not a game into a game, so giving it all the elements of a game, things like points that say, ‘you have done this well.’ Like when you’re playing a slow machine, the machine will tell you when you won with ringing bells and flashing lights, and a lot of the apps we use now have elements of that build in. Even when they aren’t really about games.”

Same thing happens on Tinder. When you get a match, you’re taken to this big, exciting screen saying that you got a ‘match!’.

• “Having unpredictable, yet frequent rewards, is the best way to motivate someone to keep moving forward” (or get them addicted to something, like an app — one of Tinder CEOs.
• “It’s a match! or it unlocks your ability to message them. Or you can message them again, or super-like them, or pull more matches to view you.”

• “Hookup sex is bad. For me personally, there has to be more intimacy to sex.”
• “I think a lot of people go into these hookup situations with an understanding and like they’re obligated to do it.”
• “You never have time to establish some chemistry.”
• “Majority of women are looking for a relationship, and majority of men are looking for a hookup on these dating apps. You can say that it’s not so different with society at large. I think that the way these dating apps are designed tips the scale over towards hookups, more.”

A Harvard dating historian, “What’s new about dating now is that it takes courtship away from private spaces, away from home and family, and explicitly puts it in market spaces. So, it puts it in places where people spend money and consume. And I would argue that, in a way, maybe is the most distinctive change. And that means that from 1900s onward, or from the invention of dating onward, dating is shaped by market dynamics. To me, the real turning point or watershed, is when you start having mobile dating apps, that everyone has it on their phones. The effect of mobile dating apps is to feel like we can be dating all the time and that you should always be putting yourself out there, always kind of promoting your ‘product’.”

What this made me think about is that dating experience has been designed, that it has been designed specifically so that people would have to spend a lot of money. I mean if you think about it, dating is expensive, or it can be, especially for men. It costs a lot of money to have to keep taking a girl out.

“Just like in economics, if you have a surplus of options, the value goes down.”

Same thing goes for anything. Teachers in America get paid nothing compared to all the work they have to do, and to what a responsible job is it. This is so because there are A LOT of teacher in US, especially American teachers. If you go to China, as an American teacher, you will be very much in demand. Everyone will want you to teach them, and you’ll make good money. It is hard to be a teacher in US and you have to jump through a great deal of hooks to even get qualified as a teacher, because there’s so many teachers here. Same thing with dating, or anything. The value goes down the more that there is of something. Competition goes up.

“You keep consuming.”

“80% of Tinder users are looking for a serious relationship,” Tinder survey.

• How much do dating apps know about you?
• People worry more about their internet persona than their real life + people.
• Reports of rape linked to online dating rise 450 percent in five years.
• How would a woman design a dating app? A dating app for women?

However it is, dating apps have completely changed the way we meet, date, even marry someone. I remember when I was an Uber driver, and I would often times talk to my passengers, one time I picked up a bunch of women. They were coming from picking up a bridal dress. I started talking to them and the bride-to-be told me how she met her fiance online. I don’t remember if she told me OkCupid or Tinder, but it was one of those. It’s fascinating. And, I keep hearing over and over again about how these datings apps bring people together, and how they have no time to go to bars or whatever other places to hang there in hopes of meeting someone. And then they say to themselves, ‘what kind of person am I going to meet at a bar anyways?’ Other people have told me how you can search through different profiles online, you can find someone that you like, and you can get to know each other even before you meet.

I like that too. I love to read. I don’t like going to bars. I like libraries, educational things, and sometimes to chill at home and watch something on my TV. I also really do like to meet people and talk to them, and I do agree that having to walk up to a total stranger to start a conversation, and to possibly experience rejection, is very stressful. There is a whole lot of safety behind a phone screen where there’s safety in numbers (you can message a hundred people on the same night and someone will respond to you), and you will still end up talking to someone, someone who likes you and is interested and maybe you realize that you have a lot in common. But yes, there’s also the thing about it being easier to drop someone and find someone else. But then again, the world has been changing, changing rapidly. Having said that, people are really looking for a connection, for love, not to settle but to be with someone who does make them happy, and whom they could possibly make happy in turn. People are more picky these days, they can be, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing?