The Toxic World of Tinder
According to a UCLA study, merely 7% of communication is the actual words we say. All the rest is within our tone and within our gestures. And yet, according to a 2021 study conducted by the Statista Research Department, over half of us have used dating apps in order to find romance. Stated another way, 50% of men and 59% of women use dating apps in which 93% of what we have to say is miscommunicated. Or more generously, our personalities are communicated so poorly that less than 10% of who we are can actually be understood.
Even before Corona, the world of romance seemed to be changing. Looking back now, it’s hard to overstate what a paradigm shift it was when the first dating websites came into being. But it took a while for the stigma around them to fall.
Given how much things have changed within the last ten years, it’s hard to believe that websites like Match.com, eHarmony, and Christian Mingle once reigned supreme over this strange new landscape. Those early dating sites gave birth to even more, but eventually even the PlentyOfFish, OkCupids, and Blackpeoplemeet.coms needed to step aside and make room for their successors — their boisterous new millennial cousins — dating apps.
I remember when Tinder was first invented. People were ambivalent about how to respond to it. When a kid in my English class was bold enough to admit he’d met a girl…
