Love In The Age Of Tinder (or, Sylvia Plath’s Figs Are Fake and That’s Kind of How Dating Apps Are Changing Modern Romance)
In Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar,” the young heroine stands in front of a fig tree, imagining each of the figs as a different possibility for her life: “one fig was a husband and a happy home and children… another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions.” But, unable to choose between the bounty of options before her, “the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground” at her feet.
It’s a dark but relatable metaphor for romance in the age of dating apps, where users peruse a flurry of profiles and pause, occasionally, to zoom in on an attractive possibility. But what makes the metaphor so apt is that there’s something strange about Plath’s fig tree. The protagonist imagines spending time with Socrates and Attila, who died a long time ago, of course, and would make ghastly lovers. These lovers are purely imaginative — the figs aren’t real.
The issue here isn’t about bots or misrepresentations or even catfishing. A large portion of Tinder’s 50 million users are very real people, and while misrepresentation certainly exists (several studies conclude that men tend to lie about their occupation and increase their height by two inches, and women tend to lie about their weight and use less accurate photos), it’s not that surprising or interesting.
What is interesting, however, is that users are frequently surprised or disappointed by a date even when they appear exactly like their profile. How can someone look the same in-person, yet still be vastly different from what one imagined?
Profiles are composed of a maximum of six photos and 500 characters of text. Users often make good use of this relatively sparse card to advertise a robust lifestyle and wit, with a fun caption underlining photos of themselves skiing or fishing, jumping off boats, eating spaghetti and posing with a puppy or, to suggest adventure, an exotic animal, maybe a tiger or a monkey.
Of course, there’s a massive difference between looking at the brochure and actually visiting the place. The tone of a person’s voice, the rhythm of their speech, what they like to talk about, their gestures — in short, the entire sense of a person — is largely missing from a profile. A profile is an empty outline of a person, a shell devoid of personality. Consequently, the only way to get any interactive sense of a person is through the chat feature that activates once there is a match, but even there the visual and tonal cues that normally guide conversations with strangers are entirely absent. It remains nearly impossible to deduce romantic chemistry from a profile and some text exchanges.
Oddly enough, this is what makes dating apps so alluring — one never knows whether a match might turn into something more. The possibilities seem vast precisely because the profiles are so vacuous, which encourages users to stuff them with all manner of imaginative fancies. Without any real sense of a person, people are left to imagine whatever possibilities they please. Dating apps are fig trees, with never-ending figs.
There’s a reason behind the delirious proliferation of dating apps on the market, and it’s not that they have a high probability of matching ideal partners. While 60% of Americans who use dating apps claim they are looking for true love, a Pew Research Center survey reports that only 5% of Americans who are married or in a serious relationship claim they met on a dating app (although, according to another survey, 12% of people ages 18–29 claim they met their current partner in a relationship online).
None of this is to say that dating apps don’t work. If the criterion of success is simply finding a date, they work remarkably well — with 10 million people swiping every day on Tinder alone (only one of the brands in the Match Group’s portfolio that includes OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and match.com), it’s hard to imagine how dating apps wouldn’t dramatically increase user’s chances of finding a date. Dating apps have introduced an entirely new form of courtship into the world in part for that reason: never before on earth has it been possible to romantically propose oneself, at least theoretically, to 50 million people.
The odds shift with those kinds of numbers, but so does the game. Dating apps are a boon for hookup culture, but they may not bode so well for people that are looking for something more serious. This is because dating apps are not merely updating how efficiently we meet new people, they’re also changing the psychology of modern romance and relationships.
By taking courtship online, dating apps have removed the often embarrassing and awkward ritual of talking to a complete stranger and replaced it with a match that green lights a chat. This is a brilliant move, since it transforms one of the most inhibiting parts of courtship — starting a conversation with someone — into something actually fun to do: swiping and matching.
This essentially creates a game of hot-or-not that is habit inducing: swiping is the most natural gesture for choosing yes or no on a screen, looking at profiles is a kind of voyeurism, and winning a match is a sudden little dopamine hit that draws in the user. Finally, the fact that profiles are basically empty figs that one can stuff with imaginative possibilities keeps everyone hopefully swiping: even if one date doesn’t turn out as expected, there’s always another promising match waiting to happen.
In this sense, dating apps share the addictive folly of gambling platforms. The chances of winning the lottery, for example, are extremely miniscule, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from buying tickets. In fact, it’s safe to assume that most people buy lottery tickets not so much because they’re awful at math and sincerely think they’ll win, but rather because they like to imagine winning the lottery, with all those planes and mansions. Similarly, while it’s statistically clear that a match is highly unlikely to blossom into a relationship, that hasn’t stopped anyone from swiping on profiles and imagining a match made in heaven.
Like slots and dice, dating apps work precisely by failing: users will probably match but, statistically, that match will probably not work out. And just like a casino would immediately close its doors if hitting the jackpot became a common result, if dating apps would produce an algorithm that would somehow divine a user’s ideal partner, then that would spell the end for The Match Group. The idea, after all, is to keep users at the machine. There’s little wonder why terms like “Tinderella” and “Tindervention” exist.
Yet perhaps the most important way that dating apps have changed courtship and modern romance lies outside the app, in the way users treat each other. Dating apps facilitate meeting and chatting with strangers, but they also facilitate behaviors like ghosting (when someone suddenly disappears after chatting), zombieing/submarining (when someone suddenly reappears after not chatting for awhile), benching (when someone keeps a potential partner on reserve) and breadcrumbing (when someone drops little morsels of text to keep a potential partner interested).
These behaviors surely exist offline as well, but they are far more common online. Offline, meeting new people might involve the potentially daunting task of talking to strangers. It certainly takes more time and risk than meeting online. But perhaps that added time and risk encourages people to be more invested in their dates. Dating apps allow users to meet new people efficiently and painlessly, but only by commodifying dating and matches, which in turn promotes a habit of trivializing the event of meeting someone new. Perhaps by providing a nearly infinite series of figs, the apps are making it hard to focus on any one of them.
