Virtual Love and Friendship: In the Case of Bangladesh

By Sairana Ahsan

“What I found most interesting was that she seemed to be ‘collecting’ male friends through her Facebook network, stating she wanted to have a male friend from all 64 districts in the country.”

Gone are the days of handwritten love letters and waiting at the balcony to see a glimpse of one’s crush. With the proliferation of numerous dating websites and apps (like Tinder), smartphones have brought the chances of meeting someone compatible to the palm of one’s hand. Subsequently, the advent of social media has also changed the scenario of love and friendship in Bangladesh drastically over the past decade. In a society where dating openly is stigmatized, young people have taken to virtual networking — and even falling in love — on social networking websites (like Facebook) with people from their own locality and beyond.

A statistics published by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) in February 2018 states that around 232 million people use the internet in Bangladesh, of which 64% are mobile internet users. There are around 10 million smartphone users who have access to Facebook in Bangladesh.

Facebook is the most common platform for connecting online among Bangladeshi youth. Apart from that, other networking sites include Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, Tantan, Tinder, IMO, Grindr and many more. These virtual social networking sites have introduced the hybrid lifestyle of “online-offline activities” which are now a part of everyday life for people with access to internet and smartphone anywhere in the world. Bangladesh is no different; anyone with a minimal functioning smartphone is leading a hybrid life which is an amalgamation of online and offline activities.

Finding a friend or a date has also been influenced by this hybrid lifestyle. Facebook is the most common and used networking site in Bangladesh, even though it is not exclusively a dating site, people have found ways to use it to find friends, potential dates and partners.

While conducting fieldwork in an urban slum in Bangladesh, I came across Runu, a 17-year-old girl who is a secondary school graduate. She made a little money by privately tutoring two class-1 students at home and bought a Chinese smartphone from a shop inside the slum with just 1,000 Taka. These shops mostly sell stolen or lost mobile phones for much-reduced prices, which allows adolescents like Runu to buy their own smartphones. These shops also sell affordable data packages from local telecommunications service providers which allows access to internet at a cheap price.

Runu said she is an avid user of Facebook and boasted having more than 700 friends on her list. She admitted that she didn’t know most of them personally and added these people with the hopes of making new friends, chatting, flirting, possibly having over-the-phone relationships, and eventually dating someone from this pool of individuals. After meeting a few boys who lived nearby, she went to restaurants with them and chatted over the phone for months. What I found most interesting was that she seemed to be “collecting” male friends through her Facebook network, stating she wanted to have a male friend from all 64 districts in the country.

However, I found that among members of the urban middle-class, mobile apps like Tinder are more popular. I have collected various stories and experiences, of which one was from a single woman working in a high-income position in a company in Dhaka. She said the app allowed her to make a lot of new friends in the area that she lived in, because most of her “matches” turned out to be non-romantic friendships. However, her negative experience mostly involved unsolicited nude photos that were sent to her by various strangers — also known as when a person is trying to “slide into your DMs (direct messages)” which is perceived among the online dating community as a major faux pas and breach of consent.

It is also critical to acknowledge that a virtual world full of strangers mingling with each other — which most people are not fully aware of — is prone to becoming a breeding ground for cyberbullying and cyber violence. Remarkably, the Government of Bangladesh has been mindful and aware of this and enacted the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ACT from 2006. However, awareness among the general population about the legal implications should be increased so that users know how to reach law enforcement agencies for help when situations have turned violent and abusive.

In a country where there is barely a “dating culture” that is jumping straight into the online dating bandwagon, we need to pause and take into consideration factors such as the mental health effects of online dating. For instance, there are major implications when it comes to defining “desirability” when apps like Tinder force people to “swipe” or select people based on a few superficial factors like photos and limited background information. Therefore, people may be judging others based on one’s looks, leading them to neglect the personal connection that is important at any relationship.

Overall, we often overlook the impact that our online lives have on our offline lives. How friendship and love unfold in the virtual spaces of Bangladesh is something to focus on and needs more in-depth research if we want to understand the thought processes of the user population and implement effective, targeted policies and programs that promote safe and enjoyable online networking experiences for all.

Sairana Ahsan is a Research Fellow at BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University.