 | By Parker Richards Staff Editor |
Dating apps: They're awful, right? Even friends of mine who have met their long-term partners on dating apps have little good to say about them, and for those of us who are single, a mere mention of Hinge, Bumble, Tinder or Raya is often shudder inducing. But the apps aren't just bad; the talk of the town is that they're getting far, far worse.
It is a truth, near universally acknowledged, that a tech company no longer in possession of a good venture-capital-backed fortune must be in want of a paying subscriber base. Or at least that's the going theory for why the apps are in quality free fall. As Gina Cherelus, who covers dating for The Times, reported last week, features that force users to pay more for access to certain more desirable profiles — like Hinge's Standouts — are particularly reviled.
But is there more to it than mere economics? I asked Magdalene J. Taylor, one of the smartest writers on sex, dating and romance in the internet age, to think through the problem. She wrote for The Times last year to urge young Americans to have more sex (there's a sex recession going on, if you hadn't heard), and her newsletter, Many Such Cases, is required reading on how sex is had and perceived on and offline.
Taylor makes a case for getting off the apps entirely. "Our romantic lives are not products," she writes. "They should not be subjected to monthly subscription fees, whether we're the ones paying or we're the ones people are paying for." Even when "algorithmic torture" is ubiquitous in our tech-addled lives, the stakes are simply too high in dating, she says. "We are not online shopping. We are looking for people we may potentially spend our lives with."
A friend who ditched the apps long ago likes to tell me that deleting them will lead daters to a paradise of "open chakras"; simply having no other option, he thinks, means we're more open to finding love out in the wild and off our phones. And after paying for Hinge's premium subscription to fact-check Taylor's article — $35.92 with tax, expensed to The Times — I confirmed that the app experience is a bleak one, whether or not you pay up.
The illusion of infinite choice and the ability (after sending off the required tribute to the Hinge overlords) to swipe through more of those choices don't make modern dating seem any less draining.
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