A world where you swipe right to express interest in someone has only served to heighten the world of casual hookups, experts say.
Dating apps can help to meet new people and form connections - but they can also escalate a sometimes toxic hook-up culture. In theory, online dating should be great, and there are so many options for daters to have, but in reality, it is much less romantic than that.
"Hook-up culture" is distinguished by many daters wanting a commitment-free relationship with sexual encounters. It can create superficial connections and is unfair on those wanting to find a proper relationship.
Dating apps make it easy to strike up a conversation with someone, rather than relying on the traditional way of meeting someone in a bar, but it's hard to really know what someone's intentions are behind a screen.
The creators at Tinder, the world's most popular dating app released its Green Flags Study. This analysed dating-app behaviours and polled 8,000 heterosexual men and women across the UK, US, Australia and Canada to try and work out why dating has become so difficult at a time when dating apps have made it easier than ever to connect to people. The result? We're hugely inhibited by our own assumptions. Basically, we're self-destructing and not bothering to date because we're sick of hookups that lead nowhere.
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The study revealed that 91% of men and 94% of women are finding dating more difficult. Tinder suggests that long-term romance is not dead though. Despite 65% of women saying they believe that men are only seeking casual hook-ups, the survey revealed that in reality, that was only true for 29% of responding men, and 53% said that they were seeking a genuine romantic relationship.
The convenience of having a pool of single suitors at your fingertips means there can be more of an emphasis on these superficial connections, which means some may seek quantity over quality. Jon Birger, author of Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge, pointed out that in the 2019 annual report of Match Group, the words, "married, marriage, wedding, couple, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, husband, and wife" do not appear, as reported by Heritage.
Birger suggested that mainstream dating apps may be designed to ensure that singles never find their 'perfect match'. He said: "Dating apps make a profit, not by creating permanent couples, but by attracting new customers and by retaining old ones."
There are ways daters can filter their preferences on the apps, but thanks to algorithms, this may not always work. Men and women filter through potential suitors in vastly different ways. According to Heritage, men take a "scatter-shot" approach where they will like a high volume of women's profiles, and then comb through in later detail when they have had some matches back. Men also usually outnumber women on dating apps, and women can then become overwhelmed.
However, both men and women are usually under the impression there are better matches out there - and this can then become an addictive activity of endless scrolling through profiles and sending likes with no intention of getting to know that person. Women swipe right only 30% of the time compared to men.
Reports also show that the majority of women have been sent unsolicited sexually explicit images, and research by Pew Research found that Men who have used a dating platform in the past year are much more likely than women to say casual sex was a major reason (31% vs. 13%) for being on a dating app.
With many worried about toxic hookup culture, Tinder has taken a hit with its direct revenue dropping 5% from $509 million in Q3 of 2023 to $482 million in Q1 of 2024. Tinder payers also declined 9% over the past year, according to the official Matchgroup report released in May 2024.
The app has rebranded to try and bide away from these assumptions. Over the past year, Tinder has made some significant changes to modernise its community guidelines and beliefs. They want users to have more trust in their app, and have improved the quality of their "ecosystem".
By doing this, they have removed users who are "not on the app for its intended purpose" and also introduced a "share my date" feature, which means it will require face photos used. Another feature has been added where users can state if they would prefer to just communicate in person, as explained by Leyla Guilany-Lyard, Tinder's global head of communications who says: "We don't want people to stay hours on our app." Happy swiping!
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