Swipe Right or Wrong? How Dating Apps are Changing Modern Relationships

With how common dating apps are, it is hard to imagine dating without them. Whether you are trying to craft the perfect dating profile on Hinge before bed or swiping through Tinder on your lunch break, dating apps have infiltrated how we meet, flirt, and form relationships. They have completely changed how we find love, but not without complications. 

Dating apps can be the modern matchmakers that help someone find their best friends, future spouses, and everything in between. They have also created platforms where people can find superficial love. So, are dating apps helping or harming relationships? Both. Online dating, just like most things in love, are complicated.

The Rise of the Digital Matchmaker

Dating apps, since their first appearance, have revolutionized the dating realm. They were created to make dating easy and convenient. They break barriers for those who are shy, live in a new city, or are too busy to find love on their own to find the perfect match. It helps to connect people who might not have met otherwise. 

After years of being out, dating apps are being created to fit specific preferences that can benefit those who are older, Christians, or are a part of the LGBTQ+ community. No matter what preferences someone has, there is a dating app for them. 

Why Dating Apps Work

Let’s get into the positives, because despite criticism, dating apps can help singles find each other. 

1. Accessibility and Convenience of Dating Apps

Dating apps have made it easy to meet people who aren’t in your everyday social circle. Potential partners can be found anywhere at any time. For those who are judging work, school, or social anxiety, dating apps can offer the perfect fix. 

2. Expanding Your Horizons

Before these apps, most relationships had to form within someone’s immediate social circle: at work, school, or through mutual friends. Dating apps have changed that, allowing people to meet others with different backgrounds, cultures, and lifestyles. It allows people to actually find what they are looking for in love. 

3. Tailored Compatibility

Certain dating apps like eHarmony or OkCupid use questionnaires to match interests and values. While not all algorithms can perfectly match chemistry, they can help to increase the chances of a compatible connection. 

4. A Space for Everyone

One of the most positive aspects of these apps now is how inclusive they can be. There are platforms like HER, for queer women, BLK, for black singles, and JSwipe, for Jewish singles. These apps allow people and their cultures to feel celebrated and understood. Since they have been created and updated to be more accessible and diverse, everyone feels included and feels safe when looking for love.

The Dark Side Dating Apps

People, especially when looking for love, want to feel special, cared for, validated, and truly seen. These are the things that can make dating apps so exciting, but they are also what can make them exhausting. 

1. The Paradox of Choice

While having what feels like unlimited options sounds ideal, it’s not. The paradox of choice is a term coined by psychologists, and it means that too many choices can lead to people being unsatisfied and indecisive. It causes doubt because people begin to wonder if there is something better out there. It can lead people to endlessly scroll and never commit. 

When looking for perfection, it can overpower the look for love. Relationships are not flawless, and the qualities to look for do not always shine through a profile.

2. Superficiality and Instant Gratification on Dating Apps

With how short these dating profiles are, they lead to speedy decisions. Decisions on these apps are typically made based on physical attraction. With looks being the main focus on these apps, it can be hard to find a meaningful and real connection. 

Even when apps encourage a profile that shows more of their personality, like Hinge, people can focus on being witty rather than being sincere. Surface-level interactions can lead to feeling drained, especially if your conversations never lead to a real relationship.

3. The Ghosting and Burnout Cycle

Ghosting has become a normalized part of online dating culture. Ghosting is when someone suddenly cuts all contact with someone. With people being able to match with as many people as they like, there is little accountability for those who find interest in someone else and quite respond to you. Over time, it can cause people to begin losing hope when looking for love.

4. Unrealistic Expectations

Online dating can set impossible standards for how a person looks and what relationships look. People curate their pictures and profiles to make everything look perfect, so people will be more likely to try and match with them. Sometimes the conversations that go deeper than the surface do not always match the online fantasy.

5. Privacy and Safety Concerns

While the safety features on these apps have evolved, online dating will always pose some risks. As long as dating apps exist, so will catfishing and scams. Even subtle invasions, like sharing screenshots of conversations, can make people wary of being authentic online.

How Dating Apps Affect Real Relationships

So, how does dating online translate into real relationships? 

When used in the right way, dating apps can foster strong, meaningful relationships. Dating online can allow people to find compatibility without even meeting someone in person. It can help to cut through the awkwardness of a first date. 

However, there can be problems in relationships when convenience is put over connection. Relying too much on validation over the phone can make it hard to feel connections in person. They can make communication in-person hard, especially when most conversations are being held over the phone. 

With the amount of options online, it can cause couples that come from these dating apps to have more trust issues than a normal couple. When someone knows how easy it is to download an app and start meeting other people, exclusivity can start to lose meaning.

Dating apps are not the sole problem; sometimes, it is the people on them. The way we navigate love in the digital age has changed so much, and we have to learn how to grow through it.

The Future of Love: Finding Balance In-Person and On Dating Apps

We are not going to see the end of dating apps any time soon. Over time, they are going to keep on evolving to improve rates of compatible couples meeting and advance safety features, so people are not scared to use them. 

Online dating can introduce us to people we may not have met otherwise, but it can not teach us how to be in a relationship. There is so much communication that needs to happen beyond the app for relationships to truly flourish. 

Dating apps can both harm and help relationships. They are tools that can help bring us together, but they can also be used to cripple in-person communication and bring about trust issues. 

In the end, it does not matter how or where you meet someone; it matters how you grow together as a couple.

Click here to read another article on the positives and negatives of dating apps.