Whatever they told you about love and romance is getting a complete make-over in today’s age of plug-ins and widgets. Love in the air has been replaced by love in the digital maze of dating apps that claim to help you find your ideal soul mate! Forget the fabled heart-in-the-mouth or butterflies-in-the-belly moments; it is the twitchy clicks or eager swipes on your phone that define romance today.
As per the polls conducted by YourTango (an award-winning NY-based website focusing on love and relationships), 95% of its respondents had hit up one form of the technology or the other to land dates but only a handful of them managed to find “real” love. Not that many of the net users actively seek for love anyway with a majority of them (even some in committed relationships) signing up only for temporary liaisons that at some point will be broken off.
One look at dating apps such as OkCupid and Tinder, and you would be sure of the intent behind designing them. OKCupid dubbed as the “Google of online dating” came into existence in 2004. Its services spawned an entire dating industry and brought about a swell of clones. Don’t be surprised by the questions that this site would ask you to determine your “compatibility levels”. These can range from a ridiculous “How often would you date your partner before sleeping with them?” to a down-right absurd “How long you would want your next relationship to last (one night, a few or several months)?” On the other hand, Tinder would have you select your desirable dates by displaying their profile photos. In this case, you can swipe right or left to reject or accept the potential dates before you get to chat and eventually meet them. Whatever happened to the concept of checking a person’s whereabouts before agreeing to meet up with them?
There are some dating apps that would creep you out for sure. WeChat, for instance displays the number of people around you who are online on the same app and their distance from you. After OKCupid was acquired by Match.com in 2011, it came up with its own GPS-enabled features to help users find local singles. Another app, Hinge uses its “romance graph” to hook you up with friends or acquaintances of your friends (obviously by looking through your personal data saved on the internet). Nothing is private anymore…your location, friends, and social circuit are out there on display and consumption on these sites. There are some apps that display your “romantic” score based on how actively you look for dating partners and how often you update or tot up the profile photos which are then rated by other users. The creepiest of the lot seems to be an app named “Bang With Friends” that collects real-time information about your Facebook friends and displays them for you. You can scour the list for the one you would “do” it with and once you have spotted them, you would hit “Down to bang”. If the person reciprocates your feelings, they would send you back a message, allowing you to meet and hook up sans any ado.
Studies reveal that online chatting fabricates an artificial sense of familiarity so that you end up thinking that you intimately know the other person, when all that you have had is an exchange of a friendly or flirty banter at a superficial level. There is a good chance that the person who shows up on a date may not be the same whom you were talking to. Or they have managed to hide certain facets of their real self so that you agree to meet up with them. Often the girl on the chat window with the gamine and gorgeous looks would have gone for an online photo makeover or the brawny-looking guy would have worn a chunky-knit sweater to hide his real thin build. There is no knowing the amount of white lies that people would put up on these sites about their age, physique, jobs, or relationship status.
Online dating has the potential to harm you psychologically or scar you for life. In the aftermath of a break-up in such shallow relationships, you may find it difficult to purge the awful experience from your system (especially if you were on the look-out for a real relationship). Also, the incidents of digital abuse are on the rise.
Dating apps can make you shallow and focus only on superfluous difference where you have a bevy of potential dates to choose from. An American psychologist Barry Schwartz writes about a Paradox of Choice in his book, where even though people have more choices now; it doesn’t seem that they are benefiting from it. And this is exactly what is happening to the app users who have so many choices now that they end up picking up someone randomly while navigating their way through the digital minefield.
What happened to the good old fashioned love that they used to write about or show in the movies? Does it exist anymore in the age of instant love and dating apps? Can we not hark back to the real romantic moments of holding hands, of hearts beating at a frantic tempo at the mere sight of one’s beloved, or eyes turning red-rimmed and runny while bidding adieus?
Let’s bring the real romance back into our lives. Build a memory that you would remember for life. Go out, have fun, get to know the person really well, and let the real love kick in. Remember, it is the slow-burn attraction building into love that is likely to grow long and strong. Now, do we need an app to remind ourselves of that?