Swipe right on love: Diving into the world of dating apps

Over the years, several apps have cropped out, with increasingly different antics and techniques to provide users with an engaging experience to keep dating fun. For example, an app called Hater launched in 2017, intended to match people not based on the things they liked but around the stuff they hated, such as Donald Trump or green vegetables, which didn’t succeed despite its quirky idea. While the USA has apps like eHarmony, which are known as ‘dating to be married’ apps, India saw its own upsurge of matrimonial apps like ‘Shaadi.com’ and ‘Jeevansaathi.com’, which many believe have gained popularity because dating apps eliminated the taboo of meeting and finding partners through online channels.

How we view and use these apps is an insight into human psychology. The urge to be pair bonded and to reproduce has been drilled into us by evolution, and the way we present ourselves on these apps – how our pictures are poised to portray beauty, affluence, intellect, or wanderlust – these are not random but an orchestrated dance to the tune of evolutionary biology. Moreover, these apps exist in the same world, offering innumerable portals to satisfy an ever-increasing drive for external validation – the other cogs in this machine being social media, influencer marketing, impulse shopping, and filtered images. This means that if you can’t find ‘the one’, it can be traded for ‘the one available right now’, whose expression of attention has given you a quick and fleeting high. A hyper romanticization of a familiar instinct perhaps makes dating and relationships more complicated than they need to be. If you are obsessed with the idea of finding true love, maybe it inherently stems from a feeling of loss, a loss of one’s sense of self, or that life without love is utterly meaningless.

In any case, can love be defined? Love isn’t a mystery; it’s a falling spiral of hormones, circumstances, and compatibility which masquerades as indelible emotions, which could either give your life meaning or create the sort of high-octane drama that has been selling movie tickets and heart-shaped candy since the advent of paper money, likely earlier. It’s hard to denigrate these apps when we’ve been extolling the ease and virtues of so many of them here. Given that the first online dating website, Kiss.com, started in 1995, we have had a few long decades to get used to the idea of meeting someone using technology, placing our trust in a digital Cupid.

One thing we can all take solace in – no matter who we are, where we’re from, and how we meet someone – through your friends or your overprotective parents, through a blind date or a carefully picked out candidate from a dating app, everything after is, unsurprisingly, back to basics – two people and a connection. We can thank the apps for helping us find love in hopeless times (like the pandemic), but ultimately, it is your own feelings and judgment that make the final call.