The Bleak Future of Online Dating Apps

You meet someone in a bar. You can tell almost instantly whether you like them. Their smell, their mannerisms, their vibe, everything just fits. You love the way they sound when they laugh and how their smile shines at the right angle.

This is the beauty of meeting in person. But this it is taken away through online dating.

Amidst a global pandemic, online dating is one of the best ways to meet people, but it’s incomplete. When you meet someone online, it’s difficult to tell who they are as a person. Nevertheless, there are many perks of online dating that cannot be taken for granted.

Online dating provides a basic profile of all the single people in your area. Most people go from home to work to home again. There may be a few trips to a grocery store and even a restaurant on occasion. Yet, how often do these fleeting public moments amount to anything concrete?

When was the last time you walked up to complete stranger in the grocery store or a restaurant? Almost never, I’d guess, unless you have nerves of steel.

The fear of rejection is rampant in person, but less so on dating apps. All you have to do is an innocent swipe right (a positive movement to invite a conversation). Further, they’ll never even know if you’ve swiped right unless they swipe right as well. There’s no downside in most popular online dating sites. You’ll know they’ve turned you down if you don’t match, but they won’t know that you wanted them in the first place, which helps limit the humiliation ten-fold.

Enter the queer dating world. The risk increases with the secondary element of same-sex rejection. With the stigma many people hold around getting hit on by someone of their own sex, it can not only be embarrassing, but dangerous. Hate crimes are real and rampant today. Thus, the fear of rejection isn’t just of rejection, but of violence and social ridicule. For reference, check out this chart below of how couples met in the past decades.

As more and more people explore their sexuality and become their real self in public, the number of people meeting on dating apps will only increase. As dating apps can have specifications for preference, there’s much less of a concern for stigmatization from the opposite party.

As shown in the graph, online dating is steadily increasing in both same sex and hetero relationships. However, it still needs work if we’re going to be entering the final stages of a Black Mirror episode.

Since online dating is now shown to be one of the most viable ways to find someone you have commonalities with, hopefully it will be improved. Any of the downsides will have to be eliminated to make this product as perfect as possible. But once this happens, will there be any hope for meeting someone in person?

Technology and algorithms may replace any chance of a meet cute. If apps continue to dominate the market, there will be no going back. Especially now that people as young as high school students are on dating apps, there’s much less stigma attached to them. They’re not for old, sad people, but anyone looking for a connection.

Apps may get so accurate, they’ll connect you with people without any independent decision making needed on your part. We may genuinely start living in a world guided by technology.

An app will tell us if we’re compatible before we’re even matched. We’ll never expand our horizons or meet people beyond our shallow definitions of what we want.

Futuristic apps could be able to take scents from people, show holograms of their face and body, showcase their voice and mannerisms, and so much more. As apps become more in tune with what people want, there won’t be any need to try to meet someone in person and take the chance of meeting someone bad for you.

I’ve heard from many friends one of the greatest problems with online dating is you can’t get their vibe through an app. You don’t get that sense of who they are as a person, from their voice to their smells to how often they blink. There’s an innate chemistry missing online that can only be found in person. This is why in person meetings are often a letdown. If apps evolved to be able to include chemistry, however impossible it seems, we’d never have to leave the house again.

Is this how we want to meet people, though? Will people never expand their horizons? If you have concrete rules for who you’d want to date, they may limit you from someone amazing. If you only look for a certain type of person with your type of appearance and beliefs, you’ll never be challenged.

Will we become more and more segregated with our beliefs until there is less crossover between people who    consider themselves different from each other?

In this case, we’d have our matches pre-determined. Nothing would actually be our choice. It’d be like living in a dystopian teen novel where you’re placed in one of five personality types when you’re 16. You can’t crossover, change your mind, or have any self-determination (or divergence).

Right now, dating apps are still almost entirely superficial. Yet, they won’t always be this way. The problems with them right now are the snap judgements based on appearance.

Everyone tries to market themselves as the most preferable version of themselves they can muster. Therefore, you’re not going to get their authentic self. Everyone will just come off the same way.

But what if you could get to know someone authentically online? These are the questions of the future. Would our dating matches be predetermined completely through an algorithm? Will our children’s children be able to meet someone new in a library, or just wait for their app to do the connecting for them? This is just some food for thought on the future of dating apps and predetermination. It’s always helpful to look at new technology critically, while remaining optimistic about it’s uses.

With businesses like 23andMe opening the door to personalized DNA insights, we might one day see it integrated into dating apps.

That would really take the fun out of it. Imagine establishing a connection with someone because an algorithm has determined that any offspring you might have together will have a low chance of having back problems.

Or even worse, being discouraged from meeting someone because the app thinks that your chance of getting divorced is higher than normal due to your profession’s likelihood of being eliminated by robots in the near future. (Finance troubles are one of big causes of divorce.)

They say data is the new oil, but hopefully that data isn’t used in dystopian ways.

No matter how much we try to predict, we won’t know exactly what will happen until the next generation of dating apps are upon us.

We’ll just have to wait and see.