Dating : Penned Ponderings: Game-ifying Dating

Off the top of my mind, love and dating in this modern age is something that instantly surfaces in my mind. The topic of love is something I’m all too familiar with — the conversation of finding your soulmate is something I definitely and unabashedly talk about at least once a day with a friend.

You would think that it’s easy to find someone nowadays — you go into the App store, scroll to “Top 50 Free Apps” and find Tinder in the top 10, hit install, and BAM. You’ve unlocked a whole new world at your fingerprints, one that brings promises of friendship, companionship, and most importantly, love, in these lonely and strange times.

Oh, but how naive of you to think that it’d be all that easy.

For some reason, because it’s that easy to see the whole catalogue of potential suitors, it makes it that much harder to formulate a more intimate and lasting bond — emotionally, at least. While I understand that the nature of dating apps is to simulate a simple and seamless experience (the mere action of swiping left and right will determine your fate), the apps create a disillusionment of what dating is really like, in real life.

Now I’m no expert by any means in dating — I’m still trying to navigate the choppy waters myself, too, but I’ve been on the majority of platforms to hold a relatively sound opinion:

The interfaces of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and the many other dating apps “game-ify” dating.

We mask our true feelings and personalities and cower behind our iPhone screens. Online dating now boils down to an endless game of who-can-last-the-longest-without-catching-feelings. We, as online dating users, become dissociated from all the other users’ feelings and thoughts. As a result of this detachment, we become less empathetic through these online interactions. But really, think about it. How we engage and conduct ourselves on these apps would be actions that we would never imagine doing in real life:

Talking to multiple people at once: In the chances, say, three men walk up to you at a bar and ask you for your phone number, each interaction within 5 minutes apart — would you give them your phone number? If so, would you be willing to commit to going on dates with each individual man every week? What if I told you that each of those men were also seeing 2 other women, aside from you? Would you still say yes to going out with them?

Chances are, most of you would say no. If you’re having to commit to 3 dates/week, credit card bills could easily steepen. Beyond personal finances, it’s hard to ascertain who you’re giving your final rose to — who is worthy of your time and attention for the rest of your life? When you have so many options in front of you, we often fall into the trap of analysis paralysis, the phenomena where “an individual…is unable to move forward with a decision.”

Ignoring and ghosting: Ghosting has become popularized in modern dating that it now has its own Wikipedia page. According to our trustworthy online encyclopedia that badgers us for donations on a quarterly basis, ghosting is “a colloquial term used to describe the practice of ceasing all communication and contact with a partner, friend…without any apparent warning or justification.”

Imagine this. What if you met a fellow student on your very first day of undergrad? You guys had similar backgrounds — both of you are out-of-state students who want to pursue CS and create a startup in the future— and you were under the impression that through these similarities, you guys became friends. After agreeing to meet up for a quick bite after class, you both head to the on-campus cafe. Halfway into the meal, your “supposed” friend stands up and wordlessly leaves. All contact ceases to exist; anytime you see him on campus, he avoids you like the black plague. Think about it — how do his actions make you feel? You didn’t do anything wrong, so why did he drop all means of communication with you? It doesn’t sit well with you to be ghosted, does it? On the contrary, would you “ghost” in real life too?

Nowadays, we never know what’s running through the other person’s mind. We don’t know really anything about them other than the height that they’ve added to their profile page and the breed of the dog that they own (if they even own a dog, that is — could be a stock picture taken from the Internet for all I know). Suffice to say, it’s hard to establish trust in a setting like a dating app.

Although we despise the awkward and pregnant pauses on blind dates, your date’s incessant finger-tapping on the table said a lot about how a person was feeling. Body language says a lot about a person, and if you’re able to pick up on subtle cues, you can use it to your advantage to read the situation. As such, in-person interactions easily create human connections — they carry raw and genuine emotions.

However, these emotional ties that I speak of are now a mere fantasy in this online dating space. The online environment that results from the easy swipes and quick taps on a screen have spun into superficiality, devoid of authenticity and humanity, really. How can you effectively read someone when there is a screen barricading your judgement?