In this day and age, more and more young people are turning to online dating sites and mobile phone applications in search of love and intimacy. From the launch of the first online dating site in 1995, to the invention of modern social networking dating sites in 2007, online dating has grown into a billion-dollar industry with countless users. In fact, today nearly 2 billion people worldwide use some form of online dating.  The basis of these apps is simple. Users can create a profile by uploading several photos, along with a short text description. This becomes visible to other users who can then ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the profile.

Indeed, probably you have at one pint or another, used a dating app or at least found yourself curious as to whether they should enlist and sign up.

These dating apps represent a significant new social phenomenon; a far cry from the singles bars and social mixers of times past. Interestingly, the impact of dating apps on interrelationships has been underestimated , but some preliminary evidence suggests they may cause issues.

First let’s break it into four points before showing numbers:

1. People became disposable, making it harder to settle: When human beings are offered many choices, they’re actually less likely to make a decision or selection. That is, social interactions become “depersonalized” as users can scan through infinite profiles. Now it is easier to choose who you want to meet than wait to be discovered, as in profiles you put your interests and hobbies, if someone do not like it just swipe to the left!
2. People can lie about themselves: People want to be liked, to be talked and we love liking others, and sometimes even lying about us, or showing only our good part, but what about being honest to yourself, truthful and what about showing the bad part of you? We all have defects and we are not perfect.
3. People are forgetting about the work of building meaningful long-term relationships: It isn’t something that can be built over a few messages, sharing of photos or a date.  Building a meaningful relationship with someone takes time and effort. It takes dedication. Human beings are not objects, they are complex individuals with many layers, experiences, and emotions. Because dating apps have made it so easy to find “the next thing”, people are less likely to take the time it requires to give someone a chance to open up to them.
4. It backfire its users on a psychological level: “Tinder users reported having lower levels of satisfaction with their faces and bodies and having lower levels of self-worth than the men and women who did not use Tinder,” said Jessica Strübel, PhD, of the University of North Texas, who presented the research that she co-authored with Trent Petrie, PhD, also of the University of North Texas.

Young people and adults are getting more artificial with this new form of technology

Online dating and mobile applications are changing and affecting the dating culture of the young people and even some adults who use them and shake how they perceive these experiences. It is possible that the popularity of dating applications is not only encouraging young adults to “date shop,” but also to select potential mates based on limited visual data versus connecting via conversation. Furthermore, forming relationships based on such limited information can also encourage users to make judgments about others based on biases. These factors have the potential to have long term effects on how individuals form attachments. According to a study made by SimpleTexting, an SMS Marketing service, where 500 dating users between ages 18 to 65 showed how this phenomenon is getting real:

This first chart shows what they say they are looking for, surprisingly the majority said a long term relationship, but yes, then, the intention still exist, how dupes…

But of course, nearly half of them have just had 1 or 2 dates and “other”, what should that mean? People do not engage to know the other person, they just went again to the swaping to find another one.

As indeed there could not be, the main important fact to lodge is the photo, following the description where superficial things are said following with lies.

But it is not just by triking in the description, but also misleading with the profile photo, as this next chart show all the dating apps photo fails that people encountered when meeting in real life. Posing with a group of people is very good to to play guessing games, and not to mention the “other”.

So as seen, in our “technosexual” era, the process of dating has not only been gamified, but also sexualised, by technology. Mobile dating is much more than a means to an end, it is an end in itself. people’s expectations of online dating and mobile applications, their realities, and the understanding intimate relationships is being intervened by new technology and its news dating apps.