Dating apps are feeding a broken dating culture on college campuses and beyond.
While more than half of young adults say they have used online dating, the business model of dating apps is dependent on keeping people single and unhappy for as long as possible. Many of these apps are owned by the same company, Match Group, which now owns Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, and others. These apps make money from people using them, so why would they purposely try to lose customers? They profit from an environment where people scroll through photos for hours, have an occasional one-night stand to satisfy basic sexual desires, and then return to the app for more monotonous stimulation.
Instead of calling them dating apps, we should call them what they are: hookup apps. This is not to say that there isn’t anyone looking for real connections on dating apps, but rather, that the apps do not incentivize healthy relationships. Eighty percent of college-aged men on dating apps use them for casual sex, along with 55% of college-aged women. Similar trends are found among the general public, with more men looking for casual relationships than trying to meet a future spouse on the apps.
Roughly half of Tinder users are not actively seeking dates, and as many as two-thirds are either in a relationship or already married. Among Tinder-using college students, 7% have used the app to have casual sex despite being in a supposedly committed relationship with someone else. According to one study, “Tinder users showed greater sociosexuality than nonusers, as well as increased dissatisfaction with their sex life and sexual preoccupation, and more positive attitudes towards consensual nonmonogamy.”
Many of the apps are explicit in their pro-hookup and anti-family agenda. Earlier this year, Bumble apologized for running an ad campaign that shamed women who refrained from sex. In its apology, Bumble said celibacy is sometimes necessary “when reproductive rights are continuously restricted.” In 2021, Bumble created a fund to support “the reproductive rights of women and people across the gender spectrum who seek abortions in Texas.” The CEO of Match Group created a similar abortion fund of her own to help Match employees kill their unborn children. Earlier this year, Match and Bumble argued in an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court that restrictive abortion laws are bad for business. Since pro-life legislation encourages personal responsibility, it is the enemy of hookup culture, which is dependent on being without consequences.
Dating websites simply are not a good way to meet a future spouse. There are, of course, numerous success stories, but they are exceptions and not the rule. Online dating encourages people to lock themselves in their room instead of going to a social gathering and making a real human connection with someone. Using dating apps in college is particularly foolish, as there are thousands of students of the opposite sex confined to the same geographic location.
When you meet people in the outside world, they are so much more than a few photographs and a sentence-long description. You could never “swipe right” on a real person, you have to actually talk to them. That cuts to the core of the problem: dating apps are dehumanizing. When people are reduced to their dating profiles and engage in promiscuous sexual activity without any deeper emotional connections, they are treating each other as little more than meat puppets.
In some ways, dating apps are e-prostitution. While there is no monetary transaction between the individuals engaging in a one-night stand, Tinder profits like a pimp. Slushy, which is a competitor to OnlyFans, even received seed funding from Tinder’s co-founder and was founded by a former director of marketing at Tinder. It is pretty telling that the same people who promoted online dating are now starting a service that is unambiguously e-prostitution.
We are also seeing a broader decline in all dating that is not online because men are not approaching women in the real world. Forty-five percent of young men have never asked a woman out in person because they were too scared of rejection. Dating has turned into a game, and many people just don’t want to play.
In the increasingly digital dating scene, where are you supposed to actually meet someone? Some of the best places to start looking would be a church, a synagogue, or other house of worship. Honestly, anywhere where there are real people is fine, but meeting someone at a place of worship ensures a baseline level of shared values and goals for a relationship.
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Hookup apps are merely a symptom of a broader broken culture, but their purveyors have figured out how to commodify disordered sexual behaviors that would still be happening without them. The fundamental problem is not the dating apps, it is the abandonment of marriage as the end goal of a relationship and the abandonment of the nuclear family as the core of society.
Staying off the dating apps is better for you, better for your future relationships, and better for society.