Dating apps have come a long way since the now-archaic computerized dating services that first rose to prominence in the 1960s. Since then, decades of digital advancements and software innovations have refined dating apps with highly efficient features designed to match the user to others based on specific dating preferences and common interests, creating a vast pool of people to choose from. However, the ubiquity of apps like Tinder, Hinge and Grindr, begs the question — are dating apps truly a good way to find a partner? With almost 50% of college students reporting using them, as of 2023, these apps boast convenience and speedy match-making, yet a laundry list of cons, risks and flaws are entailed in their usage. The spaces created by these apps can seem confusing and contradictory, with great disparity between intention and outcome creating insecurity and harm where the apps promise success.  

For one, these apps perpetuate isolation and social disconnect. While using dating apps means putting yourself out there with the hope of meeting new people, a layer of superficiality is also ever present. On an app like Tinder, a user can either swipe right or left to indicate interest or disinterest. At first glance, this seems like a practical system that both gives the user autonomy and allows for a multiplicity of dating options to be viewed earnestly. However, when approached through a more critical lens, these decisions are made on surface-level assessments that pivot attraction and compatibility almost entirely around physical appearance, with little regard for other monumentally important traits and facets of an individual that should be addressed in determining romantic affinity. This mindless motion of swiping left and right, viewing people merely as a small photo with a name and age on their screen rather than a real human being, can have a desensitizing effect. It enables individuals — as much as 56% of Gen Z — to treat relationship-seeking as a game, ironically largely distancing the user from the person they are seeking to connect with.  

In a college campus with a student body in the lower thousands, such as Brandeis, using a dating app means inorganically creating, and more importantly, refusing to create relationships based on shallow features through a screen, instead of natural circumstances that might very well allow a relationship to prosper where it would fail in its tracks on a dating app.

Essentially, these apps create a sociocultural environment that, to a great extent, equates physical appearance to compatibility and constricts romantic and social connections to something highly digitalized, facilitating a mindset of risk-prevention that discourages students from confrontation or simply talking to romantic interests for fear of rejection. Where dating apps succeed in creating a sense of availability in options, they fall short in consistently creating something sincere and long-lasting.  

That’s not to say that these apps are all bad by any means; in fact, they can be great in connecting you to people you might otherwise never have met. It can be exceedingly difficult to meet people outside of your social circle, classes and dorm building, so the expansiveness and scope of these apps can prove immensely helpful in meeting people from different years or even different schools. Nonetheless, even this undeniable benefit is held back by another critical drawback of dating apps: subscriptions. Beyond being superficial, diminishing natural social interactions and even the proven impacts on mental health — such as links to higher rates of depression, anxiety and lower self-esteem — these apps block a plethora of valuable features behind a paywall, even limiting the number of people seen by non-subscribers. By paywalling the capacity for users to find a partner, these apps more or less monopolize the ability to find a relationship.

Ultimately, the allure and prospects of entering the dating world without having to leave your room have made dating apps bustling hotspots for college students to meet other college students. This holds particularly true in a post-pandemic world where social anxiety is at an all-time high among young people. However, in terms of efficacy, the promises of these apps and the ambitions of their users often fall short, instead feeding into hookup culture, redefining social norms around dating for the worse and all the while yielding less-than-desirable results on an individualistic basis. 

To improve the state of dating culture, the responsibility lies on the community collectively to push back against a growing trend of shallowness and highly appearance-centric outlooks on relationships, which is both worsened by the popularity of dating apps and simultaneously the reason these apps have become so popular in the first place. In a dating culture that has grown to devalue the very essence of social connection, there is nothing more important than simply going outside and, in doing so, rejecting the notion that companionship is a task to be done through a phone: Seize positive change by talking to people face-to-face instead of becoming complacent in a society that makes closeness feel intangible and unobtainable.