Tediously, Forever Young
I hate Hinge. I hate Hinge so much. But let me explain first what Hinge is before I get into why it makes for such a shitty online dating app.
When Hinge launched many years ago, it began as an online dating app that promised to link you only with friends of your friends. In theory, this was great because there is a ton of good social science that would back up the hypothesis that you’re very likely to pair off with someone who is sort of already in your extended friendship network. In my own qualitative research, I’ve found that the number one place people were likely to have described meeting their last partner was at the birthday party of a mutual friend. As social events go, birthdays create one of the densest of overlappings of one’s social networks that most people will ever experience in their lives. They are catalysts for tons of relationship formations. If I can give you any piece of life advice at all it’s that you should always say yes to a birthday party. There, you are most likely to meet your soulmate, if such a thing is likely ever to be found.
But what if you don’t get invited to that many birthday parties? Don’t beat yourself up! That’s why we have technology—ostensibly to solve major problems like this. You can absolutely imagine the possibility of a software program that would connect you with friends of friends. Many social networks actually begin with this promise. And originally, this was Hinge’s business model.
But of course, the problem with that business model is that its potential for growth will always be extremely limited. With sound execution, it’s at best a clever small business idea but no matter how well it’s done, it will always be a shitty startup idea. If a dating service only showed you only the universe of single and available friends of your personal social network of friends and that’s it, you’d soon run out of matches very, very quickly. Your friendship group is finite and thus your potential pool for partnership is thus too very limited.
From the user’s perspective, that might be great. After all, who really wants to go on a bunch of stupid first dates that ultimately go nowhere with people who know absolutely nothing of your life and what you value? Wouldn’t you prefer going on many fewer dates with people with whom you have a very high potential to click with than going on tons of cold dates with strangers hoping the whole while that they don’t chop your body into bits and leave you out in a dumpster for the rats to find? Haha, I know which one I’d prefer.
But any sociologist would tell you that as great as that sounds from a woman’s perspective, it would be an absolutely terrible deal for men. Women tend to maintain closer friendships and continue to make new ones as they age whereas dudes tend to have fewer and fewer friends left as they age out of school and no longer have their socialization organized for their benefit by others. Many dudes in their thirties and forties admit to having no close friends at all. And as even men with few friends still largely prefer dating women younger and more naive than themselves, they are very much unlikely to find them if their options were thus constrained only to matches one or two degrees removed from their existing friendship network.
So for a bunch of overlapping reasons, dating apps don’t do the most obvious thing of connecting people to friends of friends because it wouldn’t be catering to their target demographic which is older, lonely men who are unsuccessful with their peers, the demographic most likely to pay for premium subscriptions to connect with younger women far outside of their limited social networks (and league). What’s obvious from a matchmaking perspective is not going to help you an inch with the more lucrative aim of fucking with middle-aged men’s heads and getting them addicted to their phone like it’s a human slot machine.
That Hinge devolved into a shitty app like the rest of them in its play for a larger market share isn’t why I hate it, though.
What I hate most about Hinge is that it contributes to the infantilization of dating itself, as though the social phenomenon of dating only ever happens in this oddly unsexy neverland where no one is ever expected to grow up. Hinge's writing prompts work to convince adults that they can attract partners by asking them to reveal their favorite Disney movies and playing “Two Truths and a Lie” as though they studied online dating behavior and concluded that the problem was that it just wasn't childish enough.
It’s almost as though the brain geniuses making this app thought the problem they were solving is that too many men on swiping apps were being dismissed by women for being just too mature.
Of course, Hinge isn’t the only app keen on keeping middle-aged men endlessly amused inside this weird sexualized Neverland. They all do it. The app designers know that men don’t want to put effort into their profiles because putting effort into it would spoil the fantasy of using the same effortless technology that one uses to order a pizza to hook up with a twenty-something Instagram ass model.
My point in all this is to say that a majorly underappreciated reason as to why dating apps don’t work for people who are searching for something meaningful is because they aren’t at all designed with meaningfulness in mind. They’re catering to exactly the kind of user who wants to put in the least effort to get something that is ultimately out of his reach, like a dangling carrot they pay hundreds of dollars a year never reaching.
This isn’t to say that you can’t find love using dating apps. All I’m saying is that these things aren’t designed to facilitate your connection with the people with whom you are most likely to spark. As I said, if that were really their intention, you’d be matched with people you’d most likely meet at a mutual friend’s birthday party.
The technological fix to the problem of online dating isn’t actually the hard part. That part is honestly the easiest. What’s hard is that apps that do the honest work of matchmaking can’t make the kind of money VC investors would expect startups to make.
But—and I reiterate here—the worst thing they do is infantilize the whole concept of dating. These apps work to set a tone for dating and work to keep it always tacky and fluffy like a tub of cool whip. This annoys those adults over the age of 25 who recognize that relationships are work and that dating is not a source of distracting entertainment but rather a means to a very specific end, an end they feel ashamed to want on an app that encourages them to stay tediously young, forever.