How Tinder Continues To Change The Way Humans Connect

In a world where relationships have been gamified and reduced to dopamine hits from swiping an app, the longer term effects of apps like Tinder are starting to be better understood. After spending years on Tinder, writer Allison P. Davis shared in New York Magazine that “the people I meet are strangers with very little connection to my actual life, [so] I can compartmentalize my dating instead of letting it pervade parts of my life that bring me the most satisfaction.” It is easy, in other words, to live a sort of double life on Tinder.

This “Tinder life” is one reliant on short term relationships that come and go quickly. Davis went on to suggest that “the app has exacerbated certain aspects of my personality, made it easier to be nasty or avoidant or careless or clingy or overstimulated and flaky.”

Instead of bringing people closer or helping them connect more deeply, the technology is instead only encouraging more surface level, shallow connections. And all these surface connections end up leaving us feeling lonelier than ever. The solution is obvious, but hard: get out and meet more people in person. Doing so, though, requires us to do the one thing that seems hardest to do in real life. Put that phone away.