Why Tinder didn’t kill romantic love
An interview with Marie Bergström
Marie Bergström
for #vii. lovesick
spring 25
Dating apps get blamed for killing love, but the allegations they face are hardly new. That is what sociologist Marie Bergström wants to show in her book The New Laws of Love, where she traces the history of today’s dating apps back to marriage brokers of the 19th century.
Online dating first appeared in the form of websites such as Match.com, and later, in the shape we know it now, with ubiquitous apps such as Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. But the reception differed depending on the cultural context where they were introduced.
In the US, the community spirit of the early internet made users excited about a new way of connecting. Internet dating was seen as a way of circumventing physical and sociological barriers and allowing for unexpected meetings. This is the You’ve got mail romcom era.
In Europe, particularly France and Germany, online dating – and later the apps – were received in a much more critical tradition. Two particular discourses have been brought forward. The first is that the increased availability of sex has tuned more people into brief sexual encounters at the expense of long-term relations.
The second is that the apps have introduced a logic of capitalism into our relations and commodified them, a critique particularly associated with sociologist Eva Illouz. Bergström wants to push back against these views.
I think that the thesis that capitalism shapes our love lives is either obvious or exaggerated, depending on what you mean by it. If you mean that the norms regulating our love lives are influenced by the market economy, then that’s obvious. We live in a market economy, so of course our choices are influenced by that.
If you mean that meeting someone online has become akin to shopping for groceries online, then that’s an exaggeration. We know that these are different processes and it’s simply wrong to compare them.
There is this idea that something has changed: our lives are more affected by market forces now than previously and that this is partly due to dating apps. I don’t think that’s true. The idea rests on a myth about how things used to be. There are economic factors that shape our love lives, but my view is that internet dating hasn’t caused this behaviour, it has simply brought existing criteria into view.
We use those criteria when we choose our partners. Love is not blind. That is not something new and I don’t think it should be likened to consumption as it is often done. There have always been choices, among them social and economic. The thing is that online dating makes it visible in a totally different way. There is an ambivalence there in that people are uncomfortable with it.
It is said that because Tinder and other apps are profit-driven companies, the economic logic carries over to our dating behaviour. The metaphor of a market is also used widely in dating. This prompts some people to draw the conclusion that we consume partners these days. But what we consume is a service that gives us access to partners. That is not the same thing.
There are also other ways in which dating apps seem to challenge our conception of romantic love. We may think that fate should play a role or that there is something special about the person I meet. That could be a bit tricky to reconcile with dating apps where you could potentially have endless encounters. But there are also ways in which dating apps and the traditional narrative of love seem to fit together, such as in the idea of a “soulmate” somewhere out there who you can discover if you just go looking for him or her.
The critical discourses have been particularly influential in the media. “I’ve had enough, I’m quitting Tinder” is a journalistic genre in its own right and the media has reported extensively on the new generation going offline. However, there isn’t much evidence to suggest that this is happening across the board.
It is fascinating to see how much media attention dating apps still get. Even though they launched over a decade ago, if you look at the press clippings, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was as much written about dating apps in 2024 as in 2014.
I think one explanation is that the media logic constantly requires something new. Here’s an example. In the last few months, there were several stories in countries such as the US, France and Sweden alleging that the young generation is not using dating apps anymore. The source was an American report about Tinder losing market shares.
There are no empirical grounds in any country for saying that the overall usage is down. It is simply a case of people moving between apps. And yet this report made a huge splash in the media. Just like there used to be many reports about youngsters not dating in the real world anymore, the narrative seems to have shifted to “they are not using online dating anymore”. I think that online dating has become a recurring news story, where journalists constantly need to feed their readers something new.
It is true, though, that we see that a lot of users stop using dating apps after a while. They feel that it doesn’t work, that it is draining, and they stop using it but come back again; there is something called “dating fatigue”. But that is more biographic to the specific individual and it doesn’t apply to whole generations. The ambivalence among users is not new. When I started interviewing people about their dating, people were saying that they were going in and out of online dating.
We know that you are most likely to feel unhappy about dating apps if you are a woman at around 30 years old. That is when the expectations differ the most compared to men of the same age. A striking thing about Sweden is that most of those who write about dating in the newspapers are women around that age. I think that has greatly influenced the Swedish discourse on dating apps. It is much less common to read an article about how middle-aged men experience online dating, than it is to see the perspective of women between 25 and 35.
While Bergström’s research points away from the “end of love” conclusion, her point is not that dating apps have not had any impact on our intimate relations at all. On the contrary, she argues that they have had a revolutionary impact on where we meet our partners. Traditionally, you may have met your partner at a club, at work or through mutual friends. These days, you are more likely to meet people outside your personal sphere.
This decoupling of the social life and the love/sex life could rewrite the social landscape. As Anna Björklund has suggested, perhaps we will find out that we did mundane tasks, such as sit on the board of our local bostadsrättsförening (communal housing association), because we were (consciously or unconsciously) driven by a “desire to meet someone”. Will the future kids sit through boring meetings or sign up as volunteers if there is no chance for romance?
There is a larger trend that people’s lives are getting increasingly more divided into different spheres and becoming more private. People tend to “hang out” less in public spaces and they are more likely to stay at home.
What that means for dating is that different places increasingly serve different functions. There has already been a shift in what people perceive as being acceptable places for meeting your partner – some places have become “desexualised”.
The work place is the most clear-cut example of this trend. It used to be a very important place for meeting your partner – it still is, but to a lesser degree. Even meeting a partner within your circle of friends has become less socially acceptable in some instances. That is most clear when it comes to casual sex as that has largely been replaced by dating apps. The reaction can be “there are apps for that, why don’t you keep it there”.
I think this trend will only get stronger. It will be even more important to know where you can meet people and where you can’t. There is a risk that some will feel excluded from those spaces. We know from our research that particularly men from working class or immigrant backgrounds find it much harder to get in touch with women on dating apps.
I think our bostadsrättsstyrelser may survive, but there are traditional places for meeting a partner, such as night clubs, that could be affected. This has been the case in the gay community, where gay bars – which have been very important for meeting people for sexual encounters – have disappeared in many cities and been replaced by apps.
One thing that I didn’t go into in my book is that I think the critique of love is coloured by more general anxiety and mental health issues. You can see that clearly in some Swedish novels that have been published recently. These focus on descriptions of anxiety, dissatisfaction, as well as depression and mental illness.
I have an example of that from my own research; the huge spread between individuals when it comes to how quickly you fall in love with someone. I have interviewed several people who married the first person they ever went on a date with. On the other end, you will find someone who has dated for 15 years without the desired results.
There could be an attitude to life and a lack of well-being in general where that just doesn’t happen. In those cases, it could be tempting to say “capitalism has destroyed intimate relations”. But sometimes it might just be hard to fall in love when you are depressed.
It’s hard to predict how we will see dating apps in the future. But I think the most likely scenario is that dating apps become the new normal. When new generations don’t remember a time when people did not meet online, it would take a lot for dating apps to remain controversial.
However, I am certain that the critical discourses will still be there – they will just latch on to something else. It could be AI or something else connected to technology. I think that shows that the narrative of love is still so strong that we constantly need to defend it. But I don’t think there are any signs that love itself is threatened.
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