0 comments
What about the people who don’t want to meet ‘their person’ or ‘the one’? What if instead, we revive the concept of women being able to meet multiple ones? What’s so wrong about finding a partner (or partners) for a night rather than for life?
*Starred names have been changed for anonymity
Recent trends in modern dating – which dating app ad campaigns are a pretty good indicator of, unsurprisingly – suggest that more people are looking for long-term relationships than a short-lived fun fling.
But in reality, how likely are you to find ‘the one’ on a platform with an overabundance of options, attractive mostly in their brevity.
If dating apps aren’t meant to help you find ‘the one’, what else should we be using them for? And, more pointedly, are people really buying into the rhetoric espoused by the likes of Hinge, the dating app ‘designed to be deleted’, that we’re likely to swipe left on our personal Prince Charming?
Or, are the statistics concealing how screwed we really are?
According to actual dating app users, it would seem that we’re not as naive as marketing campaigns believe us to be.
While some people like Stacey* use dating apps ‘to practice talking to people and getting to know them in a low pressure environment’ rather than for hooking up, it’s not as if the sexual revolution has died out.
Others, like Vivienne, told me they’re not actively looking for “the one,” mostly because they don’t believe in it, but more accurately because they’re looking for “the next one”.
Instead of conforming to the traditional heteronormative, monogamous script of a “serious” relationship, instead they’re “hoping to find people [they] can be sensual and intentional with, and take that seriously”.
Amber, another dating app user and someone who dates non-monogamously, told me that since their last breakup they’ve not been looking for the one, taking the time instead to “protect [themselves] whilst still wanting to enjoy company.”
This means seeking casual sex with nice people whose values align with hers, but importantly “without the desire to form a deep partnership or commitment”.
Amber adds that she’s also not looking for a sexual relationship to become a priority or focus, and that she uses different dating apps depending on the type of sex or person she’s hoping to be compatible with.
A recent development in the most popular dating app Tinder even introduced a feature which allows you to specify the type of “match” you’re looking for, from “short-term fun”, to “long-term partner”, or even “new friends” (yeah, ok), making this style of anti-relationship dating more accessible.
So what’s going on? Is hook-up culture dying out? Or, more likely – given the mainstreaming of alt-right patriarchal views embodied by fascist organisations like Reform UK – has the zeitgeist reverted back to a pre-feminism age?
One in which it’s seen as almost shameful to admit that, quite frankly, I can think of very little worse than the idea of spending the rest of my life with a man who, statistically, is more likely than anybody else to kill me
