It’s easy to get sucked into “all or nothing” thinking. You accept inaction, and nothing at all, on the grounds that you can’t act to get the precise outcome or thing that you want. In psychology this is identified as a cognitive bias, because the world so rarely offers the “all” option and usually allows the space for the “nothing” option.
But it occurs to me that this could be applied socially to online dating — for long-term relationships, at least. Not because online dating inspires a particular kind of thinking, but because of the paradigm it has created for us.
You meet someone who you’ve never met before, and likely aren’t connected to in any socially meaningful way, to establish their merit as a romantic partner for you. But the dating app allows you to do this without the social fabric that would otherwise be in place.
Let’s say you got set up on a blind date: One person knows both of you, and thought you might hit it off.
Or maybe two people who know each other thought you might be the kind of people that would suit one another. Not so different from the dating app?- After all, you’re just replacing some individual’s sensibility with an algorithm… Maybe.
The trouble, I think, is that you’re not beholden to the app. You aren’t going to meet the app for drinks or at the next company retreat. It’s never going to get back to the app that you ghosted the person it set you up with (well, in cases of merely “mundane” ghosting, at least).
The app isn’t going to have to meet with the person and hear about how “it was going so well, and I thought they were really nice… up until they disappeared.” In the case where you get set up by a mutual friend, ghosting isn’t possible, as such. Or, at least there are going to be some social implications for doing it. The issue is that there is a lingering social connection — you CAN’T just disappear.
But in app-world, it is possible to show up, assess (or at least pretend to), and disappear. The app-dater is going for all, and likely to accept nothing.
So, it is true, there is less social risk. There’s a lot less pressure to say, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to work,” in a nice way. There’s never going to be a situation where you have to explain to a third party that “you gave it a shot, but it just wasn’t a good fit,” in a nice way. Since doing so would implicate someone who thought they knew you well enough to pair you off.
This way of meeting people cannot be all or nothing. The social milieu persists. You are contextualized within friendships, social norms, knowledge and so-on before you start. It can’t be all romantic and nothing else.
Let’s say you met at the beach: You are creating a brand new social connection, aren’t you? And what if the primary interest is romantic?
If you do this, you have to do it within certain social bounds. You probably don’t want to come off as the sort of person who does this as a technique, which means you have to get to know the person. You have to establish normal, friendly relations before you can get on to the romantic stuff. It’s a process, and it takes time.
Probably, by the time you get to the romance, there’s either some social stuff or there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship. The all or nothing paradigm doesn’t bear out in the sense that it is much more difficult for it to be purely romantic.
You might say, “the app doesn’t really allow for all or nothing, either. You still have to get to know the other person. Anyway, that isn’t the goal? It is more efficient since there aren’t any social connections to worry about.”
The purpose of apps, and tech in general, seems to be to disrupt processes— to make them more efficient. But sometimes those things which are perceived inefficiencies, are really integral to whatever process the app purports to make more efficient (I think the stress Amazon has put on the postal service is a great example of this phenomenon — the end result doesn’t really work).
Dating and romance are not efficient. Nor should they be.
Interpersonal fulfillment and a sense of peace are about more than procreation, or whatever would constitute efficiency in this context. The intermingling of social worlds in dating is, in a small way, analogical to the intermingling of social worlds in the long-term or life-long relationship.
The dating app captures one aspect: “are the daters compatible with one another?” But there are lots of other aspects. How do their worlds combine? How will they shift? Will their interests grow together or apart — not to mention their personality shifts and changes? How do they approach community? Adversity? And so on…
So maybe the real question is, “if you haven’t allowed this social mixing to occur, have you really dated at all?” Maybe online dating always places us at the nothing end of the “all-or-nothing” pool. Maybe we should collectively think about jumping back in.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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