Why Dating Apps Have No Way To Find True Love

I didn’t start writing a book telling singles to throw away their dating apps.

Focus Make Your Move: A New Science of Dating And Why Women Are In charge It’s not an online date. It upsets the script about the traditional gender role of dating. In other words, rewrite all the old-fashioned “rules” that you can’t ask a woman to date a man or ask a boyfriend to marry.

However, another thing emerged from an interview with a woman who broke the rules and found love. They hated online dating.

So many women I talked to had these amazing stories that wouldn’t have been written without quitting the app and finding a soulmate at work, church, friends, or dog run. ..Inspired by their story, I added a chapter to the book Make your move an offline dating challengeA step-by-step plan to find love in the real world, not digital.

“Suspicious game?”

Mia, a 49-year-old divorced, was one of the unfortunate app customers.

why? For one thing, she described online dating to me as a “suspicious game.” Mia thought most men online were lying to her — about their career, marital status, or whether they were looking for a hookup or a real relationship. (A Pew Research study found that Mia’s rights: 71% of dating people report that it’s “very common” for people to lie to the profile of a dating app.)

Tired of being fooled and used, Mia made her first date and tried to find all the holes in the man’s story. It didn’t lead to many second dates.

Today, Mia is engaged to a man she met through her best friend. Prior to her first date, Mia didn’t even care about googled him. She said she didn’t have to do that because she knew her friends would never set up her with an unfriendly or unreliable man. “It’s like a game of believers,” Mia said of old-fashioned dating. “I wanted to find something positive.”

Yes, people find husbands and wives through dating apps. And no, especially in the era of COVID, I’m not against all forms of online dating. There are some niche dating apps that I love. (Read my book!)

And yes, there are good reasons to use a dating app that has nothing to do with finding a life partner. If you use them to find rewarded hookups or friends, or non-privileged friends, be sure to swipe. But if your goal is to get married, there’s a better way to find a life partner than spending 10 hours a week swiping the app (this is the average time on a recent date). ..

Failure rate

According to Pew Research, 55% of women find dating today more difficult than it was ten years ago. Two Troublesome Reasons: 57% of women report experiencing harassment on dating apps, and 19% even say they are under threat of physical violence.

Even if safety isn’t an issue, research has shown that it’s hard to fall in love or fall in love online. Young men and women who meet first are 25% more likely to report intimacy than those they first meet online, according to a study led by Susan Sprecher, a professor of sociology at Illinois State University. It turned out to be expensive.

The dissolution rate is also high. Aditi Paul, a professor of communications at Pace University in New York, is the most comprehensive and independent dataset on online and offline dating at Stanford University.How couples meet and stay together“Survey. In part of her study, Paul found that relationships involving the first people he met in real life lasted four times longer than the relationships of the first couple he met online.

Why is it difficult to find true love in the app? Humans have evolved as social animals. We deepen our bonds through shared experiences. As a result, jokes always look more interesting with friends than alone. Those shared experiences will be part of us — stories we want to tell and love to tell again to the closest people. They form the basis of deeper emotional connections.

Dating business model

Finding a soulmate online is so difficult for the same reason that no one turns on the computer to find a best friend. It’s not how the human brain is wired.

Another problem with online dating is that the romantic goals of dating app members do not always match the business goals of dating app operators.

It’s no coincidence that Match, Zoosk, and other dating apps rarely advertise the overall effectiveness of online dating in advertising. Bounty claims that paper towels are more absorbent, Chevrolet claims that the car is more reliable, and Verizon claims that the network is the fastest. But dating apps never claim to get married faster than meeting people in the old-fashioned way.

Dating apps don’t get rich from your happiness. Their business model revolves around increasing membership revenue by attracting new customers and retaining old ones. Some apps like Tinder also make money from ads. Every time a Match or Tinder member gets married and stops using the app, there is one less paid customer.

Do you think I’m too cynical?Please see Match Group 2019 Annual Report, Match, Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish parent company. The following is a list of words that never appear in Matchgroup’s annual report: marriage, marriage, wedding, couple, boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, husband and wife.

The word partner appears three times, but only when referring to a company’s business partners.

Tinder, Match and OKCupid don’t want to get you out of the market. They want to turn you into a lifelong shopper.Match group Admit The annual report also boasts that “a successful experience … promotes repeated use.”

Translation: Start dating great people on Tinder and you can go back to the app to find even better people.

If Match Groups really want to help you get married, they focus on connecting you with people you already know in real life. For example, according to a survey, couples who meet at work get married at a very high rate of 30%.

Social situation

Given the complexity of socializing at work, and of course COVID, wouldn’t it be great to have an app that reveals mutual appeal between colleagues before someone risks being sent to HR?

Connecting singles within the same social sphere was, in fact, Hinge’s business model before it was acquired by Match Group.In the early days of hinges, users had to be friends or friends Facebook Before the hinge app matches them.

Hinge’s Facebook requirements have been romantically rewarded for users. According to Bustle, Hinge was the most mentioned dating app in New York Times However, in June 2018 (the same month that Match Group acquired a majority stake in Hinge), Hinge announced that it would abolish Facebook’s requirements and adopt a more open-ended model.

Another thing happened in June 2018. This was the last time Hinge released a press release claiming to be “the number one mobile-first dating app mentioned in the New York Times wedding section.”

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Adapted from Make Your Move: A New Science of Dating And Why Women Are In charge.. Jon Birger is a former senior writer for Fortune and the author of Date-onomics, which can be purchased with Make Your Move. Amazon, Burns & Noble, Indie bound, Walmart, And other merchants. Burger can be reached at jonbirger.com Or on Twitter @ jonbirger1.. You can also schedule a virtual book club Q & A with him. BookYaYa..