In February 2022, 29-year-old Priya* was working on the shop floor at Hollister on Regent’s Street. Nursing a terrible hangover, she had considered calling in sick, but had made it to the last 20 minutes of her shift, when a guy walked into the shop and asked her where the graphic t-shirts were. “I thought he was cute, but he looked really annoying, like some kind of Drake wannabe”, she says. “Basically, he looked like a f**boy.”
After noticing Priya’s accent, he asked if she was from India, and the pair got talking after he shared that he went to a Hindu school. “He asked for my Instagram, and it was instant after that,” she says. “We spent all our time together. His family even jokingly said ‘has this girl kidnapped you, you’re spending so much time together?’ I would say that it was definitely love at first sight.”
A few days prior, though, Priya had been on a Hinge date, who she was still messaging. “It went really well, so obviously the guy and I were still talking,” she says. “But as soon as I met my boyfriend, we stopped contact.” Two-and-a-half years later, Priya and Sam* are living together, and have plans to get married soon. “I think it has a lot to do with how we met,” she says. “When you meet someone in person it feels more real than when you’re just one of many options.”
Apps create the illusion of efficiency...an algorithm solution to the chaos of love...but they don’t work the way they say they do
It is the kind of meet-cute that many of us have spent our lives fantasising about. Saccharine rom-coms where the couple lock eyes reaching for the same book in the library, or get tangled in each other's dog leads at the park, have long populated our collective imaginary. Recently, social media accounts like @meetcutesnyc, which ask ordinary people how they met, have racked up millions of followers, with the most popular videos being those of organic, chance encounters. Three in four single people in the UK would prefer to meet a future partner in real life, according to research from Inner Circle.
But stories like Priya’s are becoming increasingly rare. Research published by Stanford University last year showed that a whopping 55 per cent of heterosexual couples in the US – and an even higher proportion of gay couples – met online in 2022. It’s hardly a secret that more of us are now meeting online. But has the normalisation of apps closed us off to love-at-first-sight encounters now that we have a designated space online for romance?
“We're so used to our first communication being mediated through the apps, which give us confirmation that that person is single, and that they like us as well,” says Dr Natasha McKeever, a philosophy and ethics lecturer at the University of Leeds and co-director of the Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships alongside Dr Luke Brunning. “People might worry a bit more about appearing weird approaching somebody in real life because, those factors aren’t a given, which can be quite daunting.”
It is not just a fear of approaching, but also being approached, adds Dr Luke, some of which paradoxically stems from trauma from negative experiences on the apps themselves. “If you're on a dating app and you're just having loads of crap interactions – particularly women with men – and then someone approaches you on the street, it’s understandable to be less tolerant and a little bit more guarded,” he says, “because your experience of people trying to talk to you is often quite negative.”
This, according to author and University of Warwick professor Dr Carolina Bandinelli, is contributing to a wider “platformisation” process of all aspects of our lives, which sees various aspects of the economy and society increasingly siloed into digital platforms.
“Platformisation takes a social phenomenon which is organic to social life and isolates it,” she says. “The apps have created a digital dating enclosure – meeting partners has been traditionally embedded in social activity – the pub, a tango class, pilates. But now there’s a space whose explicit purpose is that of meeting someone romantically, which can create the perception that meeting someone offline is awkward or embarrassing.”
Physiologically, it can take just a fifth of a second after meeting someone for the release of chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, and adrenaline that trigger that in-love feeling, according to research published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine back in 2010.
When people experience "love at first sight," they are often responding to physical attractiveness and other visual cues. From an evolutionary perspective, the concept of "love at first sight" might have served an adaptive function – people needed to make rapid decisions about potential mates due to environmental pressures, such as short life expectancy or competition.
Renowned anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose groundbreaking 2005 study analysed the brain activity of people in the throes of romantic love through MRI scans, found that when someone sees a person they find attractive, their brain's reward system is activated – involving regions rich in dopamine, like the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the caudate nucleus. Dopamine is also the chemical behind our motivation to find food and water, and just like other survival mechanisms, it can be triggered instantly.
Other hormones, like adrenaline and norepinephrine can also be triggered, which cause physiological responses such as increased heart rate, sweaty palms, and heightened focus – producing the sensation of being "swept off your feet."
Of course, that initial influx of hormones does not necessarily translate into a more stable romantic connection. Psychologically, "love at first sight" might also be influenced by projection – filling in gaps in knowledge about a person with desires about who we want them to be.
Last year, a study found that people who meet on dating apps have less stable marriages
But what happens when that initial meeting happens via a screen? Does the gamification of swiping through profiles risks replacing the genuine spark of a first in-person interaction? The repetitive nature of these online interactions, which often fizzle out after superficial chats, has led to what some call a "one-swipe-away mentality" – the belief that something better is always just another swipe away, promoting a cycle of emotional burnout.
“Dating apps make love at first sight unlikely because you have to get to know someone twice,” says Dr Eleanor Drage, Senior Research fellow on AI at Cambridge University. “Their digital profile is not going to be the same as who they are in real life.”
This has accelerated the rise of what Dr Carolina has termed the “post-romantic ethos”. “Apps create the illusion of efficiency, they promise an algorithm-powered solution to the chaos of love, the messiness and unpredictability of encountering another human being,” she says. “They propose a simple procedural solution. Take Tinder’s strap line – match chat date. It reduces the complexity of meeting your soulmate for one night, forever, whatever it might be, to a simple procedure. But they don’t work the way they say do.”
“This is the post-romantic ethos – the idea of love not as an unpredictable and enigmatic endeavour, but a love that doesn’t hurt. Love minus the pain, minus the risk.” Apps are, ultimately, about self-creation – carefully selecting the best photos, airbrushing, labouring over messages, even using AI – to curate the most desirable version of oneself, but not necessarily the most accurate. This can create what Dr Luke terms an “authenticity gap” when meeting in person, which can leave both parties frustrated and disappointed.
When 28-year-old Sarah first moved to London during the pandemic, she initially found apps a useful way to set up dates when in-person socialising was limited. Increasingly, however, she discovered that they were not conducive to selecting people who she actually ended up having chemistry with. “You can have a really long list of qualities that you look for in someone, but for me at least that rarely translated well into vibes in person,” she says. “I realised I wasn’t very good at judging for myself on paper what would actually work for me.”
After deleting the apps on and off over the years, she decided that she had more success meeting people organically, so deleted her profiles for good in July. “I much prefer meeting people in-person – it’s all about the vibes,” she says. “For me, it’s also really attractive if someone has the confidence to ask you out in person. With apps, you can hide a bit.“
“I’ve been on dates with people who I’ve met IRL – at parties or events,” she adds, “and I wouldn’t ever have chosen on paper, but we’ve ended up really getting along. I’ve always had positive experiences – I think because you’ve had that tiny bit of face-to-face interaction so by the time you’ve said yes, you know whether it’s a goer.”
In 2014, one of OkCupid’s founders caused outrage when he revealed that the company had deliberately mismatched users, presenting low-compatibility profiles as highly compatible to see if they would converse as much as well-matched ones – which they did. While many criticised the study as unethical, it suggested that people's perceptions of compatibility might not align with their actual potential for a connection.
Experts have also raised concern that by encouraging us to only seek connection with people who align with what might be our type “on paper”, apps could be reinforcing rigid, normative beauty standards regarding ethnicity and body type. “Men who are under six foot or women who are bigger than size 10 – people get filtered out before they even get a look in,” says Dr Natasha. “If you're meeting these people in person, you might not really notice those things about them.”
Men who are under six foot or women who are bigger than size 10...get filtered out [on apps] before they even get a look in
“There are two issues in place,” argues Dr Luke. “The first is the explicit filters that users are able to set, and the second is how the algorithm might be filtering potential matches based on a conception of attractiveness. The whole process can be really driving – or at least increasing – existing discrimination.”
Dr Kerry Mcinerney, a research fellow at Cambridge University, agrees. “When it comes these wider, socially significant criteria, particularly things around gender and ethnicity, but also political beliefs, algorithmic sorting is creating a polarisation that could have bigger knock-on effects,” she says.
Could this be creating less stable, more superficial connections? Last year, a study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior found that people who meet on dating apps have less stable marriages. Researchers surveyed 923 American adults, who filled out questionnaires about the state of their unions. “Online daters reported less satisfying and stable marriages than those who met their spouse offline,” said Liesel Sharabi, the study’s leader.
It’s important to note, though, as Dr Luke says, that apps also have the potential for facilitating genuine, meaningful relationships. For many people, meet-cutes aren't necessarily superior to online connections. Apps have other advantages, too – many female users appreciate being able to have a buffer to potential daters to begin with, to avoid potentially dangers encounters. The focus, he says, should be on building meaningful relationships, regardless of how they start.
“Some of the concerns [about apps] are overblown”, he says. “They increase people’s options, and also operate in parallel to in person meetings. You might see people on apps that you vaguely know, or a friend knows.“What all of us want is more authentic connection, whatever form that comes in.”
*Some names have been changed
