Back in February 2012, a 25-year-old tech entrepreneur named Sean Rad presented an idea for a dating app called ‘MatchBox’ at a hackathon event in California. Rad won the hackathon, caught the eye of investors, and subsequently raised over $50,000 for his fledgling business. By September 2012, the app was soft-launched in the App Store – renamed ‘Tinder’, after Rad and his co-founders realised MatchBox sounded too similar to Match.com.
Rad couldn’t have chosen a more apt name for his shiny new dating app: while he may well have believed he was onto something when he presented his idea back in early 2012, it’s unlikely he could have possibly foreseen just how seismic an impact Tinder would one day have on society.
Research published as part of Stanford University’s ongoing ‘How Couples Meet and Stay Together’ project found that in 2012, for the first time ever, ‘meeting online’ overtook ‘through friends’ as the most common way to meet a partner. Since then, meeting online has continued to outstrip every other way of meeting a partner. Researchers estimate that in 2024, a colossal 61 per cent of all couples met via online dating. Meeting through friends remains in second place – but only a measly 14 per cent of couples met this way.
But, strangely, dating apps’ dominance isn’t reflected in our culture. In films and TV shows about love, IRL meet-cutes still reign supreme. In Raine Allen Miller’s 2023 film Rye Lane, for example, protagonists Dom and Yas meet after Yas finds Dom crying in a public toilet. In Will Gluck’s Anyone But You (loosely based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), also released in 2023, Bea and Ben first cross paths in a coffee shop. You’d think Emily Cooper, a young, horny millennial parachuted into the middle of the city of love, would have downloaded Hinge tout suite; but dating apps are conspicuously absent in Emily in Paris too. Gabriel is her downstairs neighbour; she meets Alfie at a French class; and Marcello, her latest love interest, makes her acquaintance after helping her ski down a difficult piste.
Dating apps are noticeably absent on the page, too. In Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo – perhaps the most anticipated love story of 2024 – protagonist Ivan meets his future girlfriend Margaret during a chess tournament: he’s there to compete, while she’s the programme director at the arts centre where the tournament is taking place. In fact, despite Rooney being hailed as a quintessentially “millennial” writer, almost all of the couplings in her oeuvre meet offline: in Normal People, Marianne and Connell first get to know each other because Connell’s mother cleans Marianne’s house; in Conversations with Friends, Nick and Melissa first encounter Francies and Bobbi at a spoken-word poetry event.
This isn’t to say dating apps are entirely absent from modern love stories: in Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, for example, Alice meets Felix on Tinder. But Alice and Felix aside, it’s difficult to think of any happy couples in widely popular books, TV shows, or films released in the last ten years who meet online.
If and when dating apps do feature in these sorts of stories, they’re often skewered and satirised. The events which unfold in the 2022 film Fresh, for example, are catalysed by protagonist Noa’s dissatisfaction with dating apps: the film opens with Noa on a date with Chad, a man she has met online, who monologues about his love of hot sauce and his view that women should go back to dressing like they did in the 1950s. It’s this fatigue with online dating that later pushes Noa to give her number to Steve – who turns out to be a murderous cannibal – after meeting him while grocery shopping.
Noa’s experience of online dating in Fresh is doubtless one that chimes with many, many people: the casual misogyny, the unsolicited dick pics, the tedium of it all. So maybe it’s unsurprising that the apps are conspicuously absent from both the page and the screen. While they may well be the most common way for couples to meet, it’s clear that most people would prefer to meet ‘organically’: one survey reckons 90 per cent of Gen Z are “frustrated” with dating apps. It tracks that audiences are in the market for romance narratives which either criticise the world of online dating, or simply offer us some respite from the so-called ‘trenches’ and remind us that love is unpredictable, arbitrary, and could always be just around the corner.
It goes without saying that fiction isn’t always meant to be ‘relatable’ or perfectly mirror reality: but isn’t it strange that the overwhelming majority of people meet online, but we don’t see this reflected in romance stories at all? I understand the urge to steer cleer: I am no dating app apologist. I think they foster selfishness and encourage us to dehumanise other people. I think they are purposely designed to frustrate your attempts at finding love, which subsequently makes them addictive, which helps line the pockets of the execs behind them. I think their dominance has eroded social norms to such a point that it’s now nigh-on impossible to meet someone in real life, in spite of the fact that so many of us hate online dating.
But at the same time, it feels hypocritical and paradoxical to rail against dating apps and wholeheartedly deny their efficacy, and at the same time be surrounded by so many happy couples who met online. When they work, apps clearly can be romantic. A meeting on an app still relies on a healthy dose of chance, a little help from God or the universe. The last relationship I was in began on Hinge; sometimes, in our happiest moments together, I’d wonder: what if my settings were different and I’d inadvertently filtered his profile out? What if I’d deleted the app in a fit of frustration before I had the chance to meet him? What if I had swiped left? There was no saccharine, Hallmark-worthy meet-cute: no locking eyes in a coffee shop, no brushing hands while reaching for the same library book. But there were still the butterflies, the giddiness, the yearning and infatuation which gradually concretised into something real and safe and secure. I still felt as though fate had thrown us together.
Online dating, we’re constantly told, is the pits. In many ways it is. But would we view dating apps as so tragic and diabolical if we saw more stories which centred on the romantic potential of online dating? Perhaps the odd story about the possibility of love blossoming from the cold, hard interface of a phone screen could help sow a little optimism. God knows we need it.
