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Online Technology and Love

We are living in the Tinder era, when a swipe is a terminal judgment taken in an instant upon scant information—at a rate of hundreds per hour. This is entirely new to humans—the appearance of an apparently endless choice of potential partners. Were it that simple! This chapter looks at how the Internet has changed our views of love, of romance, and even of ourselves.

How Technology Undermines Our Love Lives

Since the first civilizations, and across all cultures, humans have told stories about love. From Paris and Helen, to Romeo and Juliet, to Bonnie and Clyde, to Brangelina, lovers have captivated our imaginations, and love stories have become part of our cultural fabric. Very few of us can live happily without the love of others. The love of children and partner, of parents, and of friends: all contribute mightily to the richness of our existence.

In many ways, past technological revolutions have affected how we love. Universal schooling and the popularization of letter-writing made love letters a common vehicle of expression. Later, the camera allowed soldiers to exchange pictures with their wives and families and girlfriends. The telephone connected distant lovers and friends over twisted strands of copper wire.

These technologies surmounted distance to help us maintain our relationships through “social snacking,” a taste of the experience of actually sharing time together. The Internet and smartphones have, however, made these tastes more lifelike and immediate, for better and for worse: for better because we are more connected and closer than we ever were; for worse because, since the arrival of the Internet and smartphones, we have seen pornography use skyrocket, with clear negative effects on relationships and fidelity. Divorce rates, which rose rapidly during the early days of the Internet, continue to rise in people over age fifty; marriage rates in the United States and the developed world are falling steadily; and key measures of intimacy in America, such as frequency of sexual intercourse, have declined.^1,2,3

Other contributors to these declines undoubtedly exist, but the way we use the new technology seems to have contributed. Despite all the talk of our being in a post-marriage society, married couples continue on balance to be happier and more stable than single people are, according to much of the research on the topic. And according to research by John Helliwell and Shawn Grover published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, that appears to be a causal relationship rather than a mere correlation.⁴ Of course, lower rates of marriage correlate with higher poverty rates in general, particularly in the United States, where social safety nets are weaker than in other developed countries. But living in a two-parent household is a core indicator of well-being among children.^5,6

Online technology has done a lot of good. Evidence is emerging that online dating has led to a marked increase in interracial dating and has enabled people to connect with others whom they would otherwise not have met.⁷ For those living in remote locations with small populations, online dating may, by expanding their pools of possibilities, be the best way to find a potential mate. And our ability to communicate with loved ones using technology has brought great benefits to business travelers, who can chat with their spouses while on the road and share pictures with their children and extended families.

In this section, we discuss how modern technology has affected our love lives, focusing on some of the more obvious topics—online dating, pornography, divorce—and connecting those topics to broader trends that suggest a diminution in the experience of love and romance in our lives. As they do in other parts of our lives, always-on devices, along with the attention economy and the explicit design of technology products to maximize consumption, produce tedium, frustration, and dissatisfaction, both directly and indirectly.

We see this occurring through our acceptance of ways of seeking love that seem practical and helpful but may in fact cheapen and trivialize what might otherwise be a less comfortable but ultimately transcendent experience. And some of the effects imply that moving love on line makes people’s experience of seeking an ideal match more unpleasant, more time-consuming, and more stressful than otherwise, with less fulfilling results. Compounding that, online dating promotes expectations to which our love lives, fraught with comparisons, never seem to measure up.

Online Dating and the Endless Search for the Perfect Mate (or Just for Disposable Love)

Fifteen percent of Americans have used a website or app to look for a romantic partner.⁸ The online dating industry now generates billions of dollars in revenue. It has also broken down barriers to finding potential mates as no previous technology has. We can now easily find and date people from different neighborhoods, in different towns, in foreign cities while on business trips, or in social groups that we might not otherwise regularly encounter in our daily lives. We can filter online referrals to potential mates on virtually any parameter we choose to zero in on, talking to only those who have the characteristics and background that we want in a partner.

Online dating remains new enough to raise many questions about its effects. How have online dating and dating applications affected human fulfillment? Has the endless catalogue of swipes and potential mates led us to better marriages and greater fulfillment? Or has it led us astray and left us feeling sadder and lonelier? Has it led to fidelity or to divorce? The answers to these questions are complicated. Over all, online dating appears to have diminished our ability to find romantic satisfaction. More troubling is that online dating may be changing the way we view romance and how we assess and value other human beings, making our views and values more superficial, overly influenced by physical appearance.

The experience of our good friend Alice (not her real name) is a case in point. A divorced mother with college-age children, Alice has had an amazing career, rising to high levels at prestigious companies as a technology executive. Outside of work, she is creative and an avid hiker. She paints, makes pickles, and helps her many artist friends turn their work into decent businesses. She is funny, smart, and full of energy. We have known Alice for four years—and in that time, she has always struggled to find good dating partners.

This lack of dates is not for want of trying. Alice has used several online dating sites and gone on a handful of dates, but she found the entire experience unsatisfying. She considered Tinder but found it superficial and somewhat obnoxious. Even with more-thoughtful dating sites such as OkCupid, she felt that the dates never lived up to the online conversations or the expectations that the profile pictures raised. That’s perhaps unsurprising, considering that the majority of people are at least somewhat dishonest in their profiles.⁹ She grew so dissatisfied that she began organizing parties to which her single friends brought their own single friends to meet and greet—not unlike an old-fashioned dance or social.

Alice’s disappointment with online dating seems to be common. In response to a survey by Consumer Reports, the most active group of people using online dating sites found the experience incredibly frustrating: those who were most active gave online dating sites the lowest ratings of any service sites across all industries.¹⁰

To be sure, 44 percent of respondents to the survey said that online dating had resulted in a long-term relationship. This is certainly a positive result, and there are many success stories. One large study, too, suggests that marriages coming from online dating are happier.¹¹ These positive outcomes may represent a selection bias: more-systematic people may tend to use online dating for successful outcomes precisely because they are systematic in their approaches and have a specific strategy (a wonderful book about this is Data: A Love Story, by Amy Webb) or because a better attitude toward dating led them to use a certain dating site in a more thoughtful way.¹² If so, those people probably would have ended up with a better marriage result anyway, even if online dating had not existed. (The study was funded by the online dating site eHarmony.)

Also, a fundamental change has come about through online dating. In the past, online dating was an intentional act. People logged on to a dating website to browse, chat, and look for partners. The website was separate from other online activity and was not set up by default to induce addictive behavior, though it played the usual tricks to foster engagement: e-mail alerts, phone applications, and so forth.

Then along came Tinder, with swiping and other clever user-interface tricks that foster the actions of rating, comparing, and selecting potential mates. This changed online dating in a key way. It became an omnipresent activity, a sport almost—swipe left, swipe right—that Tinder users could play in bars, in elevators, on the subway: anywhere they happened to be. Tinder’s innovation made online dating more addictive and also more comparative in an unhealthy way. Before, it took effort and focus. Tinder and its ilk made it mindless and ceaseless: the dating-application companies essentially used their simple navigation schemes to transform online dating into a form of endless mate shopping. On the one hand, we can admire its elegance. On the other hand, we see the result. The research discussed in this chapter shows that Tinder is bad for self-esteem and generally bad for the psyches of its users.

And the proof is really in what people do, rather than in what they say. If online dating were a panacea for romance, we probably would have seen soaring rates of romantic engagement. And we have not. To the contrary, in the era of modern technology, we have gone in reverse: more of us live alone; we marry later; we have fewer partners; and we spend less time in social groups and outside our homes.¹³ That said, it is critical to remember that technology is neither good nor bad except as it is used or abused.

And our cultural expectations may play a significant role in establishing that trend. Vivek has two Indian American relatives who approached online dating sites not for dates but with a view to matrimony and building a family. They used Indian dating sites and found lifelong partners and much happiness through those relationships. There are also likely to be cultural differences between small towns and large cities, between rural and urban areas, and even between different members of the same religion in terms of how they use online dating sites and their purposes in accessing them. For this reason, we try to focus on aggregate numbers.

Examining the True Effects of Online Dating

The effects of online dating and dating apps on happiness are complex. On the one hand, online dating exposes people to a far wider set of options and allows filtering by criteria of the user’s choosing. On the other hand, the paradox of choice affects many by making a decision difficult—and when they do make a decision, they tend to be less happy with it.¹⁴ This may occur because that style of online dating promotes a mentality that views people and relationships as commodities to shop for.¹⁵

This focused and highly regimented shopping for mates, which occurs even on an app as apparently unstructured as Tinder, also precludes the wonders of serendipity. In a column in the New York Times, author Maris Kreizman tells how, after failing to meet a nice match through algorithm-driven online dating sites, she found happiness with a love partner who was too young, in the wrong profession, and living in the wrong neighborhood.¹⁶ Naturally, they met the old-fashioned way, in a bar through friends of friends:

“In walked a friend of a friend who I sort of knew from the internet but who I’d never met in real life. He is six years younger than I am (way too young for me) and he lived in Harlem (that’s a $40 cab fare from my home in Brooklyn) and he’s a writer/comedian (warning flags coming at me from every direction). But we talked and he charmed me. He was online dating, too, but I never would’ve found him on an app. He wasn’t on my metaphorical vision board, but he fit into my real life in ways I never could’ve imagined. He’s my husband now.”

Aside from eliminating serendipity, online dating in its current format promotes a winner-take-all effect, wherein everyone seeks to date the most attractive people.¹⁷ This eliminates selection of mates by other variables that may be more predictive of compatibility, leading to frustration all around. There is no way to set up an online filter for people whom you find funny or fascinating or endearing, because those qualities are subjective and because they emerge in how people interact in a relationship. For these and other reasons, we believe that online dating is likely to be making it hard for people to find fulfillment in the meaningful, lasting relationships that contribute most to their lives.

Since the advent of Match.com in 1995, online dating has exploded into a diverse set of applications and services, from “science-backed” dating sites such as OkCupid, Chemistry, and eHarmony; to affinity-group sites such as JDate (Jewish) and Grindr (gay men); to swipe apps (Tinder); to apps that give more control to women (Bumble). Advocates of online dating claim that it improves choice, makes finding partners easier, and improves our ability to select partners on the basis of what we perceive to be compatible characteristics. A significant and growing body of science implies otherwise.

Through a comprehensive survey, psychologist Eli J. Finkel and colleagues found that online dating “does not always improve romantic outcomes.” This occurs for many reasons, one being that online dating is reductive, narrowing social interactions to two dimensions.¹⁸ The experience of meeting someone on line fails to capture the essence of social interaction. Online dating, Finkel and colleagues write, is evaluative and creates a mindset of assessment rather than of engagement.

This mindset leads online daters to view potential partners as just another online commodity, undermining their willingness to commit because there is always a better option out there, even if they don’t know about it at that instant. Indeed, it is probable that those who are most successful at online dating attack it with ruthless efficiency, playing a high-volume game and quickly casting aside anyone who doesn’t (either on line or once dates commence in real life) generate an immediate spark of interest.

This rating culture and commoditization mindset may also lead to diminished appreciation of people before we even meet them. Scientists are coming to believe that physical attraction is not fixed. We change what we think about people’s attractiveness based on our interaction with them. Funny people or clever people or extremely empathetic people may become more attractive to us after we talk with them or spend time with them.

Kansas University researchers documented this effect, calling it “the Tinder trap.”¹⁹ In a lab setting, they showed subjects pictures of potential mates and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The researchers then introduced some of the subjects face to face to the people they had rated. The scientists found, curiously, that potential partners they had rated as less attractive or moderately attractive were far more likely to get increased ratings after a face-to-face meeting than were potential partners they had rated as attractive. So evaluating a potential partner solely on visual attractiveness is a poor predictor of what you will think of that person once you meet in real life.

Perhaps most importantly, rating people’s attractiveness prior to meeting them tends to diminish raters’ evaluations of them afterward, “probably because the rater is comparing their conversation partner to all the other potential partners they saw on line.”²⁰ In other words, the apparently endless choice that online dating offers may cheapen and undermine our perceptions of people in real life.

The rapid-fire judgments inherent to online dating may also encourage our worst instincts. In a review of research about online dating in 2012, Eli Finkel and colleagues found little evidence that online dating was a net positive.²¹ Their review was performed prior to Tinder’s rise in popularity, but it foreshadows Tinder-like behavior. And it frames behaviors encouraged by online dating as basically antithetical to the outcome of identifying and loving a partner.

For example, the variety of choices in online dating can adversely affect our judgement in insidious ways. Evaluating choices side by side tends to encourage daters to emphasize factors and characteristics that are unlikely to determine compatibility. Whether someone is taller, or has blond hair or red hair, is highly unlikely to reflect compatibility over time; far less so than more-innate traits such as empathy, intelligence, or humor, or that elusive quality that emerges only in face-to-face interaction, “chemistry.” Particularly useless in this regard are superficial physical traits that tend to be overemphasized due to reliance on photos as the primary basis upon which to choose a date. Finkel and colleagues call it “relationshopping,” saying, “Much like hunting for size 8 leather shoes on Zappos.com, online daters seek partners by searching through profiles using attributes such as income and hair color, as opposed to arguably more important factors, such as sense of humor or rapport . . . We are bad at predicting what we will find attractive in real life.”²²

The snapshot-selection process not only leads many online daters to fudge their appearance but also tends to dwarf other considerations. OkCupid, which was founded by Harvard math majors, went so far as to measure the impact of what people wrote in their profiles in comparison with the pictures they posted. They found that what people wrote about themselves mattered little in determining perceptions of their attractiveness.²³ And, ironically, exposure to so many choices lowers satisfaction with the mate chosen.²⁴

The multitude of choices also results in scattered, unfocused communication, which is likely to contribute to the transactional nature of “relationshopping.” In a metadata analysis of four hundred thousand online-dating interactions, researchers found that the vast majority of the conversations are short, under twenty messages in length, and last an average of fifteen days.²⁵ In a Hobbesian twist, only 1.4 percent of the conversations result in an exchange of phone numbers. Imagine, then, going to a bar and introducing yourself to ninety people in rapid succession, of whom only a few are willing to talk to you, and leaving with one phone number. That experience sounds exhausting and miserable rather than liberating! This has led to “dating-app fatigue,” with some women saying they spend ten to fifteen hours a week managing their online-dating lives. As Julie Beck writes in The Atlantic, dating applications “facilitate our culture’s worst impulses for efficiency in the arena where we most need to resist those impulses. . . . Efficient dating is, in many ways, at odds with effective dating.”²⁶ Or, put another way, focusing on quantity over quality is exhausting. Rather than searching for the perfect mate or a needle in a haystack, people might be better served by just trying to get to know each other better and letting their intrinsic attractions emerge.

More concerning is that some online-dating applications have been linked with low self-esteem. In a survey of Tinder users and nonusers, those who used the swiping app recorded lower levels of self-worth and, along with other negative impressions, said that they were less satisfied with their own faces’ appearance.²⁷ Curiously, this effect was stronger in male users.

Now we move from how technology is affecting our dating lives to how it is affecting our sex lives—through pornography.

Pornography

For the purposes of this section, we leave aside all moral judgments about viewing pornography. Rather, we focus on the impacts of its consumption on our lives. It is an uncomfortable subject, but online technology has taken pornography out of the closet and into the mainstream. Pornhub, the largest pornography site on the Internet, is ranked as the thirty-eighth most trafficked web property in the world, according to Amazon’s Alexa traffic-ranking service. It tallied 2.66 billion sessions in November 2017, more than double the number of monthly sessions eight years earlier. Estimates of the percentage of worldwide web traffic devoted to pornography range from 5 percent to 20 percent (weighted by its heavy video content).

According to Pornhub’s 2017 Year in Porn Review report, visitors watched four billion hours of pornography over the course of 28.5 billion site visits to Pornhub alone, not counting visits to the thousands of other online sites and blogs that publish pornography.²⁸ Visitors performed 24.7 billion searches on the site (about eight hundred per second, the number of hamburgers that McDonald’s sells per second). No one doubts any longer that a fairly large percentage of the population consumes online porn. International studies estimate that 50 to 99 percent of men and 30 to 86 percent of women consume porn, the vast majority on line.²⁹ The average session on Pornhub was seven minutes in length as of November 2017.

Though some psychologists believe that porn consumption is innocuous and even associated with reductions in reported sexual assaults, a substantial volume of research indicates that porn is not so benign. In a survey of 1,500 people, researchers found that people who viewed porn even once a month expressed lower degrees of sexual satisfaction than those who didn’t, with “disproportionately larger decrements in satisfaction” in those who consumed it more often.³⁰ In another study, researchers found that couples of which neither member used porn reported more relationship satisfaction than did couples of which one person used porn. Individual users, the study found, reported “significantly less intimacy and commitment in their relationship than non-users and shared users.”³¹ Other research associates the use of pornography with a higher likelihood of cheating on spouses.³² Researchers have found that regular, heavy porn use may physically shrink parts of our brains.³³ Roughly one-third of married women view surreptitious or unapproved use of pornography by their spouses as a form of infidelity.³⁴

This is hardly a settled topic, and a debate continues to rage over whether online porn is actually physically and psychologically addictive. One researcher found that treatment of people who believed they were porn addicts with Naltrexone, a drug used to treat drug addictions, significantly lessened their time spent on line consuming pornography.³⁵ Some counter-evidence indicates that joint porn use within a relationship increases females’ reports of sexual intimacy and quality.³⁶ And porn watchers were more likely to be having sex than non–porn watchers, according to the most recent survey.³⁷ But having sex and making love are not equivalent, and most research suggests that porn has a negative impact on us, on our self-perceptions, and on our love lives.

Psychologists and researchers are concerned that sexuality is becoming divorced from intimacy—a trend that could accelerate as improvements in pornography technology make it a better and better replacement for intimate sex with people we love.³⁸ If porn in fact becomes more attractive than the real thing—more convenient, more enjoyable, and sufficiently realistic—and becomes more widely consumed, numerous other problems could result. Sex is effective not just for procreation; it has multiple beneficial emotional and physical effects on us. Having good sex with someone we love increases our happiness and well-being and may even increase how long we live!³⁹ Sex with somebody we love confers a range of important health benefits, and it’s possible that the intimacy associated with sex is more important than the sex itself.⁴⁰ Replacing live sex with pornography could have many unforeseen unfortunate consequences. Yet we may be heading down that path without asking what it may do to our relationships and to the meaning of being human.