On Tinder, Taking a Swipe at Love, or Sex, or Something, in New York

The New York Times:

On a recent night, with Valentine’s Day looming, I went out for drinks with a woman I know and a few of her friends. It was a Thursday, and the bar they chose, Bondurants, on the Upper East Side, was packed with people just like them: good-looking, semi-affluent millennials, downing craft beer and milling about in hungry-looking, monosexual clusters.

My acquaintance, Dana, who is 25 and works in public relations, is an enthusiastic, some might say obsessive, user of the dating app Tinder. She, like her friends, will often spend hours blithely swiping through its gallery of digitized faces — at work, at home, even in busy pickup bars.

But that’s New York’s technologized dating scene. Except for ordering their drinks, none of the people I was with that night spoke to any other actual human beings. Their erotic energy was focused on the touchscreens of their smartphones.

…

“When you have a population of young, relatively affluent transients, schooled in technology, uprooted from their networks and hoping to find each other, the chances are they’ll look for a solution on their phones,” said Benjamin Karney, a professor of social psychology at U.C.L.A.

Tinder and its competitors — apps like Loveflutter, which bills itself as an “anti-Tinder” for the quirky, and Hinge, which seeks to connect people who are friends, and friends of friends, on Facebook — don’t collect a lot of personal information on their users; detailed profiles aren’t the point. But from the data that they do collect, it is possible to say that most New Yorkers who date on mobile apps are well-educated, slightly more are male than female, are mainly from Brooklyn and Manhattan, and are overwhelmingly between 18 and 34.

Read the whole story: The New York Times