Swiping Tendencies: The UX of Desire - Medium

She was about to take a bite from her blueberry muffin when we noticed each other. She stared at me from the register and our eyes locked, creating a vortex of panic and embarrassment. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there frozen, unable to move, feeling the words piling up in my mouth. She took the muffin out her mouth, averted her gaze, as I did, and ran out of the coffee shop.

I sat back in my chair, confused about our reaction to each other. Was it me, or her — was it the muffin?

Why didn’t I get up and talk to her? After all, we had a really nice chat online only three hours before.

To figure out what happened, I had to think back a bit.

My girlfriend and I broke up last summer. We met a year prior through a popular dating app. I had just come back into town after some time away, and reinstalled the app after being off it for a while. She did the same (she came back from a three-month trip to Africa). Two days after we called it quits, I reinstalled the app ­ — the name doesn’t matter, but more the fact that that was my first instinct as a newly single guy.

I had been dating constantly (or obsessively) since until something strange happened on New Year’s Day. I went on three dates the week earlier. They were all perfectly nice women. In fact, I made out with all of them. This is not to brag, but for me, until I started with the dating app world, making out with someone usually meant that there would be a second date (one-night stands excluded — they don’t usually start with the question “what does your dad do?”). For some reason, when I got back after each date, I found myself on the app trying to find my next date. After a spontaneous and disastrous 1:30 AM date on New Year’s Eve (we met on a subway platform in Queens and walked around for twenty minutes in search of a bar. She was less than impressed), I took a drunken vow not to go on a date for a week, so I uninstalled the app, and announced the news to my neighbor the following morning.

However, after spending the whole day writing at home, I reinstalled the app, justifying the act by telling myself that, “Hey, you’ve been writing all day. You could use a nice conversation and a drink.” I matched with a girl, chatted online for a bit and poof — I found myself in a cab on the way to a 10:30 PM date.

On the way there I texted my neighbor, “Well, my ban lasted less than a day.”

She replied with the appropriate emoticon for the situation.

I wrote, “I think I need to go to rehab.”

She wrote back, “Well, maybe she’ll be nice and you’ll hit it off.”

Then a strange realization hit me — the possibility that I might like her didn’t even cross my mind.

That made me think: are dating apps really about facilitating meaningful encounters? Are they even about connecting people?

It is not that I am passing judgment on the legitimacy of dating apps as tools to find a meaningful relationship. It is not about value ­– whether meeting someone on a dating app is inherently good or bad. It’s about function — what do these apps come to mean to us in and of themselves? What areas do they take, or possess, in our lives? And how do we end up relating to them, and subsequently to the people we meet through them?

So, back to the girl in the coffee shop. Why didn’t I talk to her? Surely I would chat with someone who I spoke to briefly at a party three years ago, so why wouldn’t I feel comfortable chatting with someone I talked to three hours ago?

It’s because our romantic discourse has been delineated in and by technology. There was even something off-putting about her realness. I was only able to desire in the particular vocabulary the app provided; in fact, I only desired her because it was on the app.

I remember when I was younger planning potential pick-up lines for months before I would approach someone I desired. There were girls who I liked but I knew were out of my league, so I wouldn’t even try. Today I can start a conversation with anyone (as long as we match). But there is a specific codex we’ve conformed to when it comes to interacting with our romantic potentials.

In the 50’s, anthropologist Margaret Mead observed courtship rituals in American teenagers. She writes: “A boy is permitted great initiative, but the girl is trained to be able to exercise a strong veto upon his importunities that he can trust her to impose an external check upon them.”

Why do we need these game? Isn’t it enough just to walk up to a guy or a girl and say, “Hey, you’re cute, want to get some tacos?”

It’s not, because this game is not a means to get what we desire (a date, sex, marriage etc.). This act, this vocabulary of gestures, is the actual fulfillment of our desire itself. The longer this ritual continues, the more our ego is satisfied. That was never truer to me than when I was swiping, charming, matching and liking. It worked on me like a when I open bag of Doritos: I can’t stop, even though I want to — or at least that’s what I tell myself for my brain to be satisfied so that my body can continue gorging on the processed, synthesized snack. If there is any way to describe it, I would call it a “Tinderush”.

Essentially, I was swiping to keep on swiping. I even swiped while a date was in the bathroom. As a matter of fact, if we did match, I didn’t necessarily start a conversation. But for some reason, I wasn’t able to delete them or engage with them, so they end up just sitting there in the app, their faces staring up at me. Technology ushered in new vocabularies of consumption: for instance, we binge-watch a TV series. It doesn’t really matter what it is — the weight of it counts, not the mass. In the early days of file sharing, I would download whole discographies and boast about having terra-bites of music. I realized that this was the same: these faces weren’t faces of potential mates — they were merely a reflection of my superego telling me that there is inherent value in amassing matches.

Does this mean that in today’s society, casual encounters are not only permitted, but also encouraged? Wasn’t lustful desire supposed to be in the realm of the id?

Some say that dating apps have ushered in a new sexual revolution — people can sleep with each other whenever they want, with whomever they want. We are back to the pre-HIV era; technology has democratized and legitimized casual sex. I thought of examples stretching from writings about the sexual Victorian underbelly to San Francisco gay scene in the 1980s. The difference here is that explosive sexual desire was taboo, obviously, and done in basements and underground clubs.

What is lacking in these types of apps is the imaginative aspect of desire. The point is not that I wanted to engage in more orgies, but in essence, I realized that desire has gone through a restructuring. The gay scene in San Francisco was, a community, albeit fluid, that by their acts created a new kind of desire, one that was free from any social constraints (constraints that made their acts illegal). Sex is not only a personal catharsis — it is a social one. Sex was seen as a rebellious act that sparked creativity. I thought of the “Summer of Love” and how sexuality served as the umbrella under which so much art and music were created. Having sex with someone I met through an app felt more like a social injunction, like eating right and exercising, than a debaucherous encounter. It was mostly contrived fun, like an X-rated version your dad telling you, “Get out there. Have fun.” The creative aura, the free-play aspect was gone, and instead, it turned into a game with set rules that are agreed by everyone — even by my friend’s mom (She’s on a senior citizen dating app. We discussed the STD epidemic in retirement communities over brunch).

Basically, it felt like we have conformed to a particular sexual hegemony. What these apps presume to offer us, according to French philosopher Alain Badiou, is the relationship without risk. He concludes that love cannot exist without that risk element. I would go further and say that even sexual relations can’t exist without it. The immediate gratification these apps survive, even on the masturbatory level (in that I mean sitting in a room by yourself and talking to matches) might satisfy a person’s libido, but in essence, weakens it.

It is not that we are becoming less sexually active; it is that we are becoming less actively sexual.

What is supposed to be a perennial life force has turned into automatic action. Sexual desire drives us into action; it keeps us hungry. We are more aware and resourceful when motivated by sex. By oversaturating ourselves with images of potential matches, by not seeking desire in our minds and imagination first, we are losing not only a fundamental life essence but also a vital survival tool. Sexual skills are social skills, and when one set is handed to us, neatly optimized, we lose our social adaptability.

What will be sexual expectations from kids who grew up with dating apps? How will language change in the realm of relationships? Could someone who only knows how to relate to potential mates on dating apps ever be able to revert back to meeting people organically? I suspect that kids who will be 18 in ten years will have a totally new gestural and linguistic vocabulary, but even then, the moral superstructure will remain the same.

Online dating has shifted our perspective on love and lust, but it seems like we cannot fully embrace this new reality. I tried to figure out why, I read countless articles on the subject, and then I realized that the answer is not in the content of these articles, but the fact that there are so many of them out there. In fact, articles about dating apps outnumber articles about any other kind of app.

Why is that? Is it that dating apps are more innovative than banking apps? No. Is it that sex sells more than food? Probably. But I think the reason lies in a sense of confusion I have, and that we all share about these apps — the fact even though they offer us the unprecedented potential to meet and engage in meaningful relationships with people, marriage and divorce rates essentially haven’t changed.

In essence, it is the biggest sexual revolution that never happened.

Although there is a promise for unparalleled sexual variety, most encounters are enacted the same way. By consuming more seemingly romantic or sexual experiences, we are essentially denying ourselves a truly unique relationship — one that is a universe created just for you and your partner.

And so, I uninstalled the app and installed it again, and now I am off, and this tendency might be the case for a while. Until then, I am going to keep my phone in my pocket and look up to the world, because I might just match with the girl reading on a book on the subway–who is sitting just to the right of me.

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