T

here is nothing like a good 
romantic comedy to make 
you reevaluate your love 

life. Watching any movie with a boy-
meets-girl plot results in what my 
mother calls an “I’m going to die fat, 
broke and alone” moment, as terrible 
as that sounds. It’s the kind of feeling 
that makes you want any semblance 
of validation immediately, especially 
from a potential romantic partner. 

In one of these moments during 

my freshman year of college, to the 
rolling credit music of “27 Dresses,” I 
downloaded Tinder. I imagine I’m not 
the only one of the dating app’s millions 
of active users who decided to take 
the plunge in a flash of self-pity, 
searching for the immediate embrace 
of dopamine from a mutual match, just 
a few leisurely swipes away. 

Soon, the late-night curiosity that 

drew me to temporarily try Tinder 
had transformed into swiping during 
a dull moment during class, browsing 
the app as a distraction from my 
homework, during parties I didn’t 
want to be at and, of course, while on 
the toilet. At first, I didn’t consider my 
fascination with Tinder to be related 
at all to my own actual romantic life. 
I thought of it more as a tool, one for 
a brief burst of dopamine in the form 
of an unexpected match. I looked at 
my participation in the online dating 
scene more as another source of digital 
entertainment and a self-esteem boost, 
rather than a realistic way to find a 
boyfriend.

But a few months later, I was on all 

the apps — Tinder, Bumble (which 
requires women to message first) and 
Hinge (which markets itself as a dating 
app that is “designed to be deleted”). 
Needless to say, none of them are truly 
a foil to the cons of the others. Instead, 
they offer different options to fulfill 
the same perpetual human need: 
the constant search for love, sex and 
everything that falls in between.

Before I came to college, I had a lot of 

knowledge about relationships but not 
much experience, having gone to an 
all-girls Catholic school for my entire 
secondary school education. I was very 
familiar with plaid skirts and where I 
could find discount Oxford shirts in 
the Walmart boys’ section, but had 
only gone on one date in my whole life, 
which went badly not because of my 
own inexperience but rather that of my 
date. I knew about the hookup culture 
on campuses like the University of 

Michigan’s, but assumed I would never 
be confident enough to partake, still 
working through my mix of ignorance 
and anxiety when it came to dating.

There were several contradictions 

mixed into this anxiety, too. I wasn’t 
Catholic and had no qualms about 
premarital sex, but growing up in that 
environment had stuck me in a state of 
arrested development. I knew I wanted 
to date, sure, but I wasn’t sure how to 
navigate that scene in any way, shape 
or form. It wasn’t like I was saving 
myself for Jesus — my parents had 
sent me to a private school that just so 
happened to be Catholic, but that still 
meant a life away from boys. Reading 
Cosmopolitan makes a 17-year-old girl 
feel well-versed in sex by herself, but 
when faced with the real thing, it was 
a different story altogether.

Once at U-M, the sheer number of 

romantic choices I had to make was 
overwhelming, with thousands of 
boys my own age swarming around 
me at parties, on the Diag, everywhere 
I went. People constantly talked 
about sex, about hooking up, about 
sloppy blacked-out flings and the 
excitement of meeting new people 
around every corner. For someone 
who hadn’t even had her first kiss 
yet, I was simultaneously exhilarated 
and terrified. I wasn’t the only one 
many other people I knew were having 
their first truly mature romantic 
experiences on dating apps, something 
that seemed to be the norm for my 
generation of young adults. 

The allure of these apps comes with 

how easy they make dating. With just 
their phone, a person is immediately 
able to access hundreds of people 
online that they might have never 
met in person, especially on a college 
campus. It’s a lot less daunting flipping 
through 
ready-made 
packages 
of 

people than trying to chat up someone 
in a bar. Thus comes the paradox of that 
ease: There are even people scrolling 
on dating apps while physically in a 
bar, so they are a lot more hesitant to 
engage when there are a million more 
options in the palm of their hand. 
When everyone has agreed to a silent 
transaction, even the people who have 
chosen to eschew Tinder for the old 
way are looked at funny when they try 
to chat someone up. It’s a whole new 
world. 

An advantage I saw in dating 

apps was the mutual understanding 
between me and the person I’d be 

messaging: If we were messaging, it 
meant we were attracted to each other, 
that we were both interested. There 
was no confusion in the intentions 
either I or a potential match had on 
the platform; all one had to do was 
look at my bio to see I was looking for a 
relationship. It took some of the terror 
out of the risk of putting yourself out 
there, as I still felt overwhelmed by the 
options and norms of college dating 
life, even after one brief and seemingly 
innocent tryst freshman year that 
didn’t lead anywhere. 

Two years later, I’m in love, actually 

in love for the first time in my entire 
life. It’s making me think a lot about 
why I never really fell before, why I 
ended up in love by surprise and not 
by searching for it. The cliche of never 
finding what you want until you’ve 
given up is true for me, at least. Maybe 
it’s in that choice, in the selectivity and 
apparent promise of these apps, that 
some of us set ourselves up for failure 
and some for success in love. Is there 
a secret recipe? Does the fact that we 
are often starting our adult love lives 
through these apps mean we will 
always approach love with something 
so specific in mind?

Beyond that, I wonder whether the 

paradigms set up by apps like these are 
changing the way we look at romance 
completely. We all select our partners 
judgmentally, 
as 
much 
as 
some 

people claim to transcend prejudices, 
whether it’s in person or on an app. 
It’s a biological imperative, especially 
for those in their reproductive prime: 
pretty, healthy, tall, skinny, strong, 
attractive people are immediately 
more appealing than the rest. But is 
that flurry of preferences somehow 
worsened by the ease of an app 
interface, where one rarely can show 
their personality? Is true love — as 
some people have posited in the wake 
of hookup culture’s moral panic — 
dead? Or has it just turned into a game?

The modern meet-cute looks very 

different than it used to — this time, 
it’s the wonder of getting texted 
consistently that spells love, not 
necessarily a collision walking down 
the sidewalk or hand touch over spilled 
papers. Trying to decode in real time 
whether or not an interaction in person 
is inherently romantic seems harder 
than before; I don’t think I would ever 
go off my instinct alone before asking 
someone out today, if I knew I could 
play it safe and learn more about that 

person’s intentions ahead of making 
my decision by Googling them or even 
taking a glance at their Instagram. 
Imagining the grand gestures of 
yesteryear — the boomboxes outside 
of windows and surprise appearances 
at airport gates — I feel legitimately 
uncomfortable. All I want from 
romance is a nice good-morning text 
and a coffee once in a while, really. 
It’s obvious that our idea of what is 
romantic has changed, but the need 
for romance hasn’t. Instead, it’s just 
gotten more complicated. 

Though 
attachment 
styles 
that 

are formed during childhood largely 
end up making a person more insecure 
or secure in their love lives, the ways 
in which we approach creating those 
attachments is rapidly changing. I 
can see it in the way people talk to 
each other in these coffee shops, on 
the streets, at parties and in my own 
circle of friends. The getting-to-know-
you stage of dating has flipped from 
an incline to a parabola: Before even 
meeting a potential romantic partner 
or hookup, most of us have “talked” 
to them already, stalked their social 
media accounts, asked friends or at 
least Googled them. 

Thus, we go into the first date with 

the information about the person that 
is usually exchanged as you get to 
know someone. After the appropriate 
amount of time has passed to break 
through the wall of self-marketing that 
many of us put up for these apps, then, 
maybe we can get to something deeper 
than purely physical or intellectual 
attraction. 

These 
apps 
become 
addictive 

through an erratic matching system 
that provides hits of the feel-good 
hormone 
dopamine 
in 
knowing 

someone 
finds 
you 
immediately 

attractive. 

The fact that these systems exist 

and are so widespread seems like a 
perfect opportunity for psychological 
research on our generation, dating 
and media. To get a better idea of 
how much the combination of self-
marketing, selection and opportunity 
that dating apps offer is potentially 
changing our perception of love, I 
sought out University professors who 
were asking the same questions as me 
in their research.

But what I found, at least initially, 

was discouraging. People have only 
been using apps like Tinder and 
Bumble — which have been active on 

the App Store since 2012 and 2014, 
respectively — for less than 10 years, 
so 
psychologists 
and 
sociologists 

don’t have much data to work with. 
Moreover, due to the personal nature 
of these apps, they have nearly 
impenetrable data firewalls, to the 
point that most researchers have to 
build a lookalike tester app to use on 
their subjects. 

The lack of long-term data on dating 

apps and human behavior poses a 
unique problem, as we don’t know how 
these apps are affecting the present, 
but also how they will affect the 
romantic lives of users in the future.

However, 
dating 
services 
like 

eHarmony 
and 
Match.com 
have 

been using algorithms and selection 
mechanisms similar to the ones used by 
Tinder and other dating apps for a long 
time, and researchers know much more 
about them, especially because their 
software developers modeled their 
systems off of data from long-lasting 
relationships. When I read the studies 
around these models, one researcher’s 
name kept popping up again and again: 
Dr. Bill Chopik, an assistant professor 
of 
Social/Personality 
Psychology 

at Michigan State University and a 
visiting scholar here are U-M. I was 
happy to find out that he was currently 

working in Ann 
Arbor.

The 
winter 

wind 
biting 

my 
face, 
I 

walked to the 
psychology 
department 
on 
campus 

and found myself pushed into the 
maze that is East Hall. It almost felt 
like I was inside a giant brain. After 
10 minutes of wandering the grey-
carpeted corridors of the department, 
Dr. Chopik came to retrieve me from 
the depths of the hallways. Questions 
were whizzing through my brain 
already. Relieved to finally be walking 
with direction, I followed Chopik to his 
office. “Ready to talk about Tinder?” I 
asked. He nodded, laughing. 

Chopik is no stranger to research on 

what makes love actually tick. He has 
done several studies on how couples 

who have been together for decades 
have lasted throughout the many 
changes in life, trying to crack open 
the secrets to a good relationship by 
working backwards. 

“I 
tell 
people 
I 
study 
how 

relationships and the people in them 
change over time,” he explained. 
“Basically, I’m most interested in what 
makes people happy and healthy.” He 
settled in his seat, the snow falling 
leisurely outside the office window. 

Chopik has been interviewed many 

times before on this same topic, as 
people grapple to find meaning in this 
new age of dating. No one really knows 
how a technology will eventually 

affect the way we approach and act in 
relationships, and that’s scary.

But that change, Chopik said, might 

not necessarily be a bad thing. 

“So there’s a bunch of people who 

will look at college students today. 
And they have this moral panic about 
how they’re on their phones. They’re 
zombies. They’re out of touch,” Chopik 
laughed. “You know, totally unengaged 
with the world. And I don’t think that’s 
entirely accurate. I think young people 
are engaged in all sorts of things. 
And they’re reflecting on the role of 
technology and relationships. And so 
the same question you just had, I’m 
sure a lot of your friends think about 
too.” 

Indeed, when I told my roommates I 

was planning on writing about Tinder, 
they all told me the same thing: We’re 
all interested to see how this affects us 
in the long run.

“I will also say that a lot of people 

have that mentality (of going into 
relationships casually) when they’re 
young; people maybe 20 years ago also 
had that mentality. A lot of college 
students think that way and they’re at 
an exciting time in life, or they might 
not be sure where they’re going to be in 
two years,” Chopik explained. 

Listening to him talk, I was reminded 

of stories my parents had told me about 
their various partners throughout 
college. Though they hadn’t met their 
lovers online, they had still had the 
youthful impulse to make spur-of-
the-moment romantic decisions, to 
meet new people, to explore. It wasn’t 
as streamlined as with an app, but it 
still existed. Putting a young person 
in a vacuum doesn’t take away the fact 
that they’re young in the first place, Dr. 
Chopik argued. 

I’ve made some of my best friends 

through technology, keep up with 
ones who’ve moved away via social 
media and despite the stigma of it all, 
dating apps did, in a way, make me 
feel better about myself. Though I was 
never successful in finding a long-term 
partner through Tinder, matching and 
chatting with people on apps offered a 
boost in my self-esteem and a path to 
practice romantic interaction when I 
was barely competent at the beginning 
of college. 

I believe that the changes in how we 

form attachments based on technology 
would have happened anyway, even 
without dating apps. Even standard 
social media can serve as a dating app 
these days, with Tinder and Bumble 
giving the option to integrate your 
other social media accounts into your 
profile. As long as there is an option 
to connect with other people, through 
direct messages, comments and likes, 
people will find a way to make those 
connections romantically or sexually 

suggestive, if not direct.

In Chopik’s words, “technology 

often mimics society, not necessarily 
the other way around.” 
W

hen I first thought about 
writing on the realities 
of dating apps in the 

love lives of young people, specifically 
about how much of a game dating 
has become, I immediately thought 
of an article in Vanity Fair, where 
reporter Nancy Jo Sales scoured a 
Manhattan bar and a few college 
campuses for the first signs of change 
in the dating scene due to the rise 
in apps like Tinder. I remembered 
reading articles on dating apps like 
hers, feeling like they were windows 
into another world, one where I wasn’t 
stuck in my polyester plaid with 30 
other girls in a chapel five times a 
week. 

Rereading the article now, on sad, 

printed-out computer paper, I still 
find myself gasping at most of what 
her interviewees said about their 
respective love lives and the ways that 
apps like Tinder had both helped and 
hurt them. To put it in the words of one 
of the interviewed women, the piece 
would make any reader think that our 
era could easily be christened as the 
“Dating Apocalypse.” 

Or, to put it in the words of one of the 

interviewed males, a young musician: 
“‘I would just be sitting at home and 
playing guitar, now it’s ba-ding’ — he 
makes the chirpy alert sound of a 
Tinder match — ‘and …’ He pauses, as 
if disgusted. ‘… I’m fucking.’”

In the years since that piece came 

out, Sales has been hard at work 
cracking open quotes like these, trying 
to get inside the minds of those behind 
the new age of dating. All of this 
went into a particularly interesting 
HBO documentary last year, cleverly 
entitled “Swiped: Hooking Up in the 
Digital Age.” While watching the 
documentary, I was slack-jawed in the 
same way that the article had made 
me, simultaneously in awe of not only 
how the apps were used, but how they 
were designed. 

In 
a 
podcast 
interview 
with 

Vox, Sales discussed the careful 
construction of the apps, how they 
suck us in and whXat this means for 
us.

“You swipe, you might get a match, 

you might not. And then you’re just, 
like, excited to play the game,” Sales 
said. “We’ve become products ... 
We are providing valuable data on a 
pretty consistent basis to people who 
are making money off of us. We’re 
laborers, in a sense, to people who 
don’t really care whether or not we fall 
in love or get married or whatever.”

As I closed the podcast on my 

computer, Sales’ words still echoing in 

my skull, I whipped out my phone and 
re-downloaded the Tinder app, just to 
see my old profile. My bio welcomed me 
like an old friend: There were the same 
photos I had remembered, the same 
links to my Spotify and Instagram, the 
same coy caption: If you can name all 
5 members of Fleetwood Mac, you’re 
in the right place. Writer, musician, 
addicted to VICE documentaries on 
YouTube. I physically cringed at that 
last line. The same photo that’s my 
profile picture on all my social media 
stared me in the face, and I swiped 
through the rest of the photos, slightly 
proud of the seeming perfection of 
the bio. I used to call this profile my 
“masterpiece,” and for good reason. 
Even if it never got me a boyfriend, it 
definitely hit the spot to get me some 
attention.

Still, it felt gross to be back in the 

interface, looking at my old messages 
like an elderly lady reading her diary 
entries from childhood. Even if my 
heart was never really in the bad dates 
I went on, the apps still had their time 
with me and did whatever they were 
going to do to my mindset.

No matter what you do, there is no 

way that the culture around dating 
apps doesn’t touch you. But will the 
supremacy of dating apps last, and 
how will they fare in the long run? 
As Sales said, we’re the guinea pigs 
here. We’re the first generation to do 
romance online, whether it’s through 
apps specifically for dating or not. 

What is that actually doing to the 

way we form relationships? It seems 
like a self-fulfilling prophecy, to some 
extent — what we believe about these 
channels of connection seems to come 
true in our own lives, just because of 
the way we interact with them. But if 
this is true, is there some secret way 
to get what you actually want out of 
them? Or will they stain our romantic 
histories like spilled tea, a momentary 
mistake or attraction that seems to 
influence the rest of our connections? 

I look at my partner sometimes and 

wonder, what if this hadn’t happened? 
What if I didn’t fall in love with you? I 
think that is what makes the long-term 
questions of what these apps mean 
for our generation so hard to answer, 
because the answer is only a collection 
of these questions themselves, a 
collection of instances where we look 
at our lives and think about the choices 
we have made. Falling in love is easy, 
but getting there is hard. Even if it 
seems to be just beyond one swipe.

 
Clara Scott is a junior studying 

English in LSA and Creative Writing & 
Literature in the RC. She is a Daily Arts 
Writer and can be reached at clascott@
umich.edu.

Wednesday, April 8, 2020 // The Statement
4B
5B
Wednesday, April 8, 2020 // The Statement

BY CLARA SCOTT, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
Love inside the dopamine machine

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

