There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg effect when it comes to Tinder and the disentanglement of dating from the rest of social life. It’s possible, certainly, that dating apps have erected walls between the search for potential partners and the normal routines of work and community. But it’s also possible that dating apps thrive in this particular moment in history because people have stopped looking for potential partners while they go about their work and community routines.
Finkel, for one, believes that the new boundaries between romance and other forms of social interaction have their benefits—especially in a time when what constitutes sexual harassment, especially in the workplace, is being renegotiated. “People used to meet people at work, but my God, it doesn’t seem like the best idea to do that right now,” Finkel says. “For better or worse, people are setting up firmer boundaries between the personal and the professional. And we’re figuring all that stuff out, but it’s kind of a tumultuous time.” Meanwhile, he says, dating apps offer separate environments where finding dates or sex is the point.
But, naturally, with the compartmentalization of dating comes the notion that if you want to be dating, you have to be active on the apps. And that can make the whole process of finding a partner, which essentially boils down to semi-blind date after semi-blind date, feel like a chore or a dystopian game show. As my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2016,
Now that the shine of novelty has worn off these apps, they aren’t fun or exciting anymore. They’ve become a normalized part of dating. There’s a sense that if you’re single, and you don’t want to be, you need to do something to change that. If you just sit on your butt and wait to see if life delivers you love, then you have no right to complain.
Hailey has heard her friends complain that dating now feels like a second, after-hours job; Twitter is rife with sentimentssimilarintone. It’s not uncommon nowadays to hear singles say wistfully that they’d just like to meetsomeoneinreallife.
When Nathan Fielder disguised himself as a woman by changing virtually nothing about the way he looked or dressed because “a modern woman can present herself however she likes” that did more for feminism than “eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man” ever did
“Women’s “heal everything, fix everything” compulsion is a major entrapment constructed by the requirements placed upon us by our own cultures, mainly pressures to prove that we are not just standing around taking up space and enjoying ourselves, but that we have redeemable value- in some parts of the world, it is fair to say, to prove that we have value and therefore should be allowed to live. These pressures are introduced into our psyches when we are very young and unable to judge or resist them. They become law to us… unless or until we challenge them.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves
it’s really weird when people’s feminist analysis is making fun of men for not having a skin care routine… none of us should have a skin care routine babes
