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After your brain gets that little high of a dopamine spike, an inevitable dip follows; there\u2019s a low; and so it isn\u2019t surprising that more than half of singles report feeling lonely after swiping on dating apps. It\u2019s one of the feelings that sends you back to swipe some more, to try and make this feeling go away; and so begins the cycle of addiction.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Published on: Lit Hub<\/a> By Nancy Jo Sales<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a couple of months after my story \u201cTinder and the Dating Apocalypse\u201d came out in Vanity Fair<\/em> in 2015 that a friend of mine texted: \u201cTinder\u2019s attacking you again.\u201d Oh, wonderful, I thought, clicking on the link my friend had sent to an interview with Tinder co-founder and then CEO Sean Rad in the Evening Standard<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rad was \u201cstill defensive and upset about the article,\u201d the paper said, \u201cmurmuring mysteriously that he has done his own \u2018background research\u2019 on the writer Nancy Jo Sales and \u2018there\u2019s some stuff about her as an individual that will make you think differently.\u2019 He won\u2019t elaborate on the matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t know whether to laugh or become very worried. Tinder was doing oppo research on me and coming up with what? I wondered. That I had high cholesterol? That I still owed the Park Slope Food Coop hours from the early 90s? The writer of the Evening Standard<\/em> piece never called to ask me for a response to this smear, nor did any of the other news outlets that subsequently repeated it. It seemed clear to me that Rad was trying to get back at me for doing a piece that had raised questions about the cultural impact of his company, and so he was attacking me personally. This was online culture, and it was the culture of tech, a notoriously sexist industry: A woman gets out of line? Slam her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But hadn\u2019t Tinder done that enough already with their so-called \u201ctweetstorm,\u201d which happened soon after my story came out? I wondered. In a single night, the Twitter account for Tinder went on a rampage, tweeting at me more than 30 times, accusing me of bad journalism. It was an unprecedented case of corporate bullying of a journalist on social media, and yet, the many news reports which covered Tinder\u2019s meltdown simply mused about whether it was a corporate gaffe, \u201cbad for Tinder\u2019s brand.\u201d I was shocked at how I was left to twist in the wind, with none of my compatriots in the media coming to my defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNext time reach out to us first @nancyjosales\u2026 that\u2019s what journalists typically do,\u201d Tinder had tweeted. But I had no obligation to interview the bosses of Tinder in a piece about the experience of users on dating apps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rad was \u201cstill defensive and upset about the article,\u201d the paper said, \u201cmurmuring mysteriously that he has done his own \u2018background research\u2019 on the writer Nancy Jo Sales and \u2018there\u2019s some stuff about her as an individual that will make you think differently.\u2019 He won\u2019t elaborate on the matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t know whether to laugh or become very worried. Tinder was doing oppo research on me and coming up with what? I wondered. That I had high cholesterol? That I still owed the Park Slope Food Coop hours from the early 90s? The writer of the Evening Standard<\/em> piece never called to ask me for a response to this smear, nor did any of the other news outlets that subsequently repeated it. It seemed clear to me that Rad was trying to get back at me for doing a piece that had raised questions about the cultural impact of his company, and so he was attacking me personally. This was online culture, and it was the culture of tech, a notoriously sexist industry: A woman gets out of line? Slam her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But hadn\u2019t Tinder done that enough already with their so-called \u201ctweetstorm,\u201d which happened soon after my story came out? I wondered. In a single night, the Twitter account for Tinder went on a rampage, tweeting at me more than 30 times, accusing me of bad journalism. It was an unprecedented case of corporate bullying of a journalist on social media, and yet, the many news reports which covered Tinder\u2019s meltdown simply mused about whether it was a corporate gaffe, \u201cbad for Tinder\u2019s brand.\u201d I was shocked at how I was left to twist in the wind, with none of my compatriots in the media coming to my defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNext time reach out to us first @nancyjosales\u2026 that\u2019s what journalists typically do,\u201d Tinder had tweeted. But I had no obligation to interview the bosses of Tinder in a piece about the experience of users on dating apps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what Tinder\u2019s tweetstorm did, I think, was to manufacture a backlash to my story. In the media, there were suddenly several takes that misrepresented my reporting and the concerns I was trying to raise about how dating apps had changed the experience of dating, especially for women. Slate<\/em> called my piece a \u201cmoral panic.\u201d Salon<\/em> said it \u201creads like an old person\u2019s fantasy of Tinder.\u201d The Washington Post<\/em> said that I had \u201cna\u00efvely blamed today\u2019s \u2018hookup culture\u2019 on the popularity of a three-year-old dating app,\u201d Tinder\u2014when, in fact, my piece clearly described the collision of a long-trending hookup culture with technology: \u201cHookup culture,\u201d I wrote, \u201chas been percolating for about 100 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n My piece was about misogyny in online dating. But none of these backlash stories mentioned that. It seemed ageist and sexist to me, this suggestion that I couldn\u2019t have a valid take of my own on all this, or that I didn\u2019t know what I was doing. I\u2019d been a journalist for a long time, even won some awards. I was amazed to see myself cast as the na\u00efve old lady, the pearl-clutcher, the prude\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n If only they knew what I was really up to in my personal life!<\/p>\n\n\n\n It gave me a feeling of dread about what could happen to a journalist\u2014or to anyone\u2014now, on social media, where the weapons of attack were getting stealthier by the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, my story was going viral. Through my website, I was getting emails from people all over the world\u2014many were from London, one of the cities where Tinder is used the most. (In a 2017 market study, the top places for Tinder use were listed in order as the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, France, Scandinavia, Finland, Australia, and India.) People were telling me how the story had resonated with them. Which made me feel better, as did the many supportive tweets I saw:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHey @Tinder,\u201d one said, \u201c@nancyjosales is entitled to write anything she wants & if you think her article is misleading, you have no idea about this generation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWell done, NJS,\u201d said another. \u201cFunny that an app that is known for casual hookups would take anything so personal. #scornedlover.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I still wondered what was this \u201cbackground research\u201d Sean Rad said he had done on me, and what was the \u201cstuff about [me] as an individual\u201d he allegedly knew?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I suspected that what his veiled threat was really about was that he knew, from his corporate access to my account, that I had been using Tinder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d been using it a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And OkCupid and Bumble and Hinge as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like most people who use dating apps, I was on a few at the same time. Within a couple of weeks of going on them, in 2014, I was swiping, swiping, swiping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was swiping before I went to bed at night; I was swiping when I woke up. I was swiping while I was the riding train; I was swiping while I was waiting in the dentist\u2019s office. I was swiping to procrastinate; I was swiping to battle insomnia. I was swiping in hotel rooms in the cities I traveled to, on the road shooting my documentary (Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age<\/em>) with my cameraman, Daniel. But I didn\u2019t tell Daniel about any of this\u2014no!\u2014because he would have made fun of me and called me out. And I wasn\u2019t swiping in front of my daughter, Zazie\u2014God, no!\u2014because I didn\u2019t want her to think that I thought it was okay to put a picture of yourself on a dating app for men to evaluate and swipe right or left. (I don\u2019t even want her to read my new book<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> begins:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMidway upon the journey of our life, That was me, stumbling into Tinderworld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2014 was the year you started to see people swiping everywhere\u2014in line at the pharmacy, at the movies, at the bank. I saw a man swiping while walking down the street. I was in a boutique buying a dress to wear to a wedding when the saleswoman helping me stopped in the middle of ringing me up at the register to look down at her phone, where the animated Tinder match screen had appeared with its familiar ba-ding!<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOh, I got a match!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People were swiping when they were on the toilet, swiping while they were on dates\u201422 percent of men in a study done by Hinge said they had swiped while on a date. It was in 2014 that Tinder boasted its users were spending an average of 90 minutes a day on the app. In 2014, people started developing \u201cTinderitis,\u201d a pain in the thumb from swiping. The adoption of the technology was swift and overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would lie in bed at night and swipe and swipe, telling myself, I\u2019m just going to do this for ten minutes, but then ten minutes would turn into 20, and then 20 would become an hour, and then two. A boredom would set in as I swiped and swiped on the interminable stacks of pics, which reminded me of the boredom I felt when I would click and scroll on Amazon even when I didn\u2019t have anything I really needed to buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The adoption of the technology was swift and overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I set my geolocation at just a mile, because I wasn\u2019t prepared to travel very far for casual sex, and in New York, you didn\u2019t have to. So my feed was showing me a lot of hipster dudes in the downtown area, college students, Wall Street bros, and assorted other bizarro guys I would have never known were living near me if it hadn\u2019t been for dating apps. Like the guy whose profile pic consisted of an empty dungeon out of Eyes Wide Shut<\/em>. Or the guy who said he was going to prison soon and wanted to \u201cfuck until they locked the door behind him.\u201d Swipe left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was making me do this so much? I wondered now and then as I swiped and swiped. It scared me a little bit. I\u2019d never been addicted to anything like this before, except for maybe cigarettes when I was in my twenties and thirties, before I got pregnant with Zazie and quit. This felt like cigarette addiction to me in the way that it was always scratching at some corner of my brain, controlling my behavior. Except that this behavior was seen as totally acceptable, not socially censured like cigarettes had come to be; it was as normalized as cigarettes were in the 1950s, when tobacco companies were still hiding the truth of what they already knew, that this stuff could kill you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It comes as no surprise to most people when they learn that swiping was designed to be addictive. We\u2019ve been hearing for years how tech companies engineer their products with endless little bangs and whistles designed to grab our attention and get us hooked. What may have surprised us more, had we been able to look into the future, would have been to see how little we\u2019ve come to care about how thoroughly we\u2019re strung out on social media, and how much this has changed our behavior, day to day, hour to hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But all of this, too, is by design, chillingly enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI woke to find myself in a dark wood,
\u201cFor I had wandered off the straight path.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n