Match Made In...

Frances Eby, a twenty-one-year-old student at AUP, sits in a window-lined atrium on a Sunday afternoon telling me the story of how she met Stephen, her boyfriend of two months. The first time they met, she was in North Dakota visiting the university she plans to attend for grad school. Laughing, she says that they met on Tinder. She changed her location settings on the app before she got to school to check out the scene. They matched and hit it off talking about the places they’ve been and their mutual love of the Louvre. Now, they’re about 4,000 miles away from each other and in a relationship entirely facilitated by technology.

Adoration is the only thing in her voice when she talks about Stephen but when she talks about the fact that they met on Tinder, her tone changes. She starts off sure that she feels no embarassment about how they met, but then reveals the idea of having used a a dating app does bring up some other feelings. “For me, I have a little bit of shame. I met my boyfriend on Tinder. It’s not as classy as if I ran into him at the grocery store and our eyes locked and I just knew.”

There is a certain negative perception about online dating that casts a shadow over many of the relationships that are born from it. Meeting online is now the second most common way Americans start relationships. In 2017, 39 percent of heterosexual couples met online. However, 41 percent of millennials would say they are embarrassed to admit that they date online. Some people who have benefited from online dating sites feel shame about using them for fear of coming off as desperate. This fear creates a certain taboo around talking about online dating.

When most people picture a romantic relationship, they think of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks or Nicholas Sparks. They see the “meet cute” of two people who have just the right interaction at just the right moment that blooms into a romance of the ages. Online dating pushed the potential for a “meet cute” out of the picture and the image of a serendipitous moment is replaced by one of two people separately sitting in solitude swiping on their screens.

Eby described it as “choosing out of a catalog,” something that creates almost an entirely opposite image than the one of a romance of the ages. Online dating can feel impersonal and formulaic. People spend hours instantaneously making decisions on perfectly pieced together profiles hoping that someone else will like the best version of themselves that they have presented on their profile. This kind of presentation makes it seem like people must create a tailored version of themselves to find love, and it’s not surprising that they don’t want to want to talk about it.

Twenty-five-year-old AUP student, Ali Benzerara sits across from me in the campus’s main hang-out spot. He says he uses Tinder to find friends but knows that there’s always the possibility of finding romance. He and his friends from home are open about the fact that they use dating apps. It has just become a piece of normal, everyday life for them. According to him, though, that’s not the same story at AUP, “People here seem a little more closed off about it. There’s a stigma about it. Like, oh, they’ve really resorted to online dating.”

Online dating has a sense of desperation attached to it, as if it’s the last resort for people who couldn’t hack it dating in the real world. It conjures up an image of a sad single person throwing in the towel after a series of incredibly unsuccessful dates. No one wants to be that person and some people go as far as lying about how they met their significant other to distance themselves from this image asmuch as they possibly can.

Match.com, one of the first major online dating platforms, launched in 1995 during a time when the internet was nothing more than a novelty, not something that our entire world revolved around.

At that time, someone who needed to resort to meeting people online would have been seen as an oddity. Now everything we do is done through technology, but the remnants of that same belief are still woven into our opinions of people who date online and the platforms themselves.

Last spring, Facebook announced the launch of a new feature called “Dating.” This feature will allow members to use the website not only as a social media platform but also as a dating website. It is part of their on-going campaign of facilitating deeper relationships. One of the key features is that it is completely separate from your regular profile. Users won’t be matched with people that they’re already friends with and none of their friends can see their dating activity, something that might come as a shock to people who are used to seeing posts from friends of friends of friends cluttering up their feed.

Twenty-four-year-old AUP student Alice Preat has been using dating apps for a few years and is currently looking for nothing more than people to make a connection with. She has no doubt that she can find the kind of connection she’s looking for online just as easily as offline. “Love is love, and it doesn’t matter where you found it, it matters how it grows and blossoms into love and a healthy relationship!”

“OUR ENTIRE WORLD IS RUN ON TECHNOLOGY, WHY SHOULDN’T OUR LOVE LIVES BE INCLUDED IN THAT?”

Preat sees online dating in a similar light as Eby, but she also recognizes the benefits of this new way of meeting people. “Sometimes it does feel a little bit like a shopping mall and a little dystopian, but it can also be a great sexual liberation and emotional liberation tool, which I think is amazing.” To her, the catalog of people presented on these sites doesn’t offer a series of impersonal opportunities, but more chances to grow and learn something about herself.

She thinks the taboo around online dating websites comes from the fact that they have a reputation for fuelinghook-up culture. “There’s the idea that these apps are primarily used for sex, which can cause shame for certain people using them, especially women.” It is a double-edged sword, people who use online dating to find love are seen as desperate, and people who use it for nothing more than a casual hook-up are seen as trashy. No one wins.

The same year that 39 percent of heterosexual couples met online, 65 percent of same-sex couples met online. Platforms, like Tinder or Hinge, allow members of the LGBTQ+ community a wider pool to choose from, especially if they live in a place where it might not be safe for them to be out and open about their sexuality.

Nathan Owenby, an eighteen-year-old student at AUP, met his boyfriend Ilan on what he calls a “knock-off” Tinder. They matched on the app and talked for no more than two-hours when Owenby asked Ilan to meet him at a nearby fast food restaurant before the end of the day for their first date. Owenby visibly becomes more energetic as he describes the perfect person for him. He wants someone who is “smart, kind, caring and thoughtful.” Ilan checks off all of those boxes. His advice to people who want an outcome like this from online dating is to “go in there with a clear plan of what you want.”

Owenby has no shame about the fact that he uses online dating platforms. At their core, dating websites are supposed to do nothing more than help people meet people. No matter what you’re looking for, whether it’s the love your life or simply a friend you like to see movies with, dating apps offer the possibility of making that connection. He believes that to get full use out of apps like Tinder, people need to be willing to use them outside the comfort and privacy of their home. “You should use it in public. Going to places and finding people works.” He also recognizes that for this to truly work, there needs to be a balance. “You have to be realistic about how close you are, but also be adventurous.”

It’s now 2019 and, to Owenby, online dating has been around long enough that it has just become a fact of life. “I think it’s become normalized because we’re not the first batch of people to have access to it. To us, it’s just an option.”

People don’t want to be ashamed of dating online. It has become so common that many people like Preat and Owenby don’t see why they should be ashamed of it. Our entire world is run on technology, why shouldn’t our love lives be included in that? Technology lets Eby’s relationship flourish despite the distance, and it allows Benzerara to meet people that he otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to. It creates all kinds of new opportunities for relationships, but the shame is still there. Everyone does it and everyone knows, but it is still something that goes unspoken.

Written and Photographed by Tatum McDonald