**The surge of dating app users as a result of Covid is depersonalising individuals and the concept of love.** Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble have surged as the Covid-19 pandemic has both halted and reconstructed the ‘dating scene’. Gone are the days when people meet naturally at a bar and replacing them are awkward socially distanced walks or simply a series of futile messages with no possibility of meeting face-to-face with the person behind the screen. The huge increase of app members further degrades the morality of online dating platforms as the they are no longer just a shallow form of getting to know someone, but they are now a complete marketplace. [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/modern-dating-odds-economy-apps-tinder-math/606982/) magazine interviewed a woman on Tinder whose thought-process on dates is now ‘If this doesn’t go well, there are 20 other guys who look like you in my inbox.’ Due to this increasingly universalised attitude, dating is becoming an economy as people are seen as commodities. Individuals are depersonalised in what should be one of the most personal parts of a person’s life – love. In addition to the basic supply and demand structure of dating apps, they can be equated with an economy through common rhetoric, such as describing newly single people as [‘back on the market’](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/modern-dating-odds-economy-apps-tinder-math/606982/). And so, love is being commodified as nowadays, people are too busy making sure they can ‘shop around’, instead of considering their matches as individuals. Therefore, the surging dating app scene is transforming hopeful romantics into a generation of economists.

**Dating as always been a marketplace, even before apps.** I would disagree, in that love has always been a market, and dating apps are just a new way to access that marketplace. So while the efficiencies of these markets have changed with dating apps, and supply has gone up in recent years, and with that there are a lot of new behaviours, not all desirable, and not all good for love, this is all just a transformation of the marketplace that has always been there.

**Dating apps have turned love into a marketplace, just like it has aspired to be and should be** Dating apps promote the idea of options. It seeks to maximize a person’s reach in the dating market and allows more efficient selections. While that idea seems contradictory to the traditional image of love, it should be seen as an improvement. By market, one means options. Dating apps allow people to compare different potential love interests at the same time in a socially acceptable manner. This efficiency gives one more liberty in finding love. One does not have to change their criteria for true love. They can continue to go on dates and test the water. The only difference lies in the fact that they can better compare different candidates. This ability allows them to become more autonomous in finding love without geographical or time constraints. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this practice. Evaluating potential love interests represent a time-tested practice in many cultures. Dating apps merely perfected the means of doing so. Therefore, dating apps have made love more similar to a market. However, that tendency has always existed and this technology simply allowed for an overdue improvement.

**TL:DR: the dating apps have indeed built a marketplace for love, but with that come all the inequalities and winner-take-all dynamics of the market - exacerbated because there is only metric: hotness.** At least in heterosexual dating, there's lots of research to show that for a woman to click/swipe on a man, he has to be *really* attractive. The suggestion being that, since the physical is really only part of the mix for women, only a really beautiful man will trigger that desire. Men, for whom the physical is much more a driver (so the research says), will click/swipe with much less discrimination because they find most people attractive. The [result](https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a) is the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. Put another way, Tinder has a [higher GINI co-efficient](https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1087575749949673472?s=20) (that ranks inequality) than 95% of the world's countries. Maybe that's [always been the case](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/06/comparing-income-sex-redistribution.html), but my hunch (I'm Gen X, never used an app) is that when dating was social, the funny, clever, driven, quirky, etc guys also had a chance at love and could give Mr. Chisel-Jaw a run for his money.

They may have turned love into a very competitive marketplace that is now even more global. While it is a numbers game for many daters, the pandemic may have also made some more demanding than others.

I think dating apps have undoubtedly turned love into a marketplace. Not only does it give its users too much choice, but it also focuses too heavily on appearances. Whilst the latter is unavoidable (i.e. you can't show a true personality via a dating app), it encourages a level of superficiality that is perhaps damaging when trying to form meaningful relationships. In terms of choice, the swiping function of these apps dehumanise men and women alike, and the user is left to feel either constantly rejected or constantly judged. There is too much choice that you feel like you are having the user experience of a clothes marketplace: judging the style of the profile and how it may fit you... It is also a strange 'numbers game' of the more likes you send, the more likely you will get in return (mainly based on the algorithms that lurk behind the most popular apps). This means that you are not really looking for love, but rather validation of your profile and what you **think** it represents about you. Though I can accept the pandemic has made dating apps the only feasible way to find 'love', I think it is more of a place to find validation than meaningful connection.

Traditional dating roles are generally insulting to both men and women. Women are treated as "objects of desire" or "trophies to be won". Men are treated as undesirable and having little value until they have proven such. While online dating could help mitigate this on paper, it actually exaggerates it to an absolutely preposterous level. Women get ALL the messages, and a good number of such messages are disrespectful. Even the most attractive men get virtually no messages. Though amongst men, it is still directed to very few at the top. The best method, in my opinion, is what Bumble is doing: Men can't send messages until women initiate. It doesn't fix everything. But it does prevent men from spam-messaging women, and it forces women to actually take initiative. The imbalance in dating roles in general leads to a TON of social toxicity. But online dating is where it peaks.

I disagree with this. That is how I met my wife!