The Atlantic

Can Facebook Fix the Dating World Tinder Created?

Before dating apps like Tinder, dates usually resulted from at least some baseline level of shared experience. Facebook wants to turn back the clock.
Source: picture alliance / Getty

A common complaint about dating in the time of Tinder is that people often end up on dates with people about whom they know little to nothing. As I wrote last year in a story about how Tinder and apps like it had transformed dating in just half a decade, being on the apps often means dating in a sort of context vacuum:

Friends, co-workers, classmates, and/or relatives don’t show up to flesh out the complete picture of who a person is until further on in the timeline of a relationship—it’s unlikely that someone would introduce a blind date to friends right away. In the “old model” of dating, by contrast, the circumstances under which two people met organically could provide at least some measure of common ground between them.

By all accounts, people still love using Tinder, Bumble, and. But when shopping through every potential date in your geographic area with little more to go on than a photo and a couple of lines of bio becomes the norm, people can feel burned-out, and long for the days of offline dating.

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