Is flirting dying? Yes, claims a preternaturally cynical 24-year-old Los Angelean interviewed by NBC News in the US earlier this month. “If someone thinks you’re cute, they just ask for your Instagram these days and then DM you or swipe up on your story to show they’re interested,” they told the journalist. It was a bold claim, seemingly made out of frustration, and in the specific context of the youngster’s renegade dating choice:
They prefer to meet people in person.
The first dating app, Match.com, launched in 1995 as one element of an entrepreneurial project to digitise a whole range of commercial contact services formerly provided by print classifieds. After one year of operation, Match.com had about 100,000 users – but by 2015, and with stiff competition from other market entrants, Fast Company valued the online dating industry at US$2bn.
It’s 2024, and, friend, Tinder alone generated almost that much in revenue just last year. The market cap of the Match Group – which now owns Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and OkCupid, among others, as well as the original Match.com – is US$31.8bn. Competitor Bumble has a US$6bn valuation.
Why wouldn’t they? Worldwide, dating apps are thought to have about 300 million customers. In Australia alone, more than 3.2 million people used a dating app in 2022. At the time, only 7.8 million were unmarried and not all of them were single.
I am old; I have seen too much. I was there for the coming of the apps and have lived long enough to now witness that the apps, it seems, have come for us. In their Akira-like growth to capitalist behemoth status, they appear to have swallowed the daintiest, most delicate and delicious of human interactions. Most heavily subscribed by the younger demographic cohorts, a “pandemic generation” of kids born roughly between 1996 and 2001 – like the above Californian – have had a profoundly interrupted experience of anything else.
Turns out, courtship and coming-of-age rituals are not instinctive prompts of nature but subtle and learned behaviours developed through practice and observation. With opportunities to do so smashed in the formative years of so many, imagine flirting as a raspberry vine growing in a field and dating apps as a massive concrete supermarket built on top of it.
Even discounting the digital stalking reportedly experienced by 37% of users and the nonconsensual bombarding of 35% of users with sexually explicit imagery, attitudes towards the apps have been growing jejune. In 2020, 12% of Americans were reporting they had married or formed committed relationships with someone they met online, but only a year later, a survey of internet daters revealed up to 80% of them described feelings of “burnout and emotional fatigue” with their adventures online. “It really is almost like this part-time job,” said someone interviewed by the New York Times, in words that I could hear myself saying aloud, deleting Tinder from my phone a decade ago, a month before meeting the love of my life at a party.
Thing is, if you reduce dating to a shopfront, daters internalise and replicate retail behaviours, too. The NBC article describes the presentation of the self on the apps as a “highlight reel”, editing out the complexities, contradictions and flaws of the whole person. The dopamine hit of validation received by a swipe fades in the awkward, complex realities of encounters because you can’t actually form a human relationship with a shop.
Add to this a widely reported phenomenon of a gendered political polarisation of young people; understandably, given the chaos, fewer Americans want to date outside their political beliefs … but the challenge for the emerging heterosexual is that while young men have grown more conservative, young women have grown markedly more progressive and in overwhelming numbers. Values that can be understood, contextualised, developed and even exchanged through the dynamics of personal familiarity become criteria of pre-emptive exclusion.
Context is everything, and deprived of the data implicitly communicated by the social environment that delivers people into real-life contact, the only universal context the apps offer is that everyone’s there to get laid. Little wonder some young people are turning to “flirting coaches” to relearn the art of sharing and gauging interest when life allows them enough time off-screen to stumble into a physical person.
Alas, the skills erosion is exemplified by one young coach who insists flirting is “an authentic expression of yourself” with the verve of a pastel Instagram tile. Ancient masters of the art know it’s the indirect suggestion you may, in fact, be the greatest bang of all time if – and only if – the responder has the curiosity to find out. “Charm,” explained the playwright and philosopher Albert Camus, “is a way of getting the answer ‘Yes’ without asking a clear question.”
The young person can access Albert’s expert wisdom directly by reviving another screen-free, pre-pandemic practise: visiting the theatre.
Humanity invented this media to model the dance of intimacies in person, a safe place to witness on stage – and feel, in the audience – how real human bodies react to gestures, placements, spoken words, unspoken words. The enduring popularity of their work throughout time suggests Chekhov, Mae West, Aphra Behn and Oscar Wilde may have more educative heft on the topic than some random person on TikTok.
You have to turn your phone off while you’re seated. It’s not the resurrection of flirting. But, look, it’s a start.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
