Journalist and activist Ash Sarkar has long criticised dating apps, arguing that Big Tech has killed romance by fostering dismissive and non-committal behaviour. Her first experience with online dating came around 10 years ago, when she felt like “somebody’s country cousin who didn’t know the complex city ways”. Her time on the apps was brief, but the immediate takeaway stuck with her: people are dismissive and non-committal.
Sarkar’s offline dating proved more fruitful. “I found a man whose self-esteem was low enough that he wanted to marry me,” she laughs. She deleted the apps easily, but the degrading state of online dating lived on in the experiences of friends and strangers, often submitted to the dilemmas section of her podcast, If I Speak, which she hosts with journalist Moya Lothian-McLean.
Relationships changed by capitalism
When the Southbank Centre approached Sarkar to deliver the inaugural lecture for their Letters from the Future series (running September 18-20), her topic was clear. “It’s been in my head for a really long time,” she says. “This idea of how relationships have been changed by the particular stage of capitalism that we’re in, the sense that all of us are immersed in a disembodied, hyper-stimulated digital world and the epidemic of loneliness that people seem to be struggling with.” Asked how much blame lies with Big Tech, she replies: “Oh, 90 per cent!”
Dating apps are the easiest example. “If me and you decided to go on a date now,” she says, “and I treated you really badly. Let’s say I was insensitive, or I ghosted you. There is something which holds us together.” That “something” is that they are speaking in real life. “A container exists in which there are mutual obligations, and so there can be a degree of trust that I’m not going to be a complete asshole.”
The prisoner’s dilemma of dating apps
On dating apps, there are no such containers. What happens next, Sarkar reasons, is a sort of prisoner’s dilemma. “The [typical] prisoner’s dilemma is who’s going to snitch first. But the prisoner’s dilemma of dating apps is who’s going to reject first,” she says. Even the core user interface fosters carelessness: “You’re throwing faces into the abyss. All these hopeful faces who are just looking for love, and you go, ‘F*** you’.”
Life on “the apps” is widely known to be miserable. Usage of the most popular dating apps in the UK has fallen by 24 per cent, and Bumble has been forced to fire 30 per cent of its global workforce. To combat messaging fatigue, more apps are incorporating in-person meetings: Breeze bans messaging before a date has taken place, while Thursdays limits in-app interactions to a single day of the week. Bumble, once hailed for its “feminist” UI that only allowed women to message first, recently scrapped the policy after research found 70 per cent of women felt burnt out by having to initiate conversations.
Dating columnist Annie Lord recently argued in The Sunday Times that this was evidence of the dating world forcing women to do “all the work”, but Sarkar argues the resentment is mutual. “You constantly have women saying, ‘Well, it’s so much easier for men because all of us [women] want commitment, and [men] get to choose as though they’re looking over at the cheeses at the farmers’ market,’” she says. “But then men are going, ‘I’m this close to putting my penis in the hollow of a tree because nothing else is gonna accept me.’”
Step away from the screen
It’s not all dating apps’ fault. Sarkar points to a piece in the Financial Times exploring declining birthrates worldwide, while London’s birth rate has dropped by roughly 20 per cent over the past decade, with Islington having the lowest rate in the country. “It used to be a rich country problem, and now it’s an everywhere problem, and there is no single explanation that makes sense for all countries apart from, ‘Here’s when smartphones were introduced,’” she says.
Then there’s social media, littered with “perfect” faces, tiny bodies and porn, but lacking any eroticism. “Vanity is not sexy,” Sarkar says. “Vanity is attention on the self, right? Whereas sexiness is sort of about this thing that we’re generating together.” She thinks society “has failed to stigmatise vanity” as much as it could have.
Despite this, Sarkar is hopeful about the future of dating. “I often think about the remarkable resilience of human sociality in the face of much worse things than the internet,” she says. “In previous generations, it was the shadow of nuclear warfare. Human beings always meet; they always fall in love. You really can’t stop us from doing it.” The tide is already turning, she thinks, as phone-free childhoods and low screentimes are held up as markers of the “high-status bourgeoisie”. This desire for getting offline is why apps like Breeze and Thursdays exist, though Sarkar doesn’t think another dating app will ever be the solution. “My answer to how you fix anything is in-person social contact,” she says. “I have felt at my most resentful when I am at my most isolated. That’s true of anything — family, friendships, romance — and I think that what we need to do is disengage and disentangle ourselves from these apps of all kinds, which have taken us away from the thing that we actually need as human beings.”
