What Is Facebook Dating For?
I used to find it frustrating when people blamed dating apps for how bad dating is.
“What’s the alternative?” I would ask when a friend complained about the chore of swiping and starting a conversation. “Standing in a bar for six hours a night?” But I said this more often when I was in a relationship that had started on Tinder, and I say it much less often now that I’ve spent eight months back in the world of grainy boat-trip photos and “looking for the Pam to my Jim.”
People who have never used Tinder often frame it as an abundance of choice, when in reality, the experience of swiping through those hundreds of thousands of options has the effect of making every option look exactly the same. You can accrue two dozen matches named Matt in the time it takes to finish one glass of wine and throw the glass at the wall. Tinder doesn’t make it feel easy to go, as they say, “on to the next!” Tinder makes it feel like the next will be just like the last, which will be just like every other one, forever. The plentitude of fish in the proverbial sea is actually an apt metaphor, because what kind of lunatic could actually specify an individual fish they’d be interested in catching? They’re all fish.
Enter Facebook Dating, which seems to be differentiating itself at least partly on sheer numbers: Three-quarters of Americans are on Facebook. Tinder, the largest dating app on the market right now, has about 5 million users.
“In theory, given that so many people use Facebook, they could harness that population in an advantageous way,” says Kevin Lewis, a sociologist at UC San Diego who has studied both Facebook and online dating. “Will everyone
