The tangled web of online dating | Sonia Sodha

We’ve all been there. You’re sitting in a restaurant or a pub, the couple at the table next to you are blatantly on a first date going wrong and it’s becoming increasingly impossible to resist listening in with a mix of schadenfreude in the face of their awkwardness and relief it’s not you. And those of us who have been single will be no stranger to sympathetic glances from other punters as the narcissistic bore you’re sitting across from enthusiastically divulges the story of his life.

Single, married or divorced, dating seems to fascinate us all. Channel 4’s First Dates returned to our screens last week, beaming first-date voyeurism into the comfort of our sitting rooms. Everyone loves a happy ending, but if that’s not on offer then the tricky twists and turns one takes in the hope of getting there can make for pretty compulsive viewing too.

We’ve come a long way since the days when Blind Date was primetime Saturday night entertainment. The way we date has completely changed: gone are the lonely hearts columns pining for a GSOH; in has come the left/right swipe popularised by Tinder. The average age at which we settle down has steadily increased.

But one constant has been society’s Bridget Jones-style obsession with the single professional woman in her 30s. The Daily Mail has long pumped out articles tacitly chastising women for selfishly putting their careers before having babies, work-obsessed women who “wake up” in their 30s to realise they’ve neglected their personal life. Because obviously we women can only think about one thing at a time (the irony!). So far, so mansplainy.

What’s changed, though, is that a whole slew of new theories has recently emerged to explain the phenomenon of the single woman, many centred on the impact of technology on the way we form relationships. There’s the consumerist theory of dating, which posits that dating apps presenting an infinite supply of potential mates in convenient, smartphone-size profiles have devalued our attitudes towards sex and relationships. This fosters, continues the argument, a rampant hook-up culture one article in Vanity Fair helpfully labelled the “Dawn of Dating Apocalypse”.

There’s the behavioural economics gang, according to whom the problem isn’t so much that dating apps cheapen our desire for romanticism, but that they push it ever further out of reach. We now have so much choice that people endlessly cycle through their options, looking for their perfect partner in the belief they are just around the corner. They become much pickier about what they’re looking for, applying filters that allow you to select partners by the length of their little finger, whether they share your allergies and whether their Netflix list perfectly overlaps yours.

And, perhaps most depressingly, there’s the free market school of dating. In a book called Date-onomics, author Jon Birger cheerfully proclaims: “It’s not that he’s just not that into you – it’s that there’s not enough of him!” Birger pooh-poohs the idea that it’s technology that’s the culprit, arguing it’s purely a numbers game. He points to the fact that women are going to university in greater numbers than men and argues a relative undersupply of university-educated men fundamentally changes their attitudes towards dating and sex, encouraging promiscuity. It leads him to some pretty weird conclusions, such as holding up Silicon Valley, with its notoriously high male:female ratio, as the place for women to move if they’re looking to settle down. He clearly didn’t do much talking to the unsatisfied single women of Silicon Valley.

There’s much to hate in these theories: the simplistic embrace of pop economics; the tendency to over-extract from a few choice anecdotes (or, even worse, animal experiments); their one-size-fits-all denial of individual agency; the self-help-style book blurbs that promise to empower women with their fonts of all knowledge.

Health warning: my insights stem from the admittedly small sample size of the 30 or so years of dating experience collectively racked up by my friends. But, reluctant as I am to admit it, I’m coming round to the view that maybe there’s a kernel of truth in some of these theories.

I think it would be naive to dismiss the idea that technology might be changing the way we form relationships, amplifying the differences in the way men and women engage with dating. I don’t think this is anywhere near as dramatic as the dating apocalypse people would have us believe. I see little evidence of technology fundamentally changing human nature, turning virginal millennials into an army of sex-obsessed zombies.

But social media can and does nurture some very human but not always appealing tendencies. Facebook – or “Smugbook”, as one of my friends has dubbed it – fosters our latent desire to show off. Twitter indulges our weakness for an angry rant. While I certainly don’t buy the idea all men shun monogamy or every woman is looking to pin down a man, I do think it’s possible dating apps work with the grain of some men’s evolutionary instincts more than women’s.

If someone tends towards the commitment-phobic, technology can nurture and coddle that phobia. It’s perfectly possible to use dating apps to cycle through a series of short-term relationships; I have several female friends who have been on the receiving end of that. It’s not the dating armageddon some would have us believe is out there. But just because the resulting shifts in behaviour may be more subtle it does not necessarily make the effects any less profound for the way we live our lives.

Ultimately, this is just speculation. And that’s kind of the point. Sometimes, it feels like we’re living in a giant social experiment whose effects we can only hypothesise about. Will teenagers spending every waking minute on Snapchat experience long-term effects on their mental health? Will the proliferation of dating apps mean commitment-phobic men will never settle down?

Are we reaching a tipping point where the negative impacts of technology on human psychology might start to outweigh the benefits from it? Or is this just alarmist and luddite? The truth is, we’re unlikely to know for a long time yet.