How Dating Apps Affect Relationships and the Economy of Desire

The love market before the Relationships app always seemed to belong to the nebulous domain of chance. Two people meet at a party, in a classroom, in a university hallway. Often through friends who swear that “you have it all together”. But beneath this fog, there are identifiable patterns. Finding someone involves searching, comparing, trying, rejecting, reputation and cost. Initial attractiveness itself requires the satisfaction of statistically predictable criteria. Love is traditionally sung as something that cannot be rationalized, like destiny. But in practice, there is a structure operating. Before apps, this infrastructure was limited by relatively narrow social circles. The person chose among colleagues, neighbors, friends of friends, party acquaintances, people who could reappear in the same environment after a possible rejection. Scarcity reduced options, but increased the weight of each encounter. Abundance does the opposite: it expands possibilities, but it also trivializes the available options. Faced with the expectation of someone better after the next screen, commitment stops competing only with other people around and starts competing with the statistical imagination of all available people. It's not just for casual sex For years, almost everything said about dating apps oscillated between moral lamentation and technological propaganda. On the one hand, Tinder appeared as an agent of romantic “decadence”. On the other, as an efficient release of singles trapped in narrow social circles. It remained to be discovered what actually changed when this technology began to mediate more and more interpersonal relationships. Much of the dating app literature suggests that Tinder is a “casual sex app,” but there are important nuances here. Tinder Good Faces Agency/Unsplash In 2017, Belgian researchers developed a questionnaire to measure the main motivations for its use, called the Tinder Motives Scale. The results of the application on more than 3 thousand young adults in Belgium identified 13 main reasons for using the platform. They include curiosity, entertainment, validation, ease of communication and also the search for romantic relationships. In fact, studies show that, in the United States, online dating has become the main way in which heterosexual couples meet. This means that the old intermediaries of the encounter — friends, family, work, school — have been progressively displaced. At the same time, a longitudinal study of Norwegian students showed that Tinder users were more likely to form romantic relationships over time. In other words, the app can open doors, but part of the “romantic success” may reflect characteristics of the users themselves, and not just this effect. But it's about sex too However, casual sex continues to be a strong reason for users of dating apps. They tend to report more partners, a greater likelihood of casual encounters, and, in some studies, greater exposure to risky sexual behaviors. Reviews on Tinder and sexual health indicate that sexual motivations, sociosexual permissiveness and the search for casual partners appear recurrently among predictors of use and sexual outcomes. These results are relatively constant in Brazil and around the world. Research is generally unclear about whether the app leads to promiscuity or whether more sexually liberal users seek it out more frequently. At this point, it is worth mentioning a study published in 2026. Instead of simply comparing users and non-users, the initial diffusion of Tinder in American universities was investigated. To do this, an impressive 1.1 million responses from the National College Health Assessment were analyzed between 2008 and 2019. The results indicated that greater exposure to Tinder increased sexual activity, without producing an equivalent increase in stable relationships or consistent improvement in the quality of bonds. In this case, the app seemed to speed up the search more than the appointment. Abundance and inattention There is also evidence that apps reorganize the distribution of attention – which could help explain the greater ease in forming fleeting relationships. Other studies on Tinder have already shown that swiping more does not guarantee more matches. Additionally, women tend to receive more likes than men. And men, in general, need to initiate more conversations. This pattern helps to understand why the abundance promised by apps is experienced unevenly. The market seems open to everyone, but attention is not distributed democratically. As in other technology-enhanced markets, small differences in attractiveness, status, ability