The New Laws of Love. Marie Bergström

Introduction

      Match, Meetic, OkCupid, Grindr, LoveScout, Tinder, Happn, Bumble… These are just a few of the thousands of dating platforms available online today. The first website to specialize in matchmaking appeared in the United States in the mid-1990s and was soon to be imitated. As the internet expanded internationally, competing sites rolled out at a quick pace across North America and Europe. They were joined some twenty years later by mobile phone applications that immediately became immensely popular, especially among the young. In the past two decades, these platforms have remapped the landscape of dating across much of the western world and beyond, changing the way people meet partners, but also challenging our ideas about sex and love.

The change is remarkable. Since at least the nineteenth century, personal ads, marriage brokers, and other “lonely hearts” networks have offered their services to bring single people together and match prospective partners. Today’s dating sites and apps are the direct descendants of those earlier forms of mediated dating; in fact they have inherited many features from their ancestors. What is fundamentally new, however, is their popularity. Until the advent of the internet, the use of commercial matchmaking remained a marginal and marginalized practice. In the 1980s and 1990s, surveys carried out in the United States and in France showed that approximately fewer than 1 in 100 people had met their spouse through a matrimonial ad or agency, for example (Bozon and Heran, 1989; Laumann et al., 1994). In the ranks of the heterosexual population, to resort to such services was taboo; the companies were generally distrusted and users consisted predominantly of divorced and widowed individuals. Mediated dating was considered something of an outcast behavior in the world of dating.

      Digital platforms have brought about a major shift. Dating sites and apps have become a common way of meeting partners, and this behavior has lost most of its former social stigma. Users come from all social milieus and background and, unlike older forms of matchmaking, these new ones appeal primarily to young people. The most recent survey carried out in the United States – the birthland of online dating – showed that 30% of American adults had already used a dating site or app in 2019. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, the percentage rose to 48% (Pew Research Center, 2020c). As online dating became commonplace, commercial matchmaking finally emerged from the shade, to reach a broad general public.

      What made this change possible? How do we explain this unprecedented success of online dating, and what are the implications? To answer these questions is to draw a portrait of modern love and contemporary sexuality. This is the aim of the present book. By looking at dating and how it changes online, this book tells a new story of the transformation of intimacy, a story that differs considerably from what is currently said about this phenomenon.

Dominant discourses on online dating

The spread of online dating has not gone unnoticed. From the outset, the use of online platforms has commanded considerable attention from the media, essayists, and social scientists. One reason is interest in the phenomenon itself; but an even stronger reason is that online dating is considered to be a mirror of contemporary society. In it we tend to see reflected our hopes, and more often our fears, about the time we live in, about the new sexual norms and the future of social ties. The image that current writings on online dating projects is often an ugly one. It emerges from two main discourses that have largely come to frame popular understandings of online dating.

      First, online dating is said to have profoundly changed sexuality by favoring short-term sexual connections at the expense of stable relationships. The term “hookup culture” is often used to describe the new paradigm (Wade, 2017). Although coined initially with reference to American campus culture, today it is used in a broader sense. The term has no exact translation in other languages, yet it resonates strongly with debates on online dating in many European countries. The core idea is that new sexual norms, together with the new technology, have made young people – sometimes referred to as the “Tinder generation” – unwilling to commit or incapable of commitment; they cast aside love and embrace casual sex instead. In particular, online dating would be responsible for the “banalization” of sex, its becoming as mundane as any leisure activity. According to French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, “a hook-up (nuit chaude) can now be scheduled as easily as going to the movies” (Kaufmann, 2010, p. 140). This familiar claim is based on the idea that sex is trivialized on the internet. Sometimes presented as sexual liberation, this development is more often depicted as the decay of love (Sessions Stepp, 2007; Freitas, 2013). Authors argue that romantic long-term relationships have been sapped by endless online opportunities of easy and uncommitted sex.

A second dominant discourse presents digital dating as a commodification of intimate relationships. Apps and sites are viewed as a Trojan horse that brings economic logic into the sphere of intimacy. Because dating platforms are supposedly structured as a market – governed by competition, self-marketing, and choice strategies – the outcome, it is argued, is an unprecedented rationalization of romantic and sexual behavior. This thesis is central to the work of Eva Illouz, whose incisive analysis has been highly influential. In her critical analysis of modernity, Illouz denounces the penetration of the “capitalist cultural grammar” into heterosexual romantic relationships (Illouz, 2012, p. 9). Dating websites, she argues, have played a key role in this historical movement: “Internet dating has introduced to the realm of romantic encounters the principles of mass consumption based on an economy of abundance, endless choice, efficiency, rationalization, selective targeting,

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