Love and algorithms
The internet’s relationship with romance keeps getting messier. Now chaos is playing cupid.
MØRNING, feeling the love? Good, because we couldn’t resist bringing you Valentine’s download this week. We’ve been busy tracking a flux in attitudes to sex and dating, shaped by our resentment and reliance on the digital world. There’s emerging gender gaps and new romantic belief systems, there’s a thriving digi sex industry and generation of loveseekers reimagining the dating space, using the web to hack our way to romance.
The bad news: the internet has wreaked havoc on our love lives. The good news: we’re learning to embrace the absurdity of the dating landscape, using tech to build new romantic status quos that reject algorithms and embrace the romance of chaos…
When you think of ‘internet’ and ‘romance’, what comes to mind? All the excitement and boredom of dating apps? DM slides? Catfishing? The ever-expanding porn industry?
It’s unsurprising that our digital mirrorworld has created entirely new realms to flirt and find love in. But we just weren’t quite prepared for it to change the way we feel about ourselves and eachother. Just last week came the news that political views between (mostly cishet) men and women are shooting apart, creating a huge ideological gender gap. Where liberalism among women is rising steeply, men are taking a nose dive to the right. Even those who diverge from the trend aren’t sitting in the middle, they’re following the tide in the other direction. Think of today’s liberal guy stereotype, all polyamory and Feeld. Or the even more prominent trad girl, who’s recent popularity has been influential enough to help launch a thousands Coquette-style ribbons.
The masterminds behind these isolated views are, of course, social media algorithms, which famously push users to extreme views to stoke emotion (and advertisers’ favourite: screen time). It’s the exact same process that’s had the opposite effect on the queer community, with social media algorithms prompting curious users to tentatively explore their sexuality from the privacy of their bedrooms. The LGBTQ community doubled between 2012 and 2021 in the US (and similarly in the UK), with a clear uptick during Covid as our screen times rose and algorithms stoked closeted users’ fears and desires.
With a flourishing queer community and dwindling pressure to have babies (the world is burning, lest we forget), people are freer than ever to find love beyond societal expectations. But for the 90% of young people that exclusively fancy the opposite gender, social media is acting as the ultimate cockblock.
And that’s not the only way algorithms are warping our understanding of love. The Era of Therapisation has us in a chokehold, feeding us a constant stream of content that helps us psychoanalyse and categorise. These Reels and TikToks give us the ultimate comfort: hypercontrol over how we understand ourselves and others. It’s a big win for self-awareness and spotting abusive behaviour. But when we’re able to diagnose a Hinge match as a narcissist without even meeting them, you have to ask if this swirling digital psychoanalysis is getting in the way of IRL relationship experience.
Take a step further and you find yourself in the land of digi-spiritualism, where manifesting a partner or reading their mind via tarot is just a click away. “I was accidentally on breakuptok for a while and it was a really apocalyptic place” says MØRNING’s Dagny. ‘Like those TikToks like “they’re thinking about you right this second. Follow and like to secure this energy.” The commodification of loneliness online is so shameless these days’.
Or hop to the other side of the web and you’ll find young men creating parallel belief systems about the sexual attractiveness of themselves and others - what was incel culture has now mushroomed into the world of looksmaxxing.
On every corner of the internet, young people's taste for alternative belief systems are shifting their views of love. But while young daters today are more vulnerable than ever to romantic ambition, it comes with the price of binaried thinking, fear of commitment and risk of dissatisfaction. Gen Z are 30% more likely than millennials to believe there’s just one soulmate out there for them, which doesn’t make for great odds.
The endless carousel of potential lovers broadcast by dating apps doesn't help matters. The gamification of dating apps has collectively addicted us to dating, but taken the results out of it too. It’s a perfect complex-of-choice headache that’s preventing users from nurturing real connection. From 2005 to 2012 online dating (old school match.com sites) fostered longer/happier marriages, but now that trend has flipped, leaving users dissatisfied with their success rates, and young users rejecting apps altogether. One survey from last year found that 79% of US college students don’t use dating apps at all.
Where does that leave us? For some, further into the depths of tech. There are AI tools designed to fairy-godmother you into your most attractive self, there are dystopian Facebook groups where women are reviewing men’s profiles to filter out the wheat from the chaff. A credit-score-based dating app has just launched in the US. Can't help but be reminded of that gaping ideological gap again...
It’s not exactly fertile ground for love. And so alternatives are necessary: the online sexual market is flourishing, not just on Only Fans but every social platform. It’s never been easier to buy or sell digital sexual favours over the internet, or exploit vulnerable sexual appetites for fraud (see the worrying rise of sex scams and deepfake porn, which we all know has huge ramifications for the way young people view sex IRL).
But elsewhere a new approach to dating is emerging. This Valentines day, feeds have been peppered with ads for local dating events, with Eventbrite reporting a three-fold surge in speed dating and matchmaking nights over the past two years, echoing a trend towards branded IRL experiences that we’re seeing across the board.
Given the havoc algorithms are wreaking, it’s no wonder people are actively rejecting them in pursuit of the chance and romance of IRL. Faddy, the organiser of a speed dating event at Set in South London, says “I think the shift away from apps is partly down to everyone slowly getting back to grips on reality post covid & the evolving awareness of ‘the algorithm’, becoming privvy to the fact that dating apps, like everything else in late stage capitalism, are designed to keep you consuming content on its platform”. We’re using our love lives as an ultimate vote of confidence in the real-world.
As users continue to grapple with the mess the internet has wreaked on dating, this new chance-oriented mindset feels here to stay, users across the board letting the universe guide them to joy, love and connection rather than algorithms. No doubt we’ll see brands respond too, with Bumble already leading the charge with a slew of IRL events in London last year.
But embracing the real world doesn’t mean rejecting tech completely. The difference is the way we’re using tech: opting for methods that reflect and heighten the randomness of the physical world. We’re in a new era of hybrid dating where digital infrastructure remains a huge facilitator to our IRL love lives. See: the uptick in people meeting partners in more alternative interest-based digital spaces like Discord (MØRNING’s very own Alex is testament to this), or subverting the traditional online dating model like the Chaotic Singles Party, which asks attendees to bring one dating app match with them, before mingling with others. Or Pear Ring, ‘the world’s biggest single social experiment’. Combine this dating innovation with young people’s evolving attitudes to love and sex, and romantic chaos seems guaranteed.
The internet is no longer just another place to meet people, but a kind of hacky accomplice (and pesky meddler) that is facilitating, fucking up and enriching our love lives.
That’s all for today. Has the internet helped or hindered your love life? Let us know below, and happy V-day, devils.
Words: Letty Cole
Editor: Sui Donovan