The Future of Dating, or Love in the Metaverse
In which we go on a second (virtual) date
Last week, we went on our first virtual date, but I couldn’t get some of the ideas out of my head. Only fair that we meet again for a second date and dig a little deeper.
Love in the time of cholera 💌
Well, in the time of COVID, but who’s counting pandemics these days anyway? Finding love in lockdown is challenging. However, if you had stocks in companies that offer dating apps (many of which are under the umbrella of the Match group) you may have had an unexpected financial windfall. Dating app stocks climbed to a peak in 2021’s full lockdown mode.
It’s a similar story for the apps’ user base. Tinder, Hinge, and other apps in the Match stable all saw a significant uptick in downloads and subscribers during the early stages of the pandemic. Looking at the US, over half of dating app users also started using the app(s) of their choice more. There were also people who used the apps (much) less. Random bout of speculation: these may have been the people who primarily use these apps to look for hookups in real life.
There may be something to that speculation. This paper suggests that dating apps have quickly co-opted the pandemic to steer public perception away from seeing them as a method to arrange casual sex. Bumble, a popular dating app known for letting female users make the first move, proclaimed 2021 the year of slow dating. COVID-19 restrictions prevented physical meetings and forced people to take more time to get to know each other - preferably through the app’s chat function, of course. Many of the apps expanded their repertoire to latch onto this trend. In the very same Bumble blog, the company gives examples of ideas to get to know each other better through video chat.
Virtual dating is a booming business, and like all new trends, it is a coin with two sides. On the plus side, as the authors of the earlier-mentioned paper write, virtual dating has led these apps to develop:
…features meant for online, synchronous, and audiovisual communication as beneficial tools for providing affective relief, establishing others’ authenticity, and precluding physical contact while fostering romantic bonds.
On the other hand, this:
…puts pressure on users to prescribe to normative and formulated dating scripts. It also dismisses the responsibility of corporate actors in tending to their users’ wellbeing by failing to recognize how features like video calling can facilitate invasions of privacy, harassment and discrimination, especially among women, queer folks and people of color who are disproportionately left to deal with the strenuous affective labor of moderation and self-protection.
In the original Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the two protagonists, Fermina and Florentino, fall in love as youngsters. Life intervenes and Fermina is forced to move to another city. The lovebirds try to keep their romantic feelings alive through telegrams. But, when Fermina returns and sees Florentino again, she realizes that, despite the gushing love letters, he feels like a stranger.
Today, we don’t have to wait weeks or even days for a letter. We can log on and speak, write, or see each other in an immediate exchange - a virtual date. And yet, meeting someone IRL still feels different, doesn’t it?
Meeting in meta 🥽
Enter the Metaverse. It’s not quite reality, but it’s also not just a video chat. This Forbes article sketches the rise of VR dating. (You guessed it, there are apps for that.) Users meet through an app and if they like each other they zip off to Meta’s Metaverse or to a bespoke VR environment offered by some of the apps. Put on the headset, grab the controller, and - voila - as long as your WiFi connection lasts you’re on a date on a sandy tropical beach, or in a lunar coffee bar, or… (If you had to go on a VR date and you could choose whatever environment you like, what would it be?)
Maybe I’m old before my time because while I don’t mind VR experiments and I am convinced virtual reality will be integrated into more and more aspects of our lives, VR dating still sounds as though it lacks… something. The question, then, is this: does romantic love have a (necessarily) physical component? For me, the answer is yes. An embrace, a lingering touch, a kiss, and sex are (for me) part of a romantic relationship. This may not be the case for everyone and the extent to which these components matter will differ (I see you, asexual and aromantic friends).
But what if VR improves and starts to include all our senses? Haptic suits can simulate hugs, early experiments of simulated smell are ongoing, and I’m pretty sure the multi-billion dollar sex toy industry has a few tricks up its sleeve (or underwear) to simulate sexual experiences. Perhaps someday soon, we put on our full-immersion VR suit to see, hear, touch, smell, and perhaps even taste our distant lover. And yet, to me, it still feels as though something is lacking. Perhaps it is the closeness that comes with physical proximity (how long can long-distance romantic relationships work?), perhaps it is an atavistic desire for ‘realness’, perhaps it’s the inability to log off from real life, perhaps I’ve been indoctrinated by Hollywood’s romance ideal. I don’t know.
An even more intriguing question in this virtual dating context is: does falling in love require a physical component? Here, I’m less certain. I suppose it depends in part on what attracts you to someone. If your personalities are compatible, if you have a great time talking and virtually hanging out, if you are both on the same page about what you want and expect from the budding relationship, perhaps the physical stuff can be sorted out later. It is, after all, a relationship aspect you can work on - just like you should work on other aspects of a romantic relationship.
I enjoyed our virtual date. Let’s do it again sometime.