The University of Manchester’s Senior Lecturer Łukasz Szulc, along with students Sebastian Boyd, Lauren Parkinson and Yixiao Yang, explains how dating apps bring capitalism into the process of finding love. 

This article was first published at Media@LSE blog. You can read the original post here.

 

While popular culture may suggest that love transcends the vulgarity of money, money may help us find the perfect match more efficiently. Or so it seems, judging by the promotional materials of dating apps that advertise premium subscriptions. We analysed the premium features of six dating apps (Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, eHarmony, HeeSays, Ourtime and Tinder) to find out what their designers believe is worth paying for when one looks for love. Our results highlight how capitalism is creeping into even the very intimate aspects of our lives, making us into buyers and sellers of love.

Swipe Right for Emotional Capitalism

The commonly shared idea of a romance portrays love as an irrational and spontaneous bodily reaction that defies logical explanation, control and rationalisation, which is evident in popular phrases such as ‘falling in love’ or ‘love at first sight’. Dating apps, however, promise to streamline the process of finding what is often imagined as ‘the other half’ or ‘the one’. Relying on the latest technological developments, they offer more, faster and better matches, courtesy of maths and algorithms. If you pay a premium subscription, the dating apps suggest you will save even more time and energy in your quest for a partner.

Sociologist Eva Illouz, writing in 2007 about dating sites rather than apps, proposed the term ‘emotional capitalism’ to describe the wider process of the intertwinement of the emotional and economic aspects of our lives. For Illouz, love has transgressed into the realms of economic transaction and rational cognition following the onset of 20th-century capitalism, accompanied by the rise of popular psychologising. Lovers have become self-aware subjects that are required to turn inward and find their essence, their unique selling point, to broadcast it to the abundance of potential partners, turning themselves in the process into commodities on public display. Finding suitable partners has been submitted to capitalistic logic and cost-benefit analysis, which are employed to find optimal value in a partner, not too dissimilar from the way one might look to find the best value when buying a lawnmower.

Dating apps arguably enhance this process by triggering our imagination with the abundance of dating profiles available on the apps and providing tools to sift through them. Their interfaces enable the compartmentalisation of people based on discrete attributes—like age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, height, weight, education, profession, interests, personality traits, drinking habits and many others—that are used to make allegedly more accurate matches and, in some cases, allow users to filter in or out potential partners. What is lost in this partitioning exercise is what Illouz calls charm, the way different attributes are connected and performed contextually; that is, people in their entirety who, if given a chance, may charm us despite some of their particular traits or behaviours that we may not be a great fan of.

Optimising Matchmaking

Premium features on dating apps hold the promise to further optimize matchmaking. In general, they are designed to facilitate users in making the most ‘cost-efficient’ decisions in choosing a partner, and making the decisions more efficiently. For example, most dating apps we analysed had a premium feature that let users extend the list of ideal ‘preferences’ in a partner and increase the number of people they are presented with through unlimited swiping or an expanded grid. As such, the benefits of these paid features are an increased number of potential partners who could be sifted through faster and more meticulously by dividing daters by a greater number of discrete attributes.

At the same time, each of the eight apps has unique features that make it stand out from its competitors. The apps also increase the number of subscription levels to capitalize on matchmaking more and in many more ways. Tinder, for example, offers three main premium subscriptions (Tinder Plus, Gold and Platinum, at the cost between £7.99 and £14.99 per week in June 2024 in the UK), that allow its users to swipe without ads, rewind, go incognito or message before matching, which arguably contradicts the very idea behind Tinder design which is ‘Match. Chat. Meet’. In September 2023, the app additionally introduced a controversial VIP subscription, Tinder SELECT, at $499 a month, which is available only to 1% of Tinder users. Among its unique perks is to ‘see and be seen by Tinder’s most sought after profiles’. This astronomical sum buys users access to the most popular profiles without wasting their time seeking these out in a process of endless swiping.

Figure 1: Tinder subscription options in June 2024. Source: https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004487406-Tinder-subscriptions

Coffee Meets Bagel differentiates itself from apps like Tinder by selecting curated picks (called ‘bagels’) every day at noon via a ‘proprietary algorithm’, with the intention of limiting ‘endless swiping’. As the owners explain, they ‘believe everyone deserves a real chance at love and knew casual swiping apps just weren’t going to cut it’. And yet, premium services entirely negate this philosophy as they allow one to like and pass on as many profiles as one wants. More disturbingly, for £33.99 a month (June 2024, UK), users can access ‘Activity Reports’ about other daters’ behaviour on the app, including information about how long it usually takes them to reply and if they tend to message first. By paying money one can get a larger pool of potential matches as well as get analytical insights about how they behave and about their attitudes to dating.

While these are technically each app’s distinct features, they are all geared towards the same aim, that is, giving the user an informational advantage to choose the most suitable match and to do it as efficiently as possible. Efficiency, optimization, competition, marketing, rational choice, cost-benefit analysis and unique selling point—the terms usually saved for discussion of markets—better describe the dating apps’ logic of matchmaking than the traditional language of ‘falling in love’ or ‘finding the other half’. That people are willing to pay for the dating apps’ premium services suggests that what is being commodified in the process is not only the daters themselves but also the very act of finding love, if not love itself.

Charm for Sale

One app stood out in our analysis as significantly different in terms of its functionality. HeeSay (formerly Blued), is one of the world’s largest gay social network apps developed in Hong Kong in 2012. It is a combination of a dating service with a social media platform that incorporates a feed of posts, group voice messaging and live broadcasting as part of its main interface. The app encourages group communication as well as individual messaging.

When confronting HeeSay’s design with Illouz’s idea of emotional capitalism, it may look at first glance like the app resists some of its key tenets. Because of its posts on the feed, group communication and live-streaming features, it lets users learn more about their potential partners instead of compartmentalising them into predefined attributes for efficient matchmaking. HeeSay’s users have more opportunities than on many other apps to get to know each other in their entirety or, to use Illouz’s terminology, to charm each other; a model also explored by Facebook Dating and Slide.

On the other hand, the wider spectrum of activities on the app lends itself to a wider range of ways to profit from its users. This includes, for example, showing interest in others by buying them gifts during their live streams. The app’s premium options include—apart from the services common on other apps such as unlimited views, advanced filters or no ads—a higher proportion of income from received gifts and an opportunity to create a VIP group chat. More information about daters and their wider spectrum of activities on the app also turns into more data about them and results in new ways of capitalising on matchmaking.

Free from Freemium

The future of dating is often painted as even more dependent on new and more advanced technologies, including AI and XR, such as dating a bot (like in the film Her) or meeting up in the Metaverse. Perhaps, instead of becoming more reliant on for-profit big tech companies that employ a freemium business model (offering a mix of free and extra-cost services) and their promises of efficiently  mediating matchmaking (most likely, at a higher price for more exclusive services), we should consider developing bottom-up and free-from-freemium—that is, non-for-profit and community-managed—services that would put at their very heart daters instead of profits. Perhaps, what we need to resist the further marketization and commodification of love, sex and desire is a Wikipedia of sorts for dating.

 

Note on authorship

This article draws on the Undergraduate Scholars Programme project in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. Dr Łukasz Szulc is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the university and he devised the idea for the project, supervised its execution and was involved in writing the article. Sebastian Boyd, Lauren Parkinson and Yixiao Yang were undergraduates at the university. They collected and analysed the data as well as drafted the first version of the article.

This post represents the views of the authors and not the position of the Media@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured image: Photo by Nik on Unsplash

 

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