Dating apps don’t distort our relationship with love: Montreal researcher

Dating apps have been a part of our daily lives for over a decade, and their growth has led to fears that they could harm our relationship with love. However, it seems to be quite the opposite.

Among the most well-known dating apps, Tinder easily ranks as the most popular.

Maude Lecompte is a lecturer in the sexology department at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) who compiled research about dating apps.

Lecompte has been studying Tinder since 2012 – which is the year the app was launched. She has looked at the discourses conveyed by Tinder users to understand what dating apps have fundamentally changed in our relationship with love or approaching other people.

“People who use these dating apps, contrary to what one might expect, talk about romantic love,” explained Lecompte in an interview with The Canadian Press.

She added that studies have shown that Canadians are much more romantic than most people think.

“It also confirms that dating apps may have ultimately had less of an influence than we initially anticipated,” she said. “We see that people are still very attached to romance, which does not necessarily reflect an evolution in the order of love, as we expected.”

Lecompte contradicts the stereotypes that dating apps can “harm social ties” by devaluing relationships with others.

Her research was carried out among 30 Tinder users aged 25 to 45 which provided the basis for her book; “Dating apps: Revolution, place of perdition or simple gadget?” It will be published in January 2025.

Some dating apps now offer users various fun features, such as the ability to play online with other people. For Lecompte, this “gamification” by the authors of the apps to ensure their sustainability is a “double-edged sword.”

“This will ensure the long-term popularity of dating apps, but it has been found that the more people associate the app with fun visits, the less likely they are to consider it a suitable place to meet love,” she explained.

According to her, users stay on the app to fall in love, even if they only use the app to “swipe.”

“It’s even hard to know how many people are using an app,” she said. “A person can have several accounts, some profiles are factual, others inactive.”

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews