The New Laws of Love. Marie Bergström
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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, and standardization” (Illouz, 2007, p. 90). Illouz also stresses the emergence of new sexual norms, to which she refers as a broader trend of “de-structuration of the romantic will” (p. 197). The internet, in combination with other cultural forces such as the rise of feminism and reliance on psychology, causes a loss of belief in love and a fear of commitment. If online dating indeed operates as a marketplace, then it is a “free market of sexual encounters” (p. 10).
These powerful arguments have commanded a vast audience. The idea that online dating revolves around commodification and intense sexualization is widespread, especially in Europe, and has largely dominated the debate in the social sciences (Salecl, 2010; Dröge and Voirol, 2011; Bauman, 2013; Lardellier, 2015). But, while identifying salient features of online dating – such as the standardized platforms, the often transient nature of online relationships, and the selection mechanisms that work in partner choice – these theses fail to tell the entire story. They pave the way for a harsh criticism of online dating, but fall short of capturing its specificity and explaining its success – explaining how and why people use these platforms. Besides, many empirical elements do not support these arguments.
The first such element is the fact that contemporary societies are still structured by a strong couple norm. Although young people have delayed their first union in a couple, a vast majority of them end up forming romantic relationships (Manning et al., 2014; Bellani et al., 2017; Roseneil et al., 2020). A significant proportion of today’s couples meet through online dating (Cacioppo et al., 2013; Rosenfeld et al., 2019; Potârcă, 2020) and, while these platforms stand accused of turning users into consumers incapable of committing to one person and settling down, surveys tend to show that partners who meet online actually commit more quickly than those whose encounter stems from other settings (Rosenfeld et al., 2019). The risk of breakup is not necessarily higher for these relationships; in the United States, for online couples, the risk of separation is the same as, or even lower than, for couples who meet in physical settings (Cacioppo et al., 2013; Rosenfeld, 2017). Moreover, the transformations of sexuality cannot easily be reduced to, or explained by, a theory of free markets. Online dating may indeed favor casual relationships, but that’s a far cry from being a trivialization and deregulation of sex. These platforms are permeated by powerful social norms, and notably by a gendered double standard that pervades the online world and leads men and women to engage in intimate relationships on very different terms (Bergström, 2012; Pinsky, 2019; Lamont, 2020).
The commodification thesis also poses problems theoretically, as it is either too vague or too extreme. If the argument assumes or implies that our behaviours, attitudes, and beliefs are affected by market economy and by our capitalist society, that is of course true. As social agents, we are inherently formed by the institutions and the means of production of our time. Having said that, we haven’t said much. But if commodification means that, with online dating, choosing a partner is essentially the same thing as choosing a yogurt in a supermarket or ordering a sweater from an online catalogue, the assertion is a pleasant trope, but it is wrong, too. The social process of couple formation, or casual dating, is significantly different from consumer behavior; it obeys specific norms and follows patterns of its own. As Viviana Zelizer (2005, p. 29) points out, the true relationship between intimacy and economy cannot be accounted for by theories that reason in terms of “nothing but” – as in partner choice is nothing but a market, or online dating is nothing but consumption. The way intimacy is influenced by the economy, as well as by other social forces, is a more complex process. It is a fine-grained investigation of this process that the present book sets out to write.
Such an aim requires attention to both historical change and continuity. Whenever a new phenomenon is examined, there is a danger of referring to a past that is mostly mythical, in other words of depicting a time when love was blind, pure, and authentic, far removed from our contemporary experiences. Criticisms of online dating often stem from nostalgia for a past that never existed, fueled by fears of technological change, sexual transformations, and the ever-tightening grip of economic forces.
In steering a course between the fears of some and the enthusiasm of others, the book sets out to tell another story. It relies on a vast empirical investigation and comes to very different conclusions about what online platforms do to intimacy. The major change lies in a privatization of dating. As I will show throughout the book, this feature is fundamental for understanding the popularity of dating platforms, the way people use these sites and apps, and the type of relationships that stem from them. The book shows how dating has become a private matter, and reveals the implications of this shift for both intimate and social life. In doing so, it focuses on the heterosexual population. Rather than offering a general overview, which inevitably does injustice to LGBT experiences, it puts the majority group under the spotlight in order to better understand its specificity.
The privatization of dating
There is something dazzling and almost blinding about online dating. By focusing on the most spectacular features of the phenomenon, such as the mass of registered users, ostentatious self-presentations, and profile swiping, one may fail to detect another, seemingly minor characteristic, which is no less important: the social insularity of dating platforms. Online dating is detached from other social activities; it occurs outside an individual’s ordinary social circles and possibly without their knowledge.
This is surely the most important difference from earlier ways of meeting potential partners. Historically, heterosexual courtship has always been intimately tied to ordinary social settings, for example the neighborhood, the workplace, the church, the school, community activities, and leisure (Bozon and Heran,