“A whole new spectrum of dating behaviour has evolved on ‘the apps’. Habits that, while now common, are still odd things to do.

Someone might seem very interested but then ‘ghost’ or ‘orbit’ (which means they stop replying to messages but still engage with your social media content, liking your posts and photos); or tell obvious but seemingly unnecessary lies; another person might read ‘the riot act’ on a first date, sternly laying down their terms for how the relationship should progress; and there are endless stories about dates reacting bizarrely, even menacingly, if rejected. …

I did my own share of things which probably ended up being discussed in pubs. … I did it because I could get away with it. We didn’t know anyone in common. Who would he tell? …

A new book, The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy, by Marie Bergström, … illuminate[s] a culture where dating is often so detached from their wider social network that the idea of mixing the two evokes panic. …

Many of the women she interviews say they prefer to use apps for casual sex and relationships to avoid judgment from their peer group. … ‘it is discretion rather than sexual assertion’ that makes these apps popular.

Meanwhile, the men she interviews frequently reveal themselves to hold startlingly conservative views about female sexuality. One says that when an attractive woman on Tinder propositioned him for a one-night stand he was so taken aback that he started ‘hallucinating’.

Bergström’s ‘privatization of intimacy’ doesn’t seem to have made dating any better. I realised too, while reading, that there is a strange, uncomfortable public side to all of this not covered in the book. It is now common for people to share screenshots of messages from strangers on dating apps on social media for public disapproval … I’d surely rather be gossiped about for sleeping with someone from my uni course.”

aus: Rachel Connolly: Apps promised a sexual revolution but they have just made dating weird. The Guardian online, 28.12.21, im Internet.

abb.: Eko Nugroho: La Rue Parle #6, 2012, indoartnow, im Internet.

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