CULTURE

Hinge's "Date From Home" Feature Doesn't Solve the Problem of Virtual Dating

The Date From Home feature is nice, but video chats are always going to be an awful way to date.

You probably know Hinge as the app that repeatedly kills its furry little mascot in its commercials.

Marketing itself as "The Relationship App" that's "designed to be deleted," the joke is that Hinge is so good that you'll soon end up in a committed relationship and won't need it anymore. Whether or not that's true, it's certainly a big claim, and now Hinge has set its sights on an even loftier goal—to make virtual dating less awkward.

People are understandably bored and lonely right now—holed up at home with no parties or bars or restaurants to go to. Even going back to work is starting to sound appealing. In that environment, trying to make a connection with strangers through an app is an increasingly tempting prospect. But what do you do when you hit it off? You want to actually hear someone's voice, see the way their face crinkles up when they laugh, have a conversation that flows naturally.

Hinge, the Dating App Designed to Be Deletedwww.youtube.com

Chatting over text is fine, but there is always something a little rehearsed and stilted about the way people talk when they have a chance to pause and reword and delete their messages. You need to have that face-to-face organic flow to really get to know someone. So how do you do that in April of 2020?

Social distancing obviously precludes a proper date. You can set up a virtual date with a video chat, but seemingly no one wants to actually do that, which is why Hinge just added a new feature to their app. Now, with Hinge's new Date From Home feature, instead of one person needing to break the ice and suggest that first virtual date, the app will give you the option of secretly indicating that you're ready, and only when the other person is also ready do you both find out that the other person is in and the video date is on. The idea is to make taking the virtual next step less uncomfortable, and thus reduce the tendency toward ghosting.

It's a nice feature, and Hinge might really be onto something. It certainly seems like a lot more people will end up on virtual dates this way, but it still does nothing to address the reason why people were so hesitant to set up video chats in the first place. Video chatting is always uncomfortable. Even with someone you're close with, video chatting adds a layer of strangeness that disrupts familiar rapport.

The Problems with "Virtual Dating"

For a start, there's the lag. Even if you both have great connections, there will always be that fraction-of-a-second delay that leads to people accidentally talking over each other, then going silent, then trying to talk again at the same time. But even when you aren't interrupting each other, the audio quality through anything shy of a professional-grade microphone is going to lead to a lot of "What was that last part?" and, "Sorry, I didn't catch that," which then leads everyone to slow down and raise their volume and over-enunciate until you feel less like you're hanging out and a lot more like you're putting on a formal presentation.

On top of all that, the amount you can do with body language is severely limited, and there is no shared context to form the basis of small talk. There are no other people around for you to make fun of, there's no food to share or weather to comment on. You're both just alone with your phones (or worse, you're not alone and liable to be interrupted by nosy roommates). Short of giving each other tours of your homes, there's not much to comment on that could spark a conversation.

These are the issues that have made video calls awkward and unpleasant for as long as they've been around, but with all the pressure and uncertainty of a first date at the best of times, it's hard to imagine the virtual version surviving all these pitfalls. If Hinge wants to make "virtual dating" a viable option, then they'll have to do something to address some of these problems. For a start, they could try making it live up to its name.

A Better Way

A "virtual date" should be way more than a video chat. It should give young love a shared environment in which to bloom. Zoom has quickly risen—despite security concerns—to be the new go-to video chat platform, and at least a part of that is based on the draw of a silly add-on feature that lets you swap your background for an image of your choosing. Hinge should give daters similar options—virtual settings where they can go on their virtual dates.

Zoom backgrounds

Rather than both being at home, set the background to a restaurant, a coffee shop, an escape room—with some light background noise, some characters, and events to comment on, and maybe some space to explore. Give people something to do. And maybe some prompts to take turns speaking. Turn the date into a game. It's a much bigger task than just letting people secretly sign up for a video chat, but it would scratch a very potent itch that people are feeling right now—let them feel like they're getting out and doing something.

Of course, this wouldn't solve all the problems of virtual dating—the first kiss is going to remain an issue for the foreseeable future—but even if the experience is silly, it could at least make the situation a little less tense and awkward. So...get to it, Hinge.

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Why is Sharon Stone, one of the world's most prominent "sex symbols," using a dating app?

If you're not sure, then you're out of touch with how online love will be in the 2020s. Since the dawn of online dating in the mid-1990s, we've come full circle from shaming online romance to trying it out "ironically" to swiping right on possible mates while waiting in line at Starbucks.

When the 61-year-old actress (of salacious Basic Instinct fame) took to Twitter to lament that she'd been blocked from Bumble because users were reporting her profile was fake, we were collectively reminded that online dating's become too prosaic to exclude celebrities. "Hey @bumble, is being me exclusionary? Don't shut me out of the hive," she tweeted. Soon the company reinstated her account, with Bumble's editorial director Clare O'Connor stating, "Trust us, we *definitely* want you on the Hive."

In fact, the hive is buzzing, and not just on Bumble. Seven years ago, five dudes and one woman launched Tinder. Today, dating apps are estimated to be a $12 billion dollar industry in 2020. As swiping has creeped into our daily rituals, critics have fretted that dating has been superficially "gamified" by Tinder, killed off the subtlety of courtship, and resulted in a "dating apocalypse" that's prioritized sexual gratification over genuine human connection.

Earlier this year, writer Derek Thompson tweeted a simple graph showing Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld's 10 years of research on how modern heterosexual couples meet. While he expected the data to point out the obvious to people, the general response was despair at the emptiness of modern existence, marked by "heightened isolation and a diminished sense of belonging within communities," as one user noted (which is an impressive impact for a sociologist to have on the Twitterverse, so kudos to Rosenfield, who received a barrage of messages on his own social media accounts). It's the opposite of the 1950s' "stranger danger," Thompson noted, to the extent that finding a partner is like ordering on Amazon. Like online shopping, we're struck with choice paralysis when confronted with seemingly every conceivable fish in the sea.

Is modern love emotionally bankrupt? Is our reliance on technology trapping us in isolated bubbles of ids and impulses? Eh, maybe. But one overarching effect of searching for a potential partner online is that we have to get very clever at communication, or at least faking it through shorthand. From cringey neologisms like "sapiosexual" or "lumbersexual," listing your Meyers-Briggs personality type, or inexplicably sticking your baby photo in the middle of your profile, what makes us stand out from the nameless, impersonal crowd is personal details–or, as Brene Brown loves to say, "the power of being vulnerable."

For instance, as universally appalling as identifying as a "sapiosexual" (one who is attracted to intelligence) is, the unfortunate trend took off because it "fill[ed] a gap between the language we have available and the language we need to find connection in the online dating world," Mashable noted. Psychologist, author, and sex coach Liz Powell emphasized the importance of communication via dating app: "On the internet, all you have is words. So while IRL you can watch how someone interacts with others or dances, online you just have what you type at each other." She added, "Sapiosexuality is a highly controversial term these days because of the ways it can enshrine classist, ableist, sexist, and racist ideas about what it means to be 'smart.'" But, at its core, the word is emblematic of our desire to be seen as individuals rather than a profile picture. The CEO of a dating app exclusively designed to appeal to self-identifying sapiosexuals, called Sapio, even acknowledges, "For many, defining oneself as sapiosexual has become [a] statement against the current status quo of hookup culture and superficiality, where looks are prized above all else." It's a white flag of surrender to hookup culture and an odd plea to be seen holistically.

Similarly, the CEO of Hinge has noted that the latest approach to online dating values "authentic and vulnerable" profiles. The app grew in popularity because of its requirement to answer distinct and personal questions on your profile, such as "the most personal thing I'm willing to admit," "pet peeves," "I will never tell my grandchildren," or "what I am thankful for."

Undoubtedly, we're still grappling with the linguistic challenges of presenting a curated online version of ourselves that appeals to strangers within the average three to seven seconds we have before being sentenced to a swipe left or right. But maybe the bright side of our Instagram-laden, commodified, and robot-driven daily rituals is that our banal, unsexy humanity is becoming one of our most appreciated assets—even if we don't look like Sharon Stone.

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