“Everyone erases everyone. Life is about getting to know people that you first love and then erase.” (Alejandro Zambra, Chilean writer.)
Right now I have 120 matches on Tinder. I talk to two or three of them, I open the app when I take the metro or I’m bored, and from time to time my friends ask me where I am in my research. I don’t know if it should be seen as research. What are we looking for on Tinder?
In any case, since I’ve been using it, I’ve noticed that it’s easy to get in touch with people, but to cut off contact with them is even easier. There is no more trauma in the loss. Today, more than ever, everyone erases everyone.
In the series of contacts and exchanges that we have every day, erasing unintentionally is a matter of survival. The hyperconnected individual is more disconnected than ever, according to the French sociologist David Le Breton: we always communicate more, but we meet less and less, and in fact we prefer superficial relationships that begin and end when we have decided.
Apps like Tinder are all about getting us to meet new people. There is no idealism there, nothing false. Tinder promises neither to find love nor to pull off a phenomenal blow: what it offers is virtual connection and novelty. An endless catalog of candidates, and for the user the power to accept or refuse someone with a flick of the thumb.
And maybe more
The need to bond is nothing new. What has changed are the reasons why relationships crystallize and fragment, and the forms they take. Tinder is therefore not intended to meet a need that already existed, but to take advantage of the vulnerability of new modes of relationship and, ultimately, to perpetuate it.
Because, finally, the meeting always involves risks. It often happens that we have things in common with someone, or that we have the impression of having some. Without the physical component of the meeting, it is impossible to know with certainty if we really have affinities. We chat for days, then at some point we end up seeing each other, and there is no chemistry: the mirage of idealization vanishes. So we say goodbye and we’ll never speak again. Like when you travel in a BlaBlaCar, you tell your life story to the driver or the passengers, and then you never hear from them again. To keep a virtual relationship alive, it is therefore necessary to avoid the meeting. Finally a social network from which all purity is absent.
If Tinder helped us build lasting connections with other people, it would be a commercial aberration. The app benefits not from the success of relationships, but from their failure, because this is what ensures the return of the user. That a lasting relationship can be born there from time to time is only collateral damage.
The objective is not so much the physical encounter with the other as the simple fact of “matching”. Once that happens, people pile up in an endless list of candidates. The trend is for limitless growth. We can always start a conversation with one of the 80 matches on his list. Earning potential relationships becomes an addictive game, you end up being addicted.
Always more fish in the sea
This collection alone produces a mirage of connection that makes us invulnerable. A refuge where those around us cannot boycott us. This idea that there will always be more fish in the sea is brought to its climax.
It’s not about entering into a relationship but knowing that you can do it at any time. “There are always more possible connections, so it doesn’t matter how many of them turn out to be shaky or unstable,” writes the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Love. On the Frailty of Human Bonds [L’Amour liquide. De la fragilité des liens entre les hommes, éditions du Rouergue].
In this constant bombardment of stimuli, relationships are inconsistent and there is little investment in them. By the very nature of the app, it seems impossible to focus on just one person. The more open conversations we have, the better. What is said is not important. The circulation of messages is the message. I exist because I speak, because people communicate with me.
Using the app at full capacity, getting the most out of it, is not about meeting one person, but about not focusing on anyone. Tinder disconnects us more than it connects us. It teaches us to cut ourselves off from others, instead of strengthening ties. To view relationships and human beings as disposable. With constant change, the invitation not to linger, to turn the page quickly, the thirst for change sets in, without the loss being experienced as mourning.
“A balm against dissatisfaction”
Here, freedom is reduced to the ease of engaging and disengaging: freeing oneself from one’s work, from love, from one’s place of residence. In the 1990s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard evoked this moment of boredom “after the orgy”, in other words, after the sexual and political liberation, the emancipation of women, the unleashing of productive and destructive forces, of unconscious impulses, of art. In this post-apogee, we just have to pretend “to continue to accelerate in the same direction”. Once all the revolutions have been consumed, it is possible to perpetuate the redemption from your couch.
But the illusion of liberation contains a pendulum movement: individuals oscillate between the natural desire to establish fulfilling relationships and an acquired tendency not to commit too much, to be able to cast off when they see fit. The paradox, to use Bauman’s formula, consists in ensuring that “that a relationship gives power to the user without the dependence weakening him, that it emancipates him without conditioning him, that it makes him feel fulfilled without overloading him”.
Dating apps like Tinder offer a balm against dissatisfaction. But while offering a solution, they create a new need. It is, as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck notes,“to provide biographical solutions to socially produced problems”.
The individual can feel master of his destiny if he accepts a present that is beyond his control. Nothing is certain, so don’t hold on. The level of uncertainty to which hypermodern societies subject us becomes bearable when instability ceases to be an environmental variable to become a social principle. Each end of stage, each untied link enriches a collection of experiences obtained thanks to the change. We undertake an ascent towards the ardently desired liberation, we climb the steps of an infinite staircase, we take refuge in a fortress to forget, once up there, that we all want to be saved by someone.
Who would have imagined that, behind the promise of all liberation, were hidden new chains?