Opinion: Dating apps should spark love without political divisions

The Right Stuff, a dating app that launches next month in the United States, aims to have two types of users: ladies and gentlemen looking to meet conservative peers like themselves. “Other dating apps were scattered. We brought together people with common values ​​and similar passions,” he promised this week.

The new app aims to control the suitor pool so conservatives don’t “endure more years of bad dates and wasted time with people who don’t see the world our way, the right way.” Many of them were arranged on Tinder, which revolutionized the search for relationships a decade ago.

It’s an intriguing offering: the elimination of what one Vanity Fair writer called a “dating apocalypse” day of casual hookups based on “swipe right” matches in favor of selective encounters with like-minded people. This week its website featured a profile sample: “Paul,” a 29-year-old Catholic who loves country music, dislikes Joe Biden and wants children.

But it is a retrograde step. Dating apps are prone to abuse, particularly by young men who want sex, but they also have considerable benefits. For those seeking long-term relationships outside of their closest circles, they deepen the reserve and widen the opportunity.

Marital conservatism is built into all of us. What scientists call “endogamy” – the tendency of people to combine with others like them in terms of education, class, ethnicity and religion – is deeply rooted. This tribalism does not need to be further encouraged.

It used to be policed ​​by family and friends. More than a quarter of straight American couples knew each other through their families in 1940, but the proportion has been falling since then. About 35% were still introduced by friends in the 1980s, before online dating took off.

Tinder prides itself on its openness: it doesn’t use social status, religion or ethnicity in its user matching algorithm, claiming that “the party is better when great people from all walks of life can get together”. It’s the biggest dating app in the world, and it wants more users.

Apps aren’t always so inclusive: Bumble lets “premium” users search for people by education level and other attributes, and it’s easy to send signals through profiles. US conservatives complain that liberals put on their pages “Swipe left if you voted for Trump”. They can be used to search more efficiently for similarities rather than greater variety.

The encouraging thing is that, despite all this, technology tends to produce greater diversity in relationships, both in Europe and in the United States. The dating scene may have become more frenetic and stressful, but the marriage market has gained from liberalization.

Interracial marriage used to be illegal in many US states; online dating encouraged him. The apps have also increased online dating for people of different religions and educational levels, according to some studies. Perhaps the candidates were inherently adventurous in the early days, but there are few signs that this is fading as more people join.

Many young women have bad dating experiences through apps: More than half of Americans in a survey found them to be an unsafe way to meet people. But Gina Potarca, a researcher at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), argues that women with higher education who want lasting relationships benefit from being able to research a larger pool of candidates.

Potarca, who has studied online dating in the US, Germany and Switzerland, found that these women often seek emotional compatibility rather than social position, selecting partners for their stances on marriage and gender roles. “They are disadvantaged offline by the lack of compatible men, but they are adept at finding what they want on dating apps.”

The result is a mixture of classes and races, rather than people being rigidly true to their roots. This strikes me as a public good in an age of irascible divisions over social and political attitudes. Opposites often attract, and Romeo and Juliet showed that rebelliousness gives romance a special thrill.

Therefore, I cannot welcome The Right Stuff. You could argue that selecting “people with common values” isn’t too different from how many liberals use existing apps, just the opposite result. Nor is it the only one to limit its membership: Tinder’s Match Group last month acquired The League, a dating app for professionals that functions as an elite club.

But it is a mirror of Western society – the desire to break away from other tribes and form cocoons with people who look like you, agree with you, and reinforce existing prejudices (on all sides). One of the beauties of sex is that it can disrupt all of this through biological urges.

The Right Stuff was founded by two former aides to Donald Trump and evokes the well-known promise of restoring tradition. “We need to get back to the right way of dating,” says Ryann McEnany, sister of Trump’s former press secretary, in her introductory video.

It was certainly beautiful to be chosen by a boy her parents knew, who was waiting for her outside the white picket fence. It definitely felt more organized than being thrust into the cacophony of the dating app. But give Cupid’s arrow a chance.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves