The Paradox of Intimacy
How Technology Undermines the Love Lives of Young Adults
To grow up is, among other things, to desire love. As kids progress through puberty they become less interested in their parents and more focused on their peers. They crave a broader community, and they want the independence to discover it for themselves. While the quest for a mate has always been a universal experience in young adulthood, how people search for love has changed tremendously since the advent of the smartphone, with new benefits and drawbacks.
Technology has disrupted the love lives of young adults making it more difficult to find and cultivate meaningful romantic relationships while masquerading as a helpful tool. Even though social media and dating apps provide unprecedented opportunities for socialization, they also undermine the depth and authenticity of relationships by reducing the effort required to maintain connections, fostering unhealthy comparisons, and promoting appearance-based filtering. While there is a general awareness of social media’s shortcomings, overall, people do not acknowledge the problem’s severity, which allows it to diminish young adults' self-esteem and create less connected societies.
The ease of communication provided by social media can serve as a wonderful catalyst for friendship by enhancing communication and connecting like-minded people. Naturally, it has changed what friendship and romantic relationships look like in the modern age. Before smartphones were a part of everyday life, maintaining close friendships required writing letters, remembering birthdays, traveling, and dedicating lots of their time to the people close to them. Much of this has changed in the modern world. Smartphones have reduced the need for in-person visits by offering video calls as a faster and more cost-effective alternative. Apps also remind people of friends' birthdays, and, for younger generations, the convenience of instant messaging has rendered traditional letters obsolete. Considering all this, the fact presented by the American Survey Center that the number of close friendships that Americans have has decreased over the past two decades may be surprising as it correlates with the increased ease of contact. This suggests that smartphones, enabling humans to have unprecedented powers of communication, have weakened the connections people feel with others.
One speculative explanation for this phenomenon is that people place more value on things that require effort. The cognitive dissonance theory says that humans want consistency between their thoughts and actions. Moreover, putting effort into a friendship is consistent with the idea of having a close relationship. When the effort is removed, the inconsistency grows, and humans change their thinking to eliminate the dissonance. In this case, the change in thinking would be the perceived closeness of the relationship.
In the past, it was a privilege to talk with a friend and hear about their life. Friends would share verbal stories that conveyed their passions and pleasures to the people they trusted. By contrast, social media, as used by younger generations, allows for unprecedented awareness of what your peers are doing at all times. With Instagram and Snapchat “stories” that broadcast delicious meals and exciting activities for 24 hours and “BeReals” that entice all users to post simultaneously, it’s easy to stay connected to everyone. However, Primack et al. show that increased social media use is strongly associated with increased perceived social isolation in individuals aged 19-32. The extreme visibility social media provides allows one to see all the events they weren’t invited to and to compare their own lives to the curated moments of others’. When a young mind is continuously exposed to other people’s highlights it makes their life seem monotonous and lonely because their normal life is being juxtaposed with the best moments from dozens of their peers’ lives.
Additionally, shared photos may be increasingly damaging to viewers as their authenticity is eroded by editing which creates comparisons to something entirely unrealistic. Lingwei Shao presents the flipside of this situation by conducting a study on Chinese women who feel empowered by the photos they can modify and post online. She talks about how women have shifted their role “from ‘gazing object’ to ‘active performer’” using “selfie-modifying apps” that allow them to “decide which aspects of their mundane lives to showcase online.” Their “selfies function as a means of self-expression" which can bolster their confidence and bring them joy. This study shows that social media, as an outlet for self-expression, can be beneficial to people who produce content of their own. They can take the time to capture a nice photo and add a filter to make themselves look good.
A digital space where physical appearance matters most is on dating apps like Tinder. On the app, people are presented in a “stack of cards,” each card being a different person’s profile. A profile is a collection of photos with a little bit of text mixed in. The user can then swipe left, “to reject,” or right, “to like,” and if both users happen to swipe right on each other they are “matched” and can start texting. Due to the platform’s design, it’s no surprise that the matching process is “driven by physical attraction” which incentivizes people to present the best-looking version of themselves (Ward). While physical attraction is important it plays a relatively small role in the long-term success of a romantic relationship which is why appearance-based filtering is a very ineffective method of finding a partner even though most dating apps claim to be designed to help you find love.
The average user can’t change the design of these apps, but they can choose how they display themselves. While being in control of your online image can be empowering, the overuse of photo filters can be much more harmful than helpful. More so in women than men, filters create unreasonable and unnatural expectations of one’s appearance which logically leads to appearance dissatisfaction and low self-esteem (Habib et al.). Physical appearance has always played a role in people’s romantic lives, but social media has created a problem by allowing people to “change” their appearance so easily. Now, it’s “normal” to take hundreds of selfies a day just to choose one to modify and post (Shao). Technology allows people to showcase their “true selves” online and while some may try to minimize the difference between their online and real-world identities, social media presents itself as an obstacle in a young person’s life much more than as a tool. Because of filters that can subtly change anything from one’s freckles to one’s eye size, it’s difficult to know which photos have been modified and which haven’t. This creates a terrible effect on the young minds of people who want to fit in and naturally be as attractive as the people they see online but can’t figure out how to do it without modifying their image. In their mind, other people are not using filters and the only thing they can know for certain is that they are. It isn’t healthy for someone to display their “true self” online but to feel disappointed when they look in the mirror. This problem chips away at a pillar of successful romantic relationships by hurting people’s self-worth. Even with hundreds of potential partners, if someone can’t love themself, how will they be able to love somebody else?
Dating app users are now faced with an abundance of potential mates, which counterintuitively makes it more difficult to choose one because it’s so easy to wonder if there is someone better (Lenton et al.). As mentioned, dating apps are primarily driven by appearance based filtering. One may argue that this is natural, that humans are very visual creatures and in the past, it’s unlikely that one would approach someone they are not attracted to. But this objection features the difference between physical appearance and attraction. Attraction is much more than one’s appearance, it’s their sense of humor, warmth, trustworthiness, passion and so many more small details that can’t be conveyed in a photograph (Valentine et al.). Before dating apps, natural filtering played a large role in young dating lives. People who worked in a lab were less likely to meet people who worked in a bank, people who frequented a sports bar in Manhattan were likely to meet people who liked sports and lived near Manhattan, and so on. These frequent interactions with coworkers or peers allowed attraction to build naturally and go beyond the physical.
Dating apps, on the other hand, purport to assist people in meeting the love of their life with whom they never would have crossed paths in real life–for only $69.99/month (Boyle). While dating apps are “free to use” in a limited capacity, they offer countless in-app purchases for features as simple as seeing who “liked” you or “unlimited likes.” They use intermittent variable rewards to keep their users coming back and offer them a “better chance” for a small fee. They feign a desire to help and to connect which makes people believe that if they are unsuccessful using an app like Tinder, they are undesirable and even undeserving of love. To the objective observer, it’s obvious that these are for-profit apps that want to retain their user base. These apps take the emotion out of romantic relationships by reducing people down to an inaccurate image which a stranger judges in a matter of seconds while making the whole process akin to playing the slot machine for the corporations’ profit.
Some may say that using these technologies is a choice, but young adults who choose to avoid dating apps and other social media are still impacted by the changing romantic landscape. One-quarter of partnered Americans have felt jealous of their partner and unsure of their relationship due to the interactions their partner has on social media (Vogels and Anderson). People who perceive themselves as “more desirable” are more likely to commit infidelity (Alexopoulos et al.). This makes sense because someone who has the option to cheat on their partner is more likely to do so than someone who doesn’t have the option due to their lack of desirability. Technology didn’t change that. What technology adds to this equation is a much lower barrier of entry which affects the integrity of many young relationships by tempting people with novelty.
Even if this temptation is never acted on it can cause issues in other aspects of the relationship. It may be surprising that “communications” was the most frequently reported conflict in a 2021 nationally representative study of couples in the United States considering the role technology could play in helping people communicate (Meyer and Sledge). Many couples enjoy the ability to constantly be at a “digital arm’s length" from their partner as it contributes to better well-being for both people (Taylor and Bazarova). But perhaps this ceaseless availability isn’t exclusive to romantic relationships. According to the Pew Research Center, 51% of partnered adults in the US say “their partner is often distracted by their cell phone” during conversation. The way most smartphones and their apps are designed makes it so that there’s always something new to look at which distracts people from the relationships that are right in front of them. Not many people would say that validation from strangers matters more than being with their loved ones, but they communicate a different message when they check their phone multiple times throughout one interaction.
Clearly, modern technology negatively impacts relationships much more than people realize. In a romantic context, social media disguises itself as a tool to easily find the love of your life while in reality, it prioritizes physical appeal over attraction. Further, it corrodes the foundations of a healthy relationship by undermining trust, integrity and self-worth. These consequences can reach far beyond keeping young adults single and can hurt a person’s mental health and physical well-being. People have to accurately identify the problems created by dating apps and, more broadly, social media to devise solutions that enable human connection.