First Year Package

SCIENCE & TECH
25
Phones as Wingmen:
Technology Changing the Rules of Romance
Taylor Paulite,
Contributor
Your phone is your best friend. It is
there for you to play games with, take pictures
with, make restaurant reservations, and navigate
you in the right direction. In addition to the aforementioned
duties, your phone has also become
your wingman. In the modern age, cell phones
too are the main medium in our social lives.
Whether through text messaging a
potential suitor, “researching” a partner on Facebook,
or meeting a new bae through an online
dating app, technology has transformed the way
we start relationships. The casual bar meet-up,
along with several other traditional ways of meeting
partners face-to-face, are beginning to fade
away.
Online dating apps made their debut
into the romantic scene in the early 2000s, including
apps like Grindr, OkCupid, Match, and
eHarmony. In September 2012, Tinder was introduced,
and what was first thought of as just another
app, became a phenomenon in the dating
world.
Tinder is an application that is mainly
functional on a smartphone, and allows users
to view a number of potential suitors within the
vicinity of their location. Sexual preferences and
age limits can be conveniently controlled.
The server displays the name, picture,
and age of one’s ‘potentials.’ The app then allows
the person to swipe left, which indicates no
interest, or swipe right, which indicates interest.
Mutual interest between individuals, a “match,”
leads to opportunities to chat, which can potentially
turn into a date.
The application spread like wildfire,
logging in around a billion swipes daily by 2014.
Tinder hit the young adult community like a
wrecking ball, mostly due to its efficiency. This
app became a frequently used outlet, especially
by busy students.
Whether by facilitating one night
stands, matching future life partners, or creating
a list of hookups, this dating app brought upon
a change in the realm of romance, in regards to
how we meet new potential partners within university
and throughout our daily biddings.
Many students have met their current
partner through Tinder, and have maintained
successful and loving relationships. A UTSC student
who has been in the dating pool long before
Tinder appeared, met her boyfriend through the
app: “Tinder was something I did for fun with a
close female friend; it was nothing more than just
a hilarious time,” she says.
She met her boyfriend of 13 months
after exchanging messages for a few weeks on
the app. “He was funny and actually asked me
questions about myself. I surprised myself by
agreeing to go out with him. We just had our one
year anniversary the first week of July, and our
relationship is great; definitely the healthiest and
happiest I’ve had thus far,” she says.
Tinder sparks relationships that otherwise
may not have had the chance of forming in
such a big city like Toronto. Due to its efficiency,
and ability to network with people from all across
the city, Tinder allows the opportunity of unlikely
connections to form. With the use of radius control,
people can meet partners from a maximum
of 160 kilometres away.
“I would never have crossed paths with
him in real life without it, that’s the weird thing,”
says a another student from the University of Toronto,
while commenting on her one-and-a-half
year long relationship with her boyfriend, who is
from Niagara Falls.
NOOR AQIL / THE UNDERGROUND
Although dating apps like Tinder have
helped the dating world by connecting people
long distances apart, it has spurred some backlash.
American actor and comedian Aziz
Ansari discusses how technology can negatively
change our mindset towards other potential partners
in his novel, Modern Romance.
“When you look at your phone and see
a text from a potential partner, you don’t always
see another person; you often see a little bubble
with text in it, and it’s easy to forget that this bubble
is actually a person,” he states.
This is a common issue with technology.
Although it is convenient for those in the
dating pool, it can give people an overwhelming
amount of power that can be difficult to handle.
A second-year student, who was not
quite skilled with interpersonal interaction, has
found Tinder to be liberating when it comes to
talking to and meeting new people.
Technology gave this student the temporary
skill of talking to others while avoiding all
the awkward pauses and eye contact that come
along with it in person; however, when things became
more serious, her sense of liberty was taken
away from her. After wanting to meet a guy following
weeks of online interaction, she nervously
left upon seeing him face-to-face for the first time.
“Right when I knew he was there, I just
didn’t have it in me to see him. I messaged him
after to apologize, but we never spoke again,” she
says. The hours she invested into her online interactions
did not affect her offline behaviour, which
made the whole experience feel like a waste of
time.
Along with all of the benefits that are
associated with technology, one can also see that
there are downsides to it as well.
www. the-underground.ca AUGUST 22 - OCTOBER 5, 2016
VOLUME 36, ISSUE 01