WERE WE PLAYED BY LOVE?

Thanks to the proliferation of dating apps, the 2010s transformed the way we met each other – and our sex lives…

when, at the start of the decade, an app called Grindr aimed to offer the gay male community a ‘new kind of dating experience’ – letting users easily connect with others nearby – some wondered if it might ever take off more widely. ‘Could it work in the straight market?’ asked

The Observer in 2010. ‘And would it mean the end of monogamy?’

We only had to wait two years to find out, when Tinder launched. With basic information and photographs, you could quickly make a profile and start scrolling through other users – like shuffling through a deck of cards. The whole thing felt like a game: swipe left or right, for No and Yes, until two Yes answers made a match, and chat – or anything else you liked – could begin.

‘It really was brand new, there was nothing like it out there,’ remembers journalist Rosy Edwards, whose 2015 memoir Confessions Of A Tinderella charted her adventures on the app. ‘All there had been before were [websites] that required huge membership fees, writing long profiles, and here was this thing where you could just come and go as you pleased, and that felt revolutionary.’

Taking online dating firmly into the mainstream, it was addictive, too: many a user would be begged by coupled-up friends to ‘let me play’. ‘I’d waste hours on it, to the point where at work I would be Tindering,’ says Rosy. ‘It’s that thing of, maybe the next person I swipe will be “the one”, so you can’t stop, in case they’re a swipe away. That’s the promise of it. It’s so easy.’

‘The sexual revolution of our time’ sparked excitement and alarm like the Pill before it – with many arguing that Tinder might have made dating easy, but that didn’t mean it was good for you. The focus on

photos led to accusations it promoted shallowness, while the seemingly endless supply of potential partners on offer gave it a reputation as a ‘hook-up app’. Still we kept swiping, prompting rivals to enter the fray: Bumble, founded by a former Tinder exec; words-heavy Hinge; invite-only Raya. Meanwhile, Love Island’s 2015 debut meant we could watch dating app dynamics play out on screen too, as the villa’s arrivals paired off based on not much more than how they worked a pair of trunks, before recoupling again and again – as we were all finding out, ‘my type on paper’ was no guarantee of anything more.

Recently, researchers at Imperial College Business School tipped 2035 as the ‘tipping point’ year when more people will meet their partners online than in the real world.

‘What’s really unprecedented about dating apps is how many of us now date strangers almost exclusively,’ Daniel Jones, editor of the New York Times’ Modern Love column, tells Grazia of what he already sees happening. ‘We used to date people we knew, or at least knew of. Now you have hundreds of total strangers on your phone, all available!’ On the positive side, people do meet and fall in love, and ‘For marginalised people – for example, the gay teen in a conservative small town – technology has been incredibly liberating, allowing them to connect with people.’

But, Daniel adds, ‘Dating strangers has changed the game almost without us being aware of it, making us more wary, less trusting, less willing to be vulnerable. The lack of interconnectedness can also make us more callous: easier to ghost, easier to press for sex and nothing else.’

We have all heard the horror stories: the men who follow up to chase their dates for the money they’d spent on their drinks; the married dates posing as free and single; streams of unwanted ‘dick pics’. And there is a darker side still. In 2016, the National Crime Agency reported alleged rapes linked to dating websites or apps had increased sixfold in just five years.

‘We need to educate men that swiping, matching, is not consent,’ says American journalist Nancy Jo Sales, whose Vanity Fair investigation examined how apps intersect with rape culture, and led to her disturbing HBO documentary Swiped.

On a broader level, Nancy believes that we have yet to acknowledge the full impact of allowing big tech (Tinder was recently valued at $10bn) into this most intimate area of our lives: ‘It’s upending boundaries and norms.’

But with the genie out of the bottle – what happens next? Perhaps, in the decade to come, we will all start to take back control of our love lives – as with Facebook and our friendships, maybe we can use dating apps more consciously, if not giving them up totally.

As Rosy Edwards, who met her current partner and past two boyfriends on Tinder, says, ‘If I were to become single again, it would be the first place I would go.’