The gay dating app Grindr launched in 2009. It doesn’t do to pretend that dating in the app era hasn’t changed. I don’t believe hookup culture has infected our brains and turned us into soulless sex-hungry swipe monsters. I don’t believe technology has distracted us from real human connection. I thought that last fall when Vanity Fair titled Nancy Jo Sales’s article on dating apps “ Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’” and I thought it again this month when Hinge, another dating app, advertised its relaunch with a site called “,” borrowing the phrase from Sales’s article, which apparently caused the company shame and was partially responsible for their effort to become, as they put it, a “relationship app.”ĭespite the difficulties of modern dating, if there is an imminent apocalypse, I believe it will be spurred by something else.
