Can dating apps help with dating fatigue?

After the pioneering French sites Meetic in 2001 and AdopteUnMec in 2007, the American geolocalized gay dating app Grindr in 2009 inspired the creation of the general public Tinder in 2012. And it is now a cascade of meeting requests that multiply in France as Pure, Feels, Fruitz, Gleeden, Raya, which join existing sites such as OkCupid. It’s easy to get lost, among those destined for one-night stands, extramarital ones or even those between celebrities. And let’s not even talk about “Dritto al cuore” dedicated to meetings” patriots » among the people on the right.

But if there is something for all tastes, all orientations and gender identities, this multiplication, associated with all the social injunctions that want a couple to form at all costs, can create a sense of exhaustion: the appointment tiredness.

To try to understand how we can get out of it, but also how apps try to exempt us, to miss asked some questions to Meg Gagnard Duru, Senior Marketing Manager France and Belgium at Bumble.

Interview with Meg Gagnard Duru, Senior Marketing Manager at Bumble

What was the dating site and app landscape like before Bumble launched in 2014?

At the time these were mainly leading French sites, such as Meetic [NDLR : fondé en 2001] and AdottaAMec [fondé en 2007]. Then came real apps like Grindr [fondée aux États-Unis en 2009] then Tinder [fondée aux États-Unis en 2012]. The smartphone revolution has enabled the development of this type of mobile apps. dating where geolocation plays an important role. It is quite surprising to see that this market is particularly active here.

If in France, AdopteUnMec promised since its launch to empower women, this has not been the case for other sites and apps, and this is why Bumble stood out in the United States as it gave women the power to choose to take the first step. or not. This is for create a feeling of security in the app, which was at the heart of the concerns of its founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd. After working for a long time at Tinder where she was the only woman on the management team, she left the company accusing her ex, Justin Mateen (who is also one of her co-founders), of harassing her. This is specifically why she wanted to make the dating safer and more attentive to women first and foremost. And when the dating it’s good for women, it’s good for everyone, for all gender identities.

In recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of increasingly specific dating applications. How do you explain it?

Almost everyone wants to find love. And we may believe we can save time by turning to a service that brings people together around a political party, religion, etc. I have the impression that every app is born with the aim of attracting a certain type of people so that they can find themselves there knowing that they share the same values ​​or goals. This is what contributes to the vitality of this market, which is particularly dense in France. No doubt because it is a country where romance occupies an important place. Paris is not perceived as the capital of love for nothing. Maybe that’s why there are so many dating apps Made in Franceand many international apps that want to establish themselves and succeed here.

This proliferation of apps can also feel overwhelming and create a feeling of overwhelm and pressure, what we call dating fatigue. How does an app like Bumble try to combat this?

Yes, we notice that many people use multiple apps at the same time and may find it stressful and tiring. This is the irony of the accumulation of choices: as there are more and more apps, we can be afraid of losing the right person on one of them and feel exhausted by the desire to multiply. We can also feel obligated to be there when we don’t want to, which is a real shame.

To relieve this pressure, I think we can do so by encouraging spontaneity. On Bumble, after a game, it is necessary to send a first message within 24 hours, precisely to encourage this spontaneity, and avoid thinking too much, becoming too agitated. It’s a bit like reproducing the act of meeting a person you find charming in a bar, for example.

Relieving this pressure also involves functionality. You can put your profile on “ Postpone »: it’s as if you disappear for the time you decide, without deleting your account. We can get involved.” Incognito ” : we can or we can slide others without them seeing us (if we want to avoid meeting family or colleagues, for example), and only people we liked will be able to see us without them knowing that we have already liked them (unless there is a match, of course, After).

There are also wellness resources in the app if you want to discover, for example, what Bumble calls “love exhaustion.” How does this expression borrowed from occupational diseases demonstrate the general public’s tendency to see dating as serious and therefore exhausting work?

We can indeed feel frustration at the lack of a meeting or disappointment after unsatisfactory dates, which can cause a feeling of anguish that we call ” amorous exhaustion “. This discomfort also comes from societal pressures and injunctions to form a couple, which can be difficult to endure and achieve mental health. This is what we try to avoid on Bumble by providing people with resources for their well-being, but also links to associations that fight against sexist and sexual violence.And then, you can also look to Bumble to create professional and/or friendly connections, because it is not designed only for sexual and/or romantic encounters.

With the advent of dating apps, terms in English are also multiplying to describe in a humorous way more or less violent practices such as “ghosting”, “cookie jarring”, “breadcrumbing” and other “orbiting”. How do you observe it?

We owe a lot of the emergence of these terms to younger generations who sometimes make them trend on TikTok, which plays a role in their popularization. If Gen Z [NDLR : née après 1995 et avant 2010] sometimes he talks about it with humor, perhaps there is some good in it, because it takes the pressure off and allows us to describe situations that perhaps were less common before with new words. It’s a generation that challenges many norms, including that… dating.

It’s a little different from millennials [ou génération Y : née de 1980 à 1995] who are perceived as a hard-working generation, subject to burnt : it was observed that it had a greater tendency to pour into the jobification From dating. That is to say, consider the dating almost like a job, where the person is required of you date meets all needs, which is made easier by many apps. We would like to look at your lifestyle habits, your CV, your hobbies, etc. But we still take the time to wonder if we heard anything during the date ?

As for the vocabulary of dating which borrows so much from English, I think it’s good to be able to give things both positive and negative names. I don’t know if this helps to trivialize microviolence, but I think it still helps to become aware of it. If things go wrong, we must be able to understand the contours, be able to give them a name to raise awareness and denounce them, rather than minimizing them.

How can dating apps have a role to play in emotional and sexual education?

Bumble is a company with strong values ​​of kindness, safety, equality and inclusiveness, so we are committed and proactive on these issues. For example, we participated in what the computer flash [NDLR : l’envoi non-sollicité de photos dénudées à quelqu’un·e] be punishable by law in the UK, which has been the case since March 2022. This is already banned in France, but we are also helping to ensure a similar law is passed for the whole of the European Union. In the app there are teams dedicated to managing reports on the problem. We have also developed a feature that recognizes nude photos when sending, to ask the sender again if they are confident and to present them blurry by default to the recipient who will then have to double click on the knowledge of the cause to make it clear, as a way to agree to see him. This private detector it is an open source technology that is then made available to other companies. It is through a whole host of things that we can participate in emotional and sexual education as an app. This example of private detector helps raise awareness among the general public that sending and receiving nude photos is not a trivial act, which all parties must consent to, otherwise it can be reprehensible. Even today, many people don’t know how to send a file dickpic unsolicited violence is violence and even a crime in some countries like France.

As apps become more and more part of people’s emotional lives, it also becomes their responsibility to participate in all this awareness.

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