Dating apps are ‘lowering men’s standards’, new study says
Could the number of prospective partners at our fingertips be making us more blasé?
There was a time when we used to meet people in person. In the days before Tinder swiped onto the scene, Bumble buzzed constantly in our pockets, and Happn tracked our every move, we used to speak to prospective partners – see their faces without filters and find out their interests without using Facebook.
But, for all the downsides of dating apps, they’ve also be hugely helpful. Convenient, helping us avoid awkward encounters and offering those elusive second chances, the pros massively outweigh the cons – or do they?
New research, from the Queensland University of Technology, has revealed that although we live in the halcyon days of the hook up, that dating apps have hugely, and perhaps irreversibly, affected our standards.
Using the dating profiles of more than 40,000 singles aged between 18 and 80, almost 220,000 interactions, conversations and right swipes were studied to determine how selective we are when picking a partner in 2017. The results? We’re becoming more and more lax about who we decide to jump into bed with, and a wider pool of possibilities are becoming viable options in our smartphone-addled eyes.
The reason? The specialists believe that the sheer number of choices literally at our fingertips is overly daunting, and has convinced us subconsciously to settle – what are the chances we’ll find our one, our needle, when the haystack is so big?
“People may state a preference for an ideal partner,” says researcher Stephen Whyte, “but they are more than happy to initiate contact with potential love interests that bear no resemblance whatsoever to that ‘Mr or Mrs Perfect’ they initially think they prefer over all others.”
“Now, stating a preference for what you are looking for appears to have little to no bearing on the characteristics of people you actually contact.”
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