The question we’re all thinking is, is Hinge setting up the future for dating? Have we forgotten the authenticity of falling in love in real life without our phones? Aren’t creative young people always feeling like they wish they had love like in the old days, where it’s pure and romantic and tempestuous? Recently, I’ve been investigating the dating app Hinge, a dating app that has become incredibly popular, especially with college students. When I started at Emerson College, I constantly heard people talking about it. Out of curiosity, I made an account myself and began to use it frequently. Hinge’s trademark is “the app that is supposed to be deleted,” implying that it helps users find meaningful and lasting relationships. Many people, however, use it for long periods of time, so it raises an important question. If it’s meant to be temporary, why is it so addictive? Like all social media, Hinge has become addictive and hyper-stimulating. Most people in our generation are obsessed with stimulation, a quest to elevate ourselves above boredom. Due to the internet’s rapid growth, social media we already consume is meant to keep us engaged and stimulated. We strive to be entertained so that we don’t have to engage in our own thoughts, which can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Even though we are a thriving generation, we lack patience in all aspects of our lives and need constant stimulation from social media platforms, which leads to a preference for instant gratification over deeper, more reflective experiences. Hinge is instant gratification; the app programs us to strategically have a sense of connection due to its algorithm, with the initial goal to seek out people. So how does Hinge actually work? What sets it apart from other apps? In a recent article from Cosmopolitan, publisher Lois Shearing explains Hinge is meant to have a more detailed profile; people upload pictures and respond to prompts that showcase their personality, interests, and relationships. These prompts are the major reason for the app’s popularity, and they allow for creativity and individuality. In 2025, prompt feedback was even introduced to help users better express themselves due to the rise in this year specifically.Â
When I explored the psychological motivations behind using Hinge, I used a survey where the majority of results said a lot of times they are seeking someone in ways they wanted to feel more content vicariously through the validation of others. Many participants admitted it’s a dopamine boost. Rather than pursuing deep and emotional connections, users often enjoy the feeling of being desired more than being experienced and known because emotionally, the risks and the responsibilities of prioritizing deeper feelings and overall commitment to them are seen to be hard, so Hinge is just simple: it’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s nothing to be taken seriously. It highlights the contradiction that people claim they want to love but avoid the vulnerability and commitment required to achieve it. Hinge has also adapted to Gen Z’s current dating style. Gen Z’s dating style liberality is a culture centered around maintaining low effort and commitment. This behavior connects to broader trends of modern dating culture. When asked to describe dating today, many participants used the words “avoidant and nonchalant” and “emotionally distant.” There is a growing sense that people are afraid to express genuine feelings or take emotional risks, and instead of relationships, many people now pursue “situationships” which are an arrangement where partners do all things in a relationship but it’s undefined and focused on physical attraction with no consequences, no emotional access, or real communication, and the freedom to engage with lust I also wanted to unpack what this means for people of different genders, sexualities, and races as a whole. There are a lot of similarities in societal aspects of dating due to influence within our age group, but there are very different experiences for everyone in how society treats dating. In an interview, Elle Segin, a straight, female Hinge user, described her experience as largely casual. She agreed that it’s more of a validation of a dopamine boost for most Hinge users. She argued that many people in our generation turn to apps like Hinge because we are immersed in technology due to the fact that it’s very hard for our generation to have to engage with the awkwardness and vulnerability of dating in real life; it’s inherently such a cop-out. Hinge is supposed to keep things simple. In a similar vein, other participants agreed and clarified that when they use it more as a game, it is more of a “dopamine boost” and more of a slight ego boost. I compared this to the perspective of a male in an interview, seeing if this dynamic between dating had anything to do with the differences between men and women and how we adapt our feelings and responses to this sense of closed-offness. Is it mostly men being non-chalant? Is it both? Is it straight culture versus gay culture, dating culture, etc.? Seeing how men, who oftentimes have been described to the provider and oftentimes are societally not treated to convey more emotional aspects of dating, are affected, especially since Jahi, my brother, and I had the same values and the type of people we seek out, our parents have been together for 30 years, and they met in Shakespeare in the Park in San Francisco. They always gave us a very beautiful and pure and authentic sense of love. My father educated my brother on how to treat women and how to be sweet and caring. We always had a sense of closeness in relation to love, so I’m curious to see how our values and how open communication we’ve both learned adapt to him and his search for love and how he loves and how a hinge has impacted his dating life. In another interview I conducted with someone else, we explored from my other interviewees specifically to showcase more diversity; the next person I interviewed was in a queer relationship. I invested to relate some of Elle’s similar statements and see if she had similar intent, even with having a relationship now through Hinge. In an interview, my friend, who actually has a successful relationship through Hinge, also gave me her perspective. As one of the only people I know who has been in a relationship for two years, I asked her about how she felt about forming relationships through dating apps. She said that when she first joined Hinge, she approached it with a carefree mindset because, as a younger adult, she despised dating apps. She recalled scrolling through profiles with friends, taking screenshots, comparing matches, and laughing at the app itself. She also discussed how the queer community shaped her Hinge experience. She pointed out that dating apps frequently reflected broader, social patterns in queer dating culture, and she felt that she benefited from certain preferences that exist within that community. Other participants I interviewed, including Jermey Popchut, a gay male, also embarked on this experience, saying, “Dating culture in the gay community is very strange. It’s very hard to tell if you’ve made a connection with someone or even to know if they are also gay. I think for me personally, it adds a lot of pressure to figure out if someone is gay or not before even mustering up the courage to talk to them, making the process that much harder. I spoke with Elle Seguin and Jahi Bandele about how dating already was hard due to the social and cultural challenges of being queer and how it impacted dating. My last interviewer said, despite the fact that the app is more commonly associated with casual dating, she feels that the shift in her own mindset played a major role in her outcomes. Similarly, acknowledged that the way people use dating apps and their stage of life significantly affects their experiences. Several Participants noted that when they were using dating apps during periods of uncertainty about their identities and their experiences with relationships, they tended to reflect that uncertainty. Another key subject that is utilized on Hinge with the added factor of “hookup culture.” Now hookup culture has been described by many participants and the generalized Generation Z community as the norm, and with dating apps inherently due to their casualness.Â
It is often seen that in the era of casualness, it’s driven mostly by sex and sexual desires, and it is the sense of pleasure and passion that is preferred, similar to the idea of stimulation, which I presently explained is a lot of the Hinge culture. By having a dating app and being in the search for someone, there is a certain internalized pleasure of attention and excitement of the sexual cognition that comes with it.
I spoke to 2 non-users, Coral de la Cruz and Emory Kipston. To begin with, I asked my first interviewee, Emory, how she would describe so-called hookup culture. She states, “I have no personal issue with it; I’m in support of what other people want to do, but personally I do think because of this very normalized culture, it’s a lot of times the expectation that you have to lead more sexual activity, and lust drives a lot of the intentional part of dating now, instead of not connecting person to person.” And the reason she personally doesn’t have the app is for a similar reason—she thinks inherently seeking a sense of connection isn’t a definition of a connection. Connections should be more authentic and allow spaces of human connection. She believes by having the app herself (not opposed to others having it), she finds her thinking the app hinges on harnessing more the active speed of a connection and doesn’t allow the natural aspects of life in themselves to happen. I asked her questions such as “Do you think of yourself as being focused on just prioritizing life?” and “Are you content with being alone?” She said, “She has lots of intersection,” that she works a lot on herself, that she is in a place where she really feels as if she’s at peace with herself, and that she actively doesn’t want to seek out anyone. She also thinks inherently certain parts of dating apps are too vague, and it seems kind of cryptic on who you actually are as a person; it’s just small answers with a couple of prompts and a couple of pictures, but it isn’t you. “Your profile isn’t an actual conversation; it’s just not you.” She believes, although it works for some people and she has nothing wrong with it, that the dating app industry itself is toxic in a lot of ways; it’s vague, it’s inactive, and it doesn’t allow real sources of human activity, she explains in her own experience. Emory says she’s been exposed to a lot of lustful people, and she doesn’t believe there’s a lot of hope for dating culture now. Hinge encourages the state of immediate action and physical cognitions in a way that allows people to focus more on the outcome. Coral De La Cruz Novey is also a non-Hinge user, and her take was similar to Emory Kipston’s. She said that this dating culture now is chaotic and there is less motivation to want to move on, and because of the dating culture’s unwillingness to connect more deeply, it feels in ways hopeless, and the lack of advocacy for themselves to grow and heal before dating again inheritance fails us and social media. Arguably enough, Hinge is supposed to show more of the interesting concepts of one’s personality. Although it gives a more humanitarian approach, the reality is it is still inherently shallow because Coral describes when her friends will be scrolling. The first thing that is “Is he hot?” Is she hot?” etc., instead of looking behind the person’s face. So as a non-Hinge user, I asked her why she doesn’t have the app. She said, “It turns people kind of more into commodities than people with emotions.” She also has a similarity to Emory; she is supportive of people’s choices, but the reason she doesn’t have the app is because by having the app, you aren’t seeking out human connection; there’s no purity. And draining your soul, she explained that love and relationships are supposed to be about giving yourself a place to experience the time, the effort, the commitment, etc. She states it to be “numb to human connection.” She frames this dating culture, like most, to be callous and unemotional, and what should be valued is acknowledging, “Yes, we all want a sense of love in our lives, and it should be shared, seeing life together and feeding off each other.” Almost everyone has Hinge just for fun; it’s for validation, Coral says to her Hinge. “It’s sad and beautiful, people feeding off each other’s validation.” It’s not an evil and terrible app, but if you want to find something genuine and real, then sure, but it’s just a validation machine. In conclusion, I believe that the app is fundamentally moral. It deals with priorities and convenience, and, despite its claims to promote meaningful relationships, it also reinforces patterns of superficial connection. I believe hinge’s values are that if we continue to prioritize instant gratification, we run the risk of losing the depth and authenticity that many people still yearn for. Promiscuous culture, in my opinion, stems from our fear of being abandoned and alone, as well as our lack of social and emotional skills. I believe Hinge truly is a complex and interesting app; it really has impacted our generation and how we see love, connection, commitment, communication, and relationships and just initial values we all have. I think Hinge’s unauthenticity sparks a lot of conversation about Gen Z’s dating culture and our generation’s intentions and values in dating, and I think we should all always question our decisions and our choices and our own sense of connections.Â