Hinge, a popular dating app, was created by Justin Mcleod in 2012. To create a Hinge profile, users upload pictures and answer prompts that others can either like or skip. Your profile includes details such as whether you’re looking for a short-term or long-term relationship, your religious beliefs, your job, and where your location. Additional descriptions help answer questions that potential matches may have about you.
When someone likes your profile, it appears on a separate page. From there, you can like them back, match, and start a conversation. Users may only communicate with seven stand-out profiles at a time and receive one free rose a week, essentially serving as a “super-like.” While these features are designed to foster genuine connections, their effectiveness depends on each user’s intentions. If people sign up with ulterior motives, the app’s design may not work as intended.
When college-aged women were asked what they were looking for on dating apps, most said they were looking for a serious relationship. Men, on the other hand, expressed a preference for something more casual, like a hookup. Hinge is marketed as an app “designed to be deleted,” emphasizing its focus on serious relationships.
Joining Hinge while seeking casual encounters, despite the app’s purpose, seems unfair to those who gravitate to it to find a long-term partner. Using a platform where people are searching for committed and long-lasting relationships without being ready for or interested in one is misleading.
While Hinge may be marketed as “different” from competing apps such as Bumble or Tinder, it often leads to the same unfortunate results — women seeking relationships and being disappointed by men who aren’t, and men looking for hookups and being disappointed by women who aren’t. These mismatched intentions ultimately make any dating app unsuccessful for its users.
The biggest problem with Hinge specifically is that it’s marketed as not being unaffected by this issue. Hinge is known as the dating up for more serious relationships, but this seems deceiving. No dating app can truly lead to intimate connections when half of its users aren’t interested in connecting. If genuine connections are challenging to establish on an app designed specifically for them, can any dating app foster these connections? And can our generation connect outside of an app?
It seems that it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to communicate with one another without a screen. When I arrive early to class, I rarely hear people talking — instead, students sit with their heads down, texting or scrolling. When I wait in line for my coffee, people ignore the person behind them and are more invested in the latest TikTok drama. It worries me that Generation Z is struggling to connect.
There is always a new dating app encouraging people to interact rather than simply saying hello to the person next to them in a lecture hall or turning around and waving at the guy behind them in line. Dating apps and social media have become just another way to avoid talking to the people around you.
Hinge should require users to specify their dating intentions when creating an account explicitly and only match people with the same intentions. Beyond that, we should all start taking more time to talk to strangers and break through the generational awkwardness that comes with having the world in our pockets. Don’t use Hinge, or the next popular dating app that promises connections, to keep you from trying to create connections of your own.