can we short-form human connection?
Dopamine. We need it. We love it. We crave it. And there’s no doubt about it, the 21st century is the easiest it’s ever been to get it. All it takes is a snap of your fingers—or the swipe of one.Â
Dopamine is often misperceived as the pleasure chemical, or the happy hormone. But it’s not. Dopamine is the wanting chemical. It’s activated by anticipation. In a steady amount, it boosts our mood. In a hospital, a dopamine drip can strengthen the heart’s pulses making sure blood gets to all the right places. Dopamine can save your life. But in everyday life, we rarely receive it slowly and steadily. In our culture of consumerism, we’re receiving it more like a cold-palmed slap to the face. Fast food, social media, and drugs keep us in their orbit by keeping us on a rollercoaster. (Especially if you’re neurodivergent, which more often than not implicates the efficacy of your dopamine receptors, making you more susceptible). It’s a reliably simple cycle. We’re on top of the world, then we’re lower than low. Naturally, we would do anything to be back on top again.Â
It’s been proven that our dopamine spikes from something as innocuous as a new email arriving in our inbox, and we all experience that vague yet crippling social anxiety when we don’t see the notification we expected, or the one we didn’t want to see. To be fair, it isn’t all our fault. Every single haptic of the modern-day smartphone is meant to keep us chemically hooked. Just think about the blaring red notification bubble next to Mail or Instagram, counting the exact amount of pings we’ve had the audacity to miss. With the wild, unchecked growth of smartphone use in the last decade, our rapidly adjusting brains have begun to crave these lightning-fast rewards, while not having the patience to really get to know somebody.
I’ve noticed a specific subgenre of apps use the dopamine carrot on a stick method, while also promising us a fully-formed, satiating love story: dating apps. But how does love fit in with chasing short-term validation? How can it? And what does it mean for the future of human connection?Â
Most couples used to meet through friends, but now we’re addicted to the slot-machine of a potential jackpot. Today, most couples have met online. One date didn’t work out the way you wanted? Try again tomorrow. Try again the next day. Dating apps refresh all the time, guaranteeing you’ll have more hot (or not) faces and bodies for your viewing pleasure. From what I’ve seen, communication has gotten worse (ghosting is commonplace, no longer unanimously considered a jerk move), and commitment, too, has certainly hit rock bottom. Listen, I don’t mean a lifetime thing, but who wants to go on a date with someone who’s actively receiving more Hinge notifications while their phone is face-up on the table? It feels fickle. It feels disposable.
It’s not black and white. The apps aren’t all bad. I certainly have a friend or two who’ve met their long-term partners on dating apps, and I concede that it’s part of the digital age. Overall, however, the concept is crude. We’re flattening very 3D people into 2D cutouts, made up out of height, some quips, whether they smoke or not. I mean, I get the point. We can gauge who we’re attracted to (their pictures, at least), who will align with our lifestyle, get our humor, and go from there. But people are so much more than that. Someone can look like a match on paper (or phone screen), but you can’t fathom a personality from that. What do we risk when we can scroll through humans like short-form entertainment? People report feeling lonelier than in earlier decades, even though it’s technically easier to communicate than ever.Â
Dating apps can backslide into something like romantic doomscrolling, where the highs and lows are quasi-synthetic, like a grocery store donut or AI-generated Instagram Reels. Just like regular doomscrolling—where a person is glued to their phone, stuck in a black hole of content—it inundates us with electric-shock zaps of dopamine that make everything seem euphorically possible and desperately hopeless at the same time. It’s the paralysis of choice.
Picture standing in the cereal aisle with forty options in front of you. You know you want cereal. You know you want it to be tasty and good for you. You probably don’t care too much beyond that. But now that you see these forty options, each one designed by a team to suck in your psyche and get you to spend, spend, spend? Now you have to get the best one. You’ll spend an hour looking at flashy branding and black-and-white nutrition labels until your eyes blur. Some of the boxes will be an easy pass. Some of them look tempting, but not good for you, and so on. It can feel like that, but with people. I mean, when you’re offered nearly unlimited options at a breakneck pace, who can decide? Who can commit?Â
It’s cool that we have a way to meet way more people than we were able to before. Dating apps can be a convenient tool for connection. They can also be an oversaturated humanity overload. You may be talking to twenty people, but not know any of them. It’s lonely. People are feeling it. It’s great we don’t have to rely on the friends of friends anymore, certainly saves us some awkward hangouts, but the community aspect of dating is fast disappearing. I think the drawbacks can be recognized when you feel like you’re not looking for someone to go on a date with, you’re looking for the dopamine hit. Same thing with any social media. Are you here to post pictures, or will you get sucked into hours of comparing and contrasting yourself to everyone, feeling worse about your respective looks, physique, or accolades? The balance is frighteningly delicate. And when dopamine is involved, incredibly hard to control. Sometimes, when the sparkle of the adrenaline rush is chipped away, dating apps don’t feel rewarding anymore. Instead, they feel more like emotional exertion with no real payoff or connections gained, akin to spending hours on TikTok only to forget all the content as soon as you swipe away, ultimately unfulfilled.