The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  I ask Lauren what she means by “trying to talk to him on there.”

  “I tried to contact him and be like, ‘Hey,’ because we had a big exam,” she explains. “And I messaged him on there, and I was like, ‘Hey, how’d you do on the exam?’ like, ‘Do you think you did well?’ and just tried to spark up a conversation, and he never responded.” Lauren sighs here. “So I was like, ‘That is so awkward’!” It turns out that this happened just a few days before our interview. Lauren seems pretty disappointed that her efforts failed, so I try to console her a bit.

  “Well, basketball season is just starting, so maybe he’s busy,” I tell her.

  She laughs and shakes her head. “No.”

  “Are you sure he saw it?” I ask.

  “I’m positive he saw it,” she answers.

  “Did you get the little indicator that said he opened the message?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “It said, ‘Seen,’ and that’s, well, that’s awkward, but that’s okay. I don’t care.”

  “Have you ever successfully met someone on social media?” I ask next.

  “No,” Lauren says.

  I find myself wanting to convince Lauren that all is not lost, that just because this experiment in Facebook romance didn’t work out, she might have better luck next time. “So that was your first try?”

  Lauren nods. “That was my first attempt and my first fail, and then I’m not going to do it ever again.”

  Trying to find a date via social media, it seems, is not Lauren’s thing.

  Online dating and hooking up are subjects of constant media fascination. Because I have written about sex on campus, I am frequently asked about how college students are using social media to date and hook up. The media can’t resist this combination of two topics—sex and technology—with which our culture is obsessed.

  So, how are college students using social media to meet potential partners? Here’s the truth: they aren’t. At least not all that much. I want to be clear: just as there is a difference for students between meeting new friends via social media and using social media as a tool to conduct and maintain friendships, the same distinction applies here. You might use social media to negotiate the general logistics of meeting up, or for flirting. But I traveled far and wide, to every kind of college, and it was difficult to find college students who used social media as a first-stop tool for dating, or even for hooking up.

  Lauren is rare in that she even tried.

  There was that rather geeky young man at an evangelical Christian university who told me he’d tried to use Facebook as a way to meet girls. His method was to message them with the line, “Hey, so you wanna be Facebook official?” But all his efforts ended in massive failure—people didn’t even think it was funny. So, like Lauren, he was over it.

  I met a few students who had tried online dating, or who knew people who’d tried it. But it’s extremely uncommon for students to strike up a romantic connection online if the student has never met his or her romantic interest before.

  For instance, when I ask Brandy about online dating apps like Tinder, she is highly skeptical.

  “I like meeting people organically,” Brandy says. “I like seeing them face to face, reading their body language. For me that face to face is really important because I feel like that’s the best way you can really read a person and see where they’re at… . I don’t personally have any of those [apps]. I got too many boys in my yard already.” Brandy laughs. “I don’t know if I could ever just not meet somebody face to face and have them approach me in a romantic way.”

  Brandy has seen some of her friends take the plunge into online dating, but she does not approve. “So it’ll be interesting [in the future] just because I see a lot of people moving more to an online space. Like, one of my friends just got a boyfriend. This is the dumbest thing, let me tell you. She literally met this guy on OkCupid and literally a week after that, they started dating in an exclusive relationship. That blew my mind because I’m like, ‘You’ve literally known him for like a minute.’ And, like, he could be a serial killer!”

  In fact, when students did discuss the subject of online dating, it was generally with reference to those weird, reckless adults (some of whom are their single parents) who actually go out with strangers they’ve met online. It’s something that young people have trouble fathoming. After all, they’ve been taught their whole lives that it’s dangerous to meet up with people you’ve only chatted with online.

  Most were dismayed by the whole phenomenon. The average college student dreads the possibility of one day being so desperate that they might have to try it. Campus provides them with a universe of potential dates (or, more likely, hookups) they can meet in person, and they would prefer to not have this aspect of their lives usurped by social media.

  THE PROS AND CONS OF TINDER

  There are a number of dating apps out there, though they are more commonly thought of as hookup apps. These include Clover, Hinge, and Grindr, but by far the most popular (as of this writing) is Tinder. For the uninitiated, Tinder uses the GPS on a person’s phone to pull his or her location. You set it up so that the app knows who you are looking for (by gender, age, etc.) and the radius in which you are looking (one mile? ten?). Once Tinder knows your parameters, photos (with brief tag lines) start appearing on your screen. It’s like a candy store of potential dates—you go through them one after another, swiping left if you’re not interested, right if you are. When you swipe right and then “heart” someone, if that person has also “hearted” you, you get a “match,” and you’re able to get in touch with that person—for a date, in theory, though it’s famously used for easy sex and hookups. Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales published a lengthy article in August 2014 about how apps like Tinder are changing—destroying, in her view—dating as we know it, essentially replacing it entirely with hookups. The company behind Tinder responded on Twitter, quite viciously, accusing Sales of ignoring the benefits of the app.1

  Tinder is definitely present on college campuses, though it’s not as common as one might think. Some students are on it and enjoy it, but more often than not, if the subject of Tinder came up during interviews, the students looked disgusted and went on to tell me how much they dislike the whole business.

  Joy, a junior at a private university, let her feelings be known—bluntly. “Honestly, I think it’s a little ridiculous,” she says, laughing. “Tinder to me is like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ And people are in relationships from Tinder now, and to me, I wouldn’t even want to pursue a meeting. I wouldn’t want to download Tinder because I would never want to have to tell someone, ‘I met him on Tinder.’ ”

  In other words, if you can’t meet people in person, especially in college, you’ve failed. And you should be embarrassed. Joy goes on. “That’s the last thing I would ever want to have to say, and I know people who do [meet on Tinder]. This one girl was in my media class, and we were talking about Tinder, and I was saying how ridiculous it was, and how someone from my house I had heard talking about how she was going to go on a date with this guy from Tinder, and I was like, ‘That’s really creepy,’ and then a girl in my class was like, ‘I met my boyfriend on Tinder,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ”

  Joy shakes her head in dismay. In her view, joining Tinder is a sign of desperation. And college students are just too young to get that desperate, in her opinion. “We wouldn’t get on eHarmony and start trying to meet people at twenty years old, so why are we suddenly doing it this way [on Tinder]?”

  Another young woman, Sage, from a Catholic university, had a more nuanced view. She doesn’t have Tinder herself, but some of her friends do. “I’ve had different friends who have had different experiences with Tinder,” she tells me. “My roommate freshman year got Tinder, and she met up with five guys, five different guys, from Tinder, and by ‘met up,’ I mean, this random guy she met on this social media website picked her up at the residence hall and they went and hooked up, a
nd then she had one person come and like sleep over, just a random guy that she met on Tinder! So like, she actually used it for hooking up. But then one of my close friends at home thinks it’s absolutely hilarious. She thinks it’s so funny to just go through and look at the people. I’ve sat there with her, and we both just scroll through and people message. Guys will message her and say stupid pickup lines that are funny. So on the scale of things, I’ve seen people just use it kind of as a joke, and then people will actually use it to hook up with people.”

  This was literally the only time, in all my interviews, that anyone mentioned someone using Tinder to hook up with a stranger. As a rule, college students simply do not stoop (as Joy might put it) to consorting with strangers. Mostly, if students talked about using Tinder, it was as amusement, scrolling through profiles and laughing.

  In the online survey, students were asked to name all the social media platforms they use on a regular basis. Of the students who answered this question, only 9 percent said they use Tinder regularly.

  Because Tinder uses GPS, you can pretty much limit your choices to people on campus, and that’s what the few students who use it do. They use it to flirt. Say there’s a cute guy in your physics class but you’ve never actually met him? Maybe he shows up on Tinder when you’re playing around on it some Friday night with your friends. This allows you to swipe right on his photo and “heart” him—and hope that maybe he’s already done the same for you. Either way, voila! Once you swipe right and push that “heart” button, you’ve let him know you might be interested.

  Flirting accomplished.

  Maybe nothing happens from there—maybe he never responds, maybe he does, but you never talk to him in person. Or maybe next time you see him in physics class you actually have a conversation because you’ve established a connection on Tinder. Tinder can provide an opening to talk to someone you’ve always thought was attractive. Students find it incredibly difficult to establish that opening these days—going up to someone on campus they already find attractive and saying hello, in person, boggles their minds. Of course, once a connection is established on Tinder, if it leads to anything, it will likely be a hookup, not a date. Hookup culture dominates campuses. Dating (at least of the more traditional sort) is nearly nonexistent, even if students would prefer that not to be the case. It’s definitely true that college students don’t know how to date anymore. It’s also true that most college students would like to date if they could. Tinder can help alleviate their fears and anxieties around that initial meeting (though it doesn’t always function this way).

  But I want to emphasize that the reputation Tinder has in the media and the fears stoked by alarmists—that Tinder simply facilitates sex between strangers—do not seem to apply much on college campuses. For those who do occasionally use Tinder to find hookups, they are almost always hookups with other students. Moreover, for college students, hookups are a broad category—they can be anything from kissing (and it is often just kissing) to sex. So even if a student uses Tinder to spark a hookup, that hookup may simply lead to an evening of making out with another student.2

  The same dread that college students feel about online dating—the sense that meeting someone with whom you have no prior real-life connection is reckless—applies to Tinder also. Students may indeed want to have sex and hook up, but they do not want to do so with anonymous strangers. They want to have sex and hook up with that hot guy from American lit or that hot girl from chemistry class. Even if they have no prior formal introduction or relationship with that person, the very fact that this person is a known quantity—attends the same college, is in the same class, maybe even has some mutual friends—changes the dynamic entirely. For better or worse (and I would say for better overall), this makes the person with whom you are flirting and with whom you might like to meet up “safer.” They are “safer” in the eyes of students because you are going to see them again in class, because you can get a sense of their reputation from others before anything happens between you, because you likely already know where they live or can find out easily, and because you will have further access to them if need be, since they live and go to school on your campus and are bound by its rules and authorities. Granted, this is not a guarantee that a hookup will turn out well, and it’s certainly not a guarantee against sexual assault. But, despite fears expressed in the media, students almost never use Tinder to meet total strangers.

  Tinder, for those who are on it, is a useful tool for showing interest, possibly for flirting, and definitely for a quick ego boost if someone needs one. Is Tinder a part of hookup culture on campus? Definitely. It depends on the campus, since Tinder is more popular on some campuses than others. And hookup culture was dominant on college campuses long before Tinder was invented. Hookups happen regardless of apps and social media, so while social media may play a role in hookup culture, it certainly didn’t create it. And if social media were to disappear tomorrow, the effect on hookup culture would be pretty much nonexistent. Hookup culture would continue on, unhindered.

  Student Reply about Tinder Percentage Out of 100

  Tinder is definitely a hookup app 23%

  Tinder is for flirting/fun/it’s positive 18%

  Tinder is both good and bad 1%

  Tinder is a terrible thing 33%

  Vague idea/no experience of Tinder 23%

  When I asked students about whether dating apps are changing the way people date, hook up, and have sex, only a small number (16.5 percent) mentioned Tinder. Of those who did, their feelings about the app were decidedly mixed, as apparent from the following:

  Nearly a quarter of the students who commented on Tinder either had only a vague sense of its existence (they’d heard of people who used it) or simply wanted to point out that they’d never used it and didn’t really know much about it. (Granted, things change so quickly online that Tinder’s popularity, too, may change by the time this book sees the light of day—it might come to dominate students’ romantic encounters, or it might fade from relevance altogether.) And nearly a quarter of the students said, in effect, “Of course Tinder is used for hooking up!” but didn’t have a strong opinion about it. “It is an efficient platform for the casual hookup culture,” one said. Period. But a small subset of students love Tinder (that 18 percent) and felt that these apps “can be helpful,” especially if you’re shy, and can really “open up your options.” And about a third of the respondents loathed it.

  “It’s pretty neat to have someone matched on Tinder and then see them at a party later—you know there’s at least some base level of interest,” said one male first-year. “I think it just makes people more honest and clears up the fog of war, so to speak.” One young woman, also a first-year at an evangelical Christian college, met her boyfriend through Tinder. “Most of the time, [Tinder] is seen and talked about as a joke and something that is not taken seriously,” she wrote. “My experience, however, was positive and very different. I met my current boyfriend on Tinder. We have been in a very committed relationship for over one year now.” Another young woman, a sophomore at her Catholic university, who identifies as gay (and checked “transgender” in the online survey), thought Tinder was especially useful for women who identify as lesbian. “Tinder is interesting when listed as a queer woman because lesbians essentially use it just for dating (legitimate, romantic dating),” she wrote. “While heterosexual couples appear to use it a lot more for hooking-up.”

  A number of students also used this question as an opportunity to comment on how Tinder didn’t create hooking up. In fact, apps like Tinder help weed out the people who aren’t into hooking up. “It’s not like hookup apps invented hooking up,” said a sophomore woman at a Catholic university. “There’s always going to be some college kids who want casual sex, and it’s good that there’s a place for them to find each other without them having to risk making classmates and coworkers uncomfortable unnecessarily.”

  But most students took a practical attitude. In the wo
rds of a young woman at an evangelical Christian college, “It allows for very causal dating relationships. It also takes away the pressure of pursuit and rejection—people meet based on mutual attraction. This has its pros and cons. I think for the hookup culture, it has provided a lot more liberty. However, I think it has been detrimental to those who value long-lasting relationships based off more than physical attraction. It also creates the idea of dating as choosing from a pool rather than an individual connection.”

  Some students felt that it’s all in how you use Tinder. “This is just a new way to date,” said a young woman, a junior at her Catholic university. “Some are worse than others, but it depends on your intention. If you intend to go on Tinder to find someone to hook up with, then that’s your choice but if it’s your intention to find new and interesting people to form a relationship with, then that’s your choice.”

  Then there were the students who rued the existence of apps like Tinder. “It is so negative and it is desensitizing,” said a sophomore woman from an evangelical college. “My roommate uses Tinder and I disagree with it, because it takes away the idea of human interaction. I firmly believe that people need to build relationships face-to-face.” A number of students who disapproved made comments similar to the young woman, a junior at an evangelical Christian college, who said, “Tinder I believe is especially bad, as it promotes superficiality in my generation, and encourages hookups,” or this first-year woman at a private university, who said, “I think Tinder turns relationships and sex into something almost marketable—easily accessible online, and quickly discarded once ‘used.’ ”