In 2026, dating apps are no longer just mediating how we meet, they are actively dictating what intimacy is allowed to look like.
What began as a promise of convenience has hardened into an infrastructure that shapes desire itself: how we approach one another, what we expect from connection, and how quickly we are taught to walk away. These platforms no longer merely reflect dating culture, they govern it, quietly setting the terms under which love can occur. The question is no longer whether dating apps influence our relationships, but whether we are willing to let profit-driven algorithms continue designing the future of intimacy for us.
For more than a decade, dating apps have promised to make love more efficient. Faster matches. Better algorithms. Endless choice. But what they have actually perfected is something else entirely: the commodification of intimacy. Romance, once messy and relational, has been refashioned into a marketplace where people are filtered, branded, optimised, and discarded.
I once labelled dating apps as the Uber Eats of relationships. They encourage us to browse endlessly, compare obsessively, and believe that something better is always one swipe away. Like the city in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that throws everything out each night only to replace it with new objects by morning, dating apps thrive on churn. What matters is not what you keep, but how quickly you move on. Connection is secondary or even tertiary to circulation and consumption.
At the heart of this system is a simple transformation: people become products. Profiles function like packaging. Photos are curated, bios reduced, identities flattened into decipherable tropes. Are you the gym bro? The rave girl? The soft intellectual? The emotionally available one? My PhD research and ongoing qualitative work show how deeply this branding logic is felt by users themselves. Many describe the uneasy pressure to “position” who they are in a crowded market, to stand out without revealing too much, to be desirable without being vulnerable. Intimacy becomes a pitch.
Swiping, meanwhile, introduces a transactional pattern to desire. Like, match, chat, ghost, block, repeat – an endless cycle. The mechanics mirror market behaviour: rapid assessment, low investment, easy exit. The gamification of dating – endless swipes, dopamine hits from matches, streaks of attention – encourages instant gratification while quietly eroding patience, trust, and depth. People become disposable not because we are cruel, but because the system trains us to treat one another that way.
This is not an accident. Dating apps are not neutral tools; they are commercial engines. Their primary obligation is not to help users find love, but to keep them engaged. Algorithms are optimised for time spent on the app, not time spent off it in a stable relationship. Premium features monetise loneliness, notifications manufacture urgency. The result is a profound conflict of interest: an industry that profits most when love remains just out of reach.
The psychological consequences are well documented by users themselves. Many report feeling depersonalised, exhausted, and oddly isolated despite constant interaction. Validation often replaces connection, matches become a proxy for self-worth. One respondent in my research put it starkly: “The longest relationship I’ve had is the one with the dating app.” The joke lands because it’s true. These platforms insert themselves as the most consistent intimate presence in people’s lives, shaping how they see themselves and others.
And now, they are doing something even more audacious: telling us what dating should look like. Each year, apps release glossy “dating predictions” packaged as cultural insight but functioning more like branded horoscopes. Clear-coding. Emotional vibe coding. Hot take dating. These slogans, often amplified by Z-grade influencers, give the illusion of progress while keeping the focus firmly on individual behaviour rather than structural critique. If dating feels bad, the implication goes, you’re just doing it correctly.
This is where the politics of love re-enter the frame. As I argued in my earlier work on heteropessimism and radical self-love, many women are not withdrawing from dating because they hate intimacy, but because they are tired of the conditions under which it is offered. Dating apps intensify these conditions, layering market logics onto already unequal romantic structures. They demand emotional labour, constant availability, and self-surveillance, all while framing dissatisfaction as a personal failure rather than a systemic one.
What would it mean to refuse this? To step outside the marketplace of desire? Radical self-love, as I understand it, is not an aesthetic or a slogan. It is a refusal to participate in systems that command self-erasure. It is choosing justice over validation, reciprocity over performance. Sometimes, it looks like deleting the app. Sometimes, it looks like prioritising friendship, community, or solitude over the endless optimisation of the self.
This is not a call to abandon love. It is a call to reclaim it. To meet face to face. To allow attraction to unfold slowly, without metrics or milestones and likes. To accept that love cannot be streamlined without losing something essential. bell hooks reminded us that love and justice are inseparable. A system that profits from our dissatisfaction cannot offer either.
If 2025 was the year dating apps told us how to feel, then 2026 should be the year we stop listening. The year we recognise that intimacy cannot thrive under conditions of disposability. The year we resist the idea that love must be efficient, branded, or endlessly new to be real.
Reclaiming love will not be neat or profitable. It will be awkward, slower, and gloriously unoptimised – messy. That might be exactly the point.