The Eck’s Factor: What Tinder tells us about labels and the modern meet-cute


(Eliza Glover | Daily Trojan)

Swipe left, swipe right. Super Like and start a chat. Why not, am I right? 

Online dating apps — Bumble, Christian Mingle, FarmersOnly, if you will — have monopolized the dating frontier, with 75% of young adults using Tinder. Digitized dating has grown so rapidly in popularity, not only because of its quick accessibility but because of its methodical approach to finding a partner. 

Think about it — these dating apps are categorization mechanisms. When swiping, we have access to such little information that we are forced to look to a mere 10 pictures and a 500-character biography to sort our interests and form an opinion about someone else. 

Thus, our modern idea of romance is a swipe-fest that promotes superficiality and undermines inner beauty, and it only contradicts the prominent trope that love has no labels or boundaries. We must consider this paradox of looking for authenticity through superficial means and what it says about our perception of the meet-cute, an almost too-good-to-be-true first encounter between two people.

In these apps, artificiality manifests in the form of labels. Swiping through my own Tinder — that’s right, I have credentials — they pop up left and right, literally. And height is one of the most common characteristics I come across. 

A particular line resonated with me recently: “6-foot-1, because I guess that matters.” 

This line acknowledges the shallow nature of a culture that heavily glamorizes height but simultaneously feeds into it. We have a love-hate relationship with this kind of cosmeticity. Height may be a physical feature that disregards personality, and we know it is unhealthy to prioritize it so much. Yet we succumb to the cultural toxicity and use physicality to make ourselves more desirable and swipeable. 

Don’t even get me started on Grindr. While the app is primarily meant for spawning gay hookups, it also has the overwhelming effect of dichotomizing in nearly every way possible — tops and bottoms, mascs versus fems, twinks or otters. These binaries are all hallmarks of the gay community, so they will naturally be inflated. At times, though, these labels are yet another way of limiting oneself to surface-level pursuits. 

Part of this labeling obsession is rather simple — we love convenient intimacy exactly the way we want it. But at the end of the day, these superficial tendencies have negative consequences. This trend of popularizing labels reinforces toxic body standards, such as magnifying a nearly unattainable golden physique.   

Moving beyond the surface, perhaps there are other reasons we keep coming back for more. This ease of swiping, combined with the attention we receive on these apps, is addictive. This could be just a matter of boredom, but what if it reflected a different part of us that subconsciously enjoys this acrimony? 

Perhaps some of us never moved past our teenage angst phases and we actually use these apps as methods of self-destruction. We continually reinforce the labeling system because we are innate masochists, stuck in our nihilistic ways. This dependency is not necessarily enjoyable, but it renders us unavailable emotionally — just the way some of us like it. 

Nonetheless, this obsession with labeling is not going anywhere. Our generation is drifting in the direction of a new meet-cute that swaps old-fashioned spontaneity for a contemporary, systematic match-and-dash.

On the plus side, this can be very beneficial for the LGBTQ community, which actually uses these dating apps nearly twice as often as straight single people. This makes sense, considering that the LGBTQ community comprises only about 4.5% of the United States population. To put this into perspective, one is statistically more likely to randomly meet a partner on the street as straight than they are to meet one as an LGBT identifying individual. These apps are a utility, an innovation that has changed the dating realm regardless of sexuality. 

However, we should still work to alleviate the emphasis on labels. Why do we always have to label everything? For a moment, we could forget about it all and disregard our labeling system to move beyond the shallow. With great power comes great responsibility, and we should not let this technology eradicate whatever authenticity we have left. 

After all, meeting your significant other at Trader Joe’s is a pretty good meet-cute if you ask me.  

Matthew Eck is a sophomore writing about culturally relevant social issues.  His column, “The Eck’s Factor,” runs every other Thursday.