Apps promised a sexual revolution but they have just made dating weird | Rachel Connolly

One feature of online dating that makes it a recurring pub-discussion topic among my friends is the propensity for the people involved to do strange things. A whole new spectrum of dating behaviour has evolved on “the apps”. Habits that, while now common, are still odd things to do.

Someone might seem very interested but then “ghost” or “orbit” (which means they stop replying to messages but still engage with your social media content, liking your posts and photos); or tell obvious but seemingly unnecessary lies; another person might read “the riot act” on a first date, sternly laying down their terms for how the relationship should progress; and there are endless stories about dates reacting bizarrely, even menacingly, if rejected.

One I heard recently was about a man my friend met on an app. When she told him she didn’t want to see him again he went through a phase of sending her pictures from her own social media accounts, platforms they had never interacted on, as if to say: “I’ve got my eye on you.” But most of it is not really threatening, just plain strange. I haven’t dated in a little while but (and there is no way to say this without sounding like I’m 90) I had my Tinder phase, and I remember the strangeness well. One man I matched with spent months sending me puns and jokes based on the TV show How Clean is Your House?.

I did my own share of things which probably ended up being discussed in pubs. Once I was on a second date I didn’t really want to be on, with a man I didn’t like, and when he said something mildly obnoxious I latched on to it, picked a fight and then ran out of the restaurant and off down the street. When he messaged me later for an explanation I told him I’d done it because I was a feminist – as if that alone sufficed. But I knew, deep down, the real reason: I did it because I could get away with it. We didn’t know anyone in common. Who would he tell?

I’ve come to see a lot of the bizarre behaviour through this prism. The apps have created a dating landscape that is largely divorced from our normal social ecosystem of friends and acquaintances – people whose opinions we care about, who might judge us for ghosting someone or consistently treating dates badly. There are rarely wider social consequences for anything we do when we date strangers we meet online, and so we are free to get up to all sorts.

A new book, The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy, by Marie Bergström, a sociologist and researcher who works at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in France, explores this premise. She argues convincingly that the growing popularity of online dating has increasingly removed it from the public sphere, turning it into an entirely “domestic and individual practice”. She terms this the “privatisation of intimacy”.

The book has a refreshing lack of hysteria about the impact the internet has had on our sex lives, and no grandiose declarations about the state of love today. Bergström’s interviews with young people, who conduct almost their entire dating life online, illuminate a culture where dating is often so detached from their wider social network that the idea of mixing the two evokes panic.

One of her interviewees, a 22-year-old, admits she won’t even match with people on apps whom she shares contacts with. “Even at the relationship level, I don’t know if it’s healthy to have so many friends in common,” she says. Another 22-year-old balks at the idea of treating a regular, non-dating social media website as a place where you might find a partner: “These are people you already know!” he exclaims.

Others discuss their fear of being gossiped about if they go out with other students at their university. One 26-year-old man says he wouldn’t date someone he met at a party because they would likely be a friend, or a friend of a friend: “There’s always trouble and it creates a lot of problems.”

The New Laws of Love casts doubt on the idea that the ease with which we can meet large numbers of potential partners online is heralding a new era of sexual liberation. Bergström is particularly insightful on the subject of female sexuality and the lingering, damaging influence of tropes about the “right” sort of woman – who has a low number of sexual partners, is not sexually direct and does her best to minimise risk in her sex life.

Many of the women she interviews say they prefer to use apps for casual sex and relationships to avoid judgment from their peer group. As Bergström rightly points out, this demonstrates a modern adherence to, rather than a rejection of, expectations of female modesty. As she puts it, “it is discretion rather than sexual assertion” that makes these apps popular.

Meanwhile, the men she interviews frequently reveal themselves to hold startlingly conservative views about female sexuality. One says that when an attractive woman on Tinder propositioned him for a one-night stand he was so taken aback that he started “hallucinating”.

Bergström’s “privatization of intimacy” doesn’t seem to have made dating any better. I realised too, while reading, that there is a strange, uncomfortable public side to all of this not covered in the book. It is now common for people to share screenshots of messages from strangers on dating apps on social media for public disapproval. There are whole accounts dedicated to this.

Sometimes the messages are unpleasant, abusive or laughably stupid. But fairly often they are inane. The other week a woman shared an entire conversation because a man asked her if she was “pumped” for a date they had planned, hoping for widespread condemnation. Maybe this also makes me sound 90, but I’d surely rather be gossiped about for sleeping with someone from my uni course.