Tinder Metaverse: Is it going to be the Next Game Changer for Finding Love?

Tinder is known to be the platform for people to meet potential romantic partners. As Facebook released its plan on changing its name to Meta to embrace Metaverse. Metaverse, as building this fully emerged virtual platform for people to engage in the interaction of reality and express themselves in a different dimension (Meta 2021). Tinder’s parent company Match group has released potential possibilities of releasing Metaverse version of Tinder. Today let’s take a look and examine critically how this move is potentially going to change how we are finding intimate relationships.

Screenshot of Meta, 2021, Retrieve from the Video “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together — Connect 2021”

Firstly, let’s clarify what Tinder metaverse is and its relation with intimate relationships from the sociological point of view. Metaverse by using Metaverse Display Portal which is visually immersive, self-configuring and monitoring, interactive and collaborative (Jaynes, C. et al. 2003). Tinder Metaverse, as expected will be most likely to combine the characteristics of Metaverse and Tinder together, which requires a whole virtual experience with online chatting and random matching process. The intimate relationship is defined as “an interpersonal relationship that involves physical or emotional intimacy” (Wong, D. W. et al. 2015). Intimate relationships are a type of personal relationships that are subjectively experienced and may also be socially recognized as close, meaning by close can be both physically or mentally (Jamieson, L. 2011). Meanwhile, the intimate relationship we mention here refers to long-term, monogamy, romantic relationship, instead of “hookup” or “one-night stand” specifically.

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How will Tinder Metaverse work on intimate relationship building? Is it going to help Tinder for a better user experience? How does Tinder Metaverse as a platform, has to do with the ultimate outcome of finding romantic partners? Does Tinder Metaverse help us to find what we need for intimate relationships?

In order to critically examine and understand these questions, we’ve interviewed a few college students who have used Tinder primarily for different periods of time and shared their experiences and thoughts about Tinder Metaverse.

What do you think of Tinder Metaverse?

Male A, 23 years old with 2 years of Tinder experience:

“Tinder I think is not a normal way to meet people, people don’t download it for real-life dating. It’s kind of like a game. You swipe right and left, you chat whenever you are free, easy. Being able to meet online is almost like going on dates virtually, I wouldn’t think people will enjoy it.”

Female B, 27 years old rarely uses Tinder:

“To be honest, I’d love to try it out (Tinder Metaverse) and see how it works. Feels like using Tinder is almost like talking to a picture the whole time. I don’t particularly enjoy using Tinder because I don’t like talking to strangers online, it’s hard to tell what they are thinking behind the screen.”

Female C, 22 years old with 3 years of Tinder experience:

“This might be a great way for people to meet and start chatting, but I think in order to start the relationship you have to meet in person. This is definitely not going to be changed for sure.”

The overall impression of Tinder Metaverse hasn’t been fully positive. People who hold doubts about its efficiency and distrust of technology will bring people together. The setup of Tinder gamification for matching, subconsciously makes it less serious and developed into a pattern. Especially when it comes to Tinder Metaverse, it will rely more on the gamified process. As it shows below in the interview, people who are using Tinder already partially agreed on its purpose as finding hookup partners. For intimate long-term romantic relationships, it might be harder and harder to build meaningful couple intimate relationships.

What do you think matters the most for an intimate relationship?

A: “Not to have to force communication, type of media you consume news, music, politically must be aligned, the ability to have individual life, physical attractiveness, the ability to listen, contribute as a reciprocity”

Female D, 21 years old uses Tinder rarely:

“knowing a person, be friends first, he has to be humorous, knowing what’s important. Also comparing how happy you are with and without them, if so that’s what it matters”

What do people want from an intimate relationship is mostly related to the long-term relationship-building factors. Mutual understanding and everyday life interaction matter. Tinder Metaverse does provide a platform for people to do things together instead of purely chatting. One of the pieces of advice we can provide is, to cut down the machine and human interaction (including Tinder Metaverse chatting interaction) as soon as possible if you can. This means trying to enhance the humanistic side of you and prove that you are a real person easy to be related to. Tinder is only a platform, what you need is human at the end of the day!

Do you think Tinder Metaverse will be helping you to find or build intimate relationships?

C: “I think platform only provides a place for things to happen. Tinder Metaverse in some way will enhance communication, but I think it will fade very soon anyway. The real interaction in real life is necessary.”

A: “Tinder already has this culture of hookup. When you are bringing expectations to the table, it subconsciously already influenced your choice. Even though metaverse will talk initially, it will still end up in the hookup culture.”

People generally don’t have a positive impression of Tinder finding an intimate relationship. Tinder Metaverse will be a fresh new start for trying to combine virtual, digital technology with real-world relationship building. It will be a long way to go for us to see the effect if it will actually help. The fear of anonymity, interacting with frauds, human-machine interaction exists during the interaction. Sociology and technology are ought to go hand in hand and explore how technology can help improve our lives.

Through online virtual talking, enhancing the gamification and eliminating the feeling of interacting with only machines, these are the factors that make Tinder Metaverse stands out, both positively and negatively. As the research from Gabb, J. & Fink, J. is trying to focus on couples’ experiences, feelings, situations to examine the intimate relationship especially couples (2017), this provides us a new perspective to research on Tinder and intimate relationship. By knowing what people think of the Tinder Metaverse and examining the experience after usage, would provide a solid understanding of how Tinder Metaverse is going to change our lives. For further understanding, we shall look forward to the Tinder Metaverse being released, more exciting or unexpected occasions might appear. By then, Tinder Metaverse might be the game-changer of the 21st century, who knows!

Reference:

Gabb, J. & Fink, J. (2017) Couple Relationships in the 21st Century: Research, Policy, Practice. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.

Jamieson, L. (2011) Intimacy as a Concept: Explaining Social Change in the Context of Globalisation or Another Form of Ethnocentricism? Sociological research online. [Online] 16 (4), 1–13.

Jaynes, C. et al. (2003) ‘The Metaverse: a networked collection of inexpensive, self-configuring, immersive environments’, in Proceedings of the workshop on Virtual environments 2003. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (EGVE ’03), pp. 115–124. doi:10.1145/769953.769967.

Meta (2021) The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together — Connect 2021. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8 (Accessed: 14 November 2021).

Wong, D. W. et al. (2015) Counseling individuals through the lifespan. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.