Cause you know I love the players, and you love the game,” Taylor Swift cheers in her hit song, “Blank Space”. She’s satirizing the media’s perception of her, but us non-celebrities sing along with non-sarcastic gusto. Because after we’ve been broken up with for the third time, discovered the cute boy in our Am. Lit. class has a girlfriend, and swiped to the end of Tinder, dating can seem like a damp, dark pit we’re all trying to climb out of.
Thinking of the single life as a game board or a play field, keeps us from planning the names of our third or fourth cat (Abelard and Heloise, if you were curious).
Humanity has come up with a variety of ways to save dating from being a complete labor. We’ve created the pillar to civilization that is Tinder, an app listed under the “Lifestyle” section of the Apple Store when we all know it belongs in “Strategic Gaming”.
The app explicitly encourages you to “keep playing” after each match. PBS’s Game/Show describes Tinder as a textbook example of a card game. Each profile contains an ID photo followed by a list of ‘stats,’ similar to the Pokémon and Yugioh cards you might have traded as a kid. My friends and I have begun to “collect” profiles off Tinder. Our groupchat is filled with screenshots of quirky bios, strange selfie faces, and potential soul mates for each other.
Humanity has come up with a variety of ways to save dating from being a complete labor.
The activity is not unlike buying up packs of baseball cards to see which one of us gets the MVP. Much of this past summer was spent with us all swiping in the same room, asking each other, “Have you come across the guy with four corndogs jammed in his mouth in his pic?” (My friend went on a date with Mr. Quadradog. Nice guy, actually.)
Tinder is laidback yet exciting in a way games often are and dating often isn’t, which contributes to the app’s massive popularity. With over 50 million users in 140 countries, Tinder could be considered one of the biggest online multiplayer games out there.
Even before the dawn of the dating app, the search for love and physical affection was made into a sport. We sort the aftermath of break-ups and rejections into winners and losers. We create fantasy teams out of people real and imagined we want to get together (I’ll ship Captain America and Iron Man ‘til I die. Come at me, fanboys).
We keep score, trade names and pictures like jerseys. Dating is a spectator sport bigger than the Superbowl.
But let’s clarify, games imply little or no consequences outside the match. You tackle someone in football, you win. You tackle someone in the street, you get arrested. As much as athletes like to bicker and taunt each other off court, they are in fact out of the game for most of their lives. This is where dating differs.
There’s no off court in dating. You hook up with someone Saturday night and realize Monday morning they’re in your Bio lecture and you will have to stare at the back of their neck every single Monday, Wednesday, Friday of the semester.
You cheat on your boyfriend and there’s no formal sanction to stop him from disparaging your name around campus. There’s no referees, no national organizations, no generally agreed upon rules of sportsmanship. This is real life and we’re all living with the consequences.
But that doesn’t mean dating can’t be fun. That doesn’t mean dating shouldn’t be fun.
People are spending longer on the playing field and more people are choosing to never to leave the game at all.
For much of human history, dating has been courting, a very specific means to a very specific end. Marriage, babies, love if you’re lucky. The single life was over quickly. Now, people are waiting until they’re older to get married. According the U.S. census, average median ages of marriage for both men and women have been on the rise ever since the 1950s.
People are spending longer on the playing field and more people are choosing to never to leave the game at all. Our generation’s fear of commitment may baffle baby boomers, but as people have waited longer to get married, divorce rates have dropped.
People aren’t dying to get out of the game, rushing into marriage with the wrong people. Fewer divorces, fewer legal cases, fewer families broken apart, because we’ve found ways to enjoy the single life.
Let’s go ahead, and continue to make dating more fun. Love’s a game, so play on.