The Shadow of Competition in Digital Human Mating

Discourses on contemporary intimate life are rife with “competition”. In public as well as academic contexts, thinking about intimate life is taking the notion for granted that when people are mating, the social structure as well as the practices that people engage in when mating are “competitive”. This is true, for example, for evolutionary psychology that argues that biological characteristics of people explain their value in dating ecologies and shape individual preferences of humans vying for reproductive chances (Buss). In the social sciences, the sexual fields approach (Green) translates Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of social fields for studying intimate life. It also imports Bourdieu’s conviction that social dynamics are characterized by differences in value and actors striving for status within social fields. Recent contributions to the sociological discourse on intimacy argue that the history of intimate life is characterized by increasing levels of choice and market like competitive dynamics (Illouz).

Taking competition for granted, however, is not an option for scientific analyses of social phenomena. I use concepts of competition from organization theory (Arora-Jonsson/Brunsson/Hasse) and sociological theory (Simmel) to analyze intimate life, in particular digital intimate mating on dating apps. The analyses show that, even though it is tempting to argue that online dating results in a “competitization” (Wolfmayr) of human mating, attending to empirical detail suggests that this is just a “shadow of competition: having the same outward appearance, but lacking its content” (Simmel). As dating apps organize the mating process, they systematically obstruct observations among competitors as well as regarding “third parties” (Simmel). Therefore, daters are unable to orient their behavior based on these observations. In digital dating, competition is a myth from which actual dating practice is decoupled. The contribution will show how platform organizations contribute to the digitalization of intimate life and discuss its consequences.