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“There is a specific type of alienation that comes with using an app that was not made with you or your community in mind, and most dating apps have initially been created with straight people in mind.”
It’s a truth uncomfortably acknowledged that every dating app in possession of a database of potential daters must be primarily in want of straight people. The quote above is one of the many insights into the modern dating landscape covered by Mashable’s own features editor Rachel Thompson, in her second book The Love Fix, out now via Square Peg, following her debut, Rough. And we’ve got an excerpt on this complex, undeniably prevalent topic for you below.
Mashable’s Rachel Thompson investigates sexual violence (and what we can do about it) in ‘Rough’
Now, full disclosure, I’m biased — that much is obvious. I’ve been lucky enough to edit and read Rachel’s (it feels weird to call you Thompson, I won’t do it) brilliant work for years, covering every angle, trend, and buzzword of sex, dating, and relationships in contemporary life — before the rest of us really know what’s happening right in front of us. But The Love Fix is a deeper dive than ever into dating app fatigue, and a truly hopeful means to understand how we can reconnect with authenticity and intimacy in a world increasingly disengaged and automated.
Rachel’s thorough analysis of how orientation affects the app experience, how dating apps are not designed with queer people at the forefront, and that “our social scripts for dating are also designed for straight couples,” is just one of the important threads she pulls.
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The Love Fix delves into questions of dating app culture and design, what “limerence” is and how to deal with it, the trickiness of DTR (defining the relationship), how to reframe rejection, why ghosting hurts, the increased use of therapy speak in dating, the online attention economy (and how to take a break from it), getting over someone you never dated, how your attachment style impacts sex and relationships, breaking up in the online age and post-breakup etiquette, and the absence of commitment amid so much choice — amid so many other questions.
Really, it’s for those with a book-long answer to the question: “How’s your love life?”
So, we’ve got a sneak peek for you, an excerpt from The Love Fix about the lack of queer representation in dating apps beyond those specifically labelled as appealing to LGBTQ daters. Get into it.
The Love Fix by Rachel Thompson
From Chapter 4: Just My Type
How does orientation affect the app experience?
The Pew Research Center found that lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are around twice as likely as straight adults to have used a dating app or site, but now that so much of dating has moved online, it’s important to examine how we make online dating inclusive. There is a specific type of alienation that comes with using an app that was not made with you or your community in mind, and most dating apps have initially been created with straight people in mind.
“Nothing in this world is made for marginalised people,” says Melissa A. Fabello PhD, a US-based sex and relationships educator. ‘”As a queer woman, I talk to so many other queer women that are like “the apps suck!” And it’s like, yeah, because the apps weren’t made for us, so even though we can use them, they weren’t made for us, and that is impactful.”
There is a specific type of alienation that comes with using an app that was not made with you or your community in mind.
This feeling that the apps are not designed with queer people in mind is echoed by scholars too. “Structures of power are visible also in the social and cultural genealogy of dating apps,” writes Dr Carolina Bandinelli. “Most apps (dating and nondating) were funded in Silicon Valley, in a socio-economic environment marked by a culture that, despite the promotional claims of democracy, is in fact based on strict mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion which benefit certain categories, mostly white middle-class males, while marginalising others, notably women and ethnic minorities.”
Queer dating apps, which have been conceived and built by queer people, are a response to oppression, says Fabello. “The queer dating apps only exist because other dating apps are not useful, particularly to queer people, so we create our own,” she says. “Even if you’re trying to create something that’s less oppressive, you’re doing it in response to oppression, oppression takes up a lot of space in our lives.”
The dynamics these platforms expect of us don’t always work, as on top of that our social scripts for dating are also designed for straight couples. As Lucy says, “Women aren’t taught to flirt with other women, so even if someone feels attracted to another woman, they may not know how to express that.” Our culture teaches straight women that men should make the first move, but doesn’t have an answer for what happens when both parties are women. In practice, this can mean that if both WLW women in a conversation expect the other person to make the first move, that move might not happen at all.
Journalist Siân Bradley wrote about the hurdle of learning to flirt after coming out as bisexual, saying, “I had had enough of secretly admiring women, nonbinary people, and AFAB people from a distance. Now I wanted to actually act on my attraction. But how?” Acting on your queer desire is scary, Bradley added, particularly when many WLW have absorbed heteronormative dating scripts. “When you’ve only been with cis men, like I had, dating women feels like a whole other ball game: one where you don’t know the rules, let alone who’s playing or whether you’re allowed on the pitch.” Not only is it difficult to know how to flirt, there’s also a hypervigilance that comes with hitting on queer women and femmes because when queer women aren’t being treated by straight women as experimentation fodder or a means to attract the male gaze they’re contending with the fetishisation of WLW in mainstream culture.
Our social scripts for dating are also designed for straight couples.
“We are seen as something for men’s pleasure only, and not our own entity,” says Lucy. “It feels shameful sometimes admitting I’m a lesbian to men and seeing the turned-on look in their eyes.” They’re always aware that the response they get might be more than a simple rejection. “We’re hyper vigilant about who we can hit on and when,” says Riley. “A lot of us have really extreme emotional scarring and we really don’t trust a lot of questioning women.”
Once the flirting stage has been overcome, there’s also the question of how to behave within that relationship. “Before I started dating women I found it a struggle to imagine how I would behave when it was just me and another woman in a romantic relationship,” says Cassie, a 27-year-old bisexual woman who, for years, only dated men. “This stopped me pursuing women for the longest time. I think this was because heterosexuality was all I knew. It was shown to us on the TV, in books, in films, on the street. I guess you could say I’m a visual learner, and with no queer representation in sight, I was lost!”
Compulsory heterosexuality – a term coined by feminist scholar Adrienne Rich in 1980 – is society’s imposition of heterosexuality as the norm, the false assumption that relationships are between men and women only. Cassie feels there is toxic masculinity at play with some queer cis women. “Sometimes we feel the need to behave in a certain way in order to fit the roles we’ve been shown our entire lives,” she says. “At times it feels like even the people around me, who are supposedly allies, are only happy with me dating a woman as long as one of us is “the woman” and one of us is “the man”.”
Extracted from ‘The Love Fix’ by Rachel Thompson, out now via Square Peg for £18.99.
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How does orientation affect the dating app experience? Read an excerpt from “The Love Fix” by Mashable features editor Rachel Thompson.
