You have full access to this open access article. With the rise of mobile-online-dating apps new principles have entered the dating culture, including parallel dating, acceleration, efficacy, and non-commitment. These practices negatively affect the self, inhibit dating success and contribute to the emergence of mobile-online-dating fatigue.
Despite its significance, research on dating fatigue remains underdeveloped so far, with limited exploration of its underlying mechanisms and broader social contextualization. The findings show how fatigue is a widely experienced social phenomenon rather than an individual vulnerability. Instead, mobile-online-dating fatigue arises from reciprocal hurtful experiences, specific attribution patterns and interpretations of experiences, just as resulting attitudes and strategies that foster negative social dynamics, including stereotyping, devaluation, repetitive and dissatisfying dating practices, and sometimes sexual coercive behaviors.
These dynamics culminate in a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. The results also reveal coping strategies, with users projecting negative effects on other users and the app providers, while continuously reproducing negative dynamics hanging on to their app usage, opting for a general dating abstinence, or seeking digital alternatives. One prominent digital alternative is Instagram, where users re-enact excitement through practices characterized by deceleration, ambiguity, social embeddedness, personal risk-taking, and equivocal communicationβ practices that are perceived as an opportunity for resonating and therefore more meaningful dating practices.
The findings are discussed against the background of a social understanding of the self, with users navigating a restrictive dating context, seeking for experiences of resonance and meaningful connections. Intermediaries in dating processes are not a novel phenomenon. Once initiated and accompanied by the immediate social context and institutions such as family and church, dating culture underwent fundamental changes in the Euro-American cities at the end of the 19th century Hendrick and Hendrick ; Kuchler and Beher ; Weigel There, dating turned into an individualized practice including a certain eventisation.
The search for a partner became an orchestrated, supposedly pleasurable, and meaningful activity Hartmann and Honneth ; Illouz Dates were enacted in the urban environment of bars, restaurants, and clubs, along specific scripts and including symbolic meanings concerning e. Subjects invested in dating in economic terms, but also in terms of the self, by dedication, focus, time, and emotions. One was investing the self, and dating was enacted as something extraordinary Illouz Such principles remained essential to dating until the era of mobile-online dating came into the picture in Burkart ; Illouz Design and logic of mobile-online dating apps bring acceleration and quantification to dating.
