Dating in the Digital Sexual Sphere: How Apps Are Shaping Our Search for Intimacy 

For Sexual Health Week 2025, we’re exploring the rise of dating apps and the role they now play in our intimate lives. In this blog, Dr Luke Brunning, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds and co-lead of the Ethical Dating Online research network, unpacks how apps are designed, why people use them (or avoid them), and what we can do to approach them with care, curiosity, and intention. 

Dating apps are rarely out of the media at the moment. From user safety concerns, or major data leaks, through to AI hype or debates about ghosting, we’re hearing more about the impact of online dating on our mental health and wider social trends.  

Curiously, however, online dating is less visible in relationship education. Since app users have to be eighteen, few dating companies want to communicate with younger people, and the effects of social media dominate the attention of schools and politicians.  

Dating apps deserve more attention, and actually resemble social media. Most dating-apps are free to access, their content is user-generated, users can send private messages, and they shape expectations and attitudes around appearance, communication, and human interaction. Unlike lots of social media, however, dating apps are also spaces where people are explicitly making themselves vulnerable and investing their most intimate hopes and desires.  

As a technology, dating apps now constitute the ‘digital sexual sphere’: a space where people interact, form connections, and arrange in-person dates. The apps are now the main way people meet each other for romance, but they have many motivations in using them, from boredom, curiosity, or the desire for a self-esteem boost. Dating apps are also a great source of revenue for companies, with around a third of users paying for some additional features.  

We need more productive conversations about dating apps, given their place in modern life. Here are some things to think about.  

Dating apps form part of our broader digital landscape, and people might turn to them, or avoid them, for a host of different reasons. Recognising this variety is important, especially when asking whether they are good or bad for society at large.  

Dating apps can increase choice of potential partners; offer a cheap and flexible way to ‘meet’ others; and help people explore, experiment, and be curious. Dating apps are especially useful for groups who many struggle to meet in conventional ways, such as people in smaller rural areas, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people working night-shifts, carers and parents, disabled people with limited mobility, people with more rare interest or desires, and people who find it difficult to articulate themselves face-to-face.  

People might avoid dating apps for several reasons. Some prefer in-person meetings or struggle with written communication. Not everyone has access to a smartphone. Data security might be a priority for some. Or they simply want to limit their screentime. Avoiding being outed to friends, family, or colleagues could also be crucial for someone so they avoid apps or at least use them anonymously.  

Another simple but crucial point is that most dating apps are designed to advance the goals of dating app companies. Despite what these companies may imply, they are not neutral spaces, or spaces designed purely for the interests of their users. Dating app companies need to stay in the app stores, keep trading, and keep generating income: ends which may not align with the desires or needs of their users. Someone might want to find a serious partner quickly; the app they use might prefer they spend more time, and more money, on their search for love.  

Appreciating that dating app companies have commercial goals helps us understand why many apps feel game-like to use. They are simple, often fun, and ‘reward’ people for their efforts with matches. These are intentional design choices to encourage individuals to keep logging on, keep swiping, keep hoping, and so keep generating money.  

The more people on an app, the more money the company makes. But when there are many users, the less likely their goals or desires will align. David might want a quick hook-up, whereas Jonathan is looking for a more serious relationship to develop out of a friendship. Asymmetries like this are often unstated and can lead people to treat the app, and each other, in radically different ways, which is confusing and painful.  

Dating apps companies have also shaped how we think about the search for intimacy. They bring to mind an image of a confident, active, person who knows what they want, sets their filter settings accordingly, and swipes happily in search of ‘the one’. Dating is portrayed as something we can do rationally on the basis of clear information. The reality is often different, however, since people struggle to know what they want, struggle to decide, and wrestle with insecurity and other difficult feelings.  

Dating apps force people to work on their personal brand, and spark up uncertain interactions with strangers on the basis of a few visual or textual cues. The lack of context, and visible social connections, means trust is scarily fragile or absent. Not only is it exhausting to have to navigate this uncertainty, but it can encourage us to seek comfort the familiar, which can heighten our biases – say towards race, or social background – or make it harder to avoid a narrow ‘type’.  

The more we appreciate dating apps are virtual environments, designed to favour corporate goals, the better equipped we are to use them intentionally and with an eye to our own interests.