How new technology is altering our idea of love and dating
New technology is changing romance, and it’s impacting not just our hearts, but our heads. Here, a neuroscientist discusses how modern love is changing the dating landscape in our brains.
Since the dawn of time, or at least since the golden era of the 1990s rom-com, humans have tried to predict how love will look in the future. Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail painted the innocent early days of cyberdating; the 2013 film Her saw a lonely writer fall deeply for his virtual assistant; and in 2017, speculative design studio Object Solutions imagined a world in which we’ll all wear brainwave monitoring headsets and find our perfect partner based on complementary neural sparks.
The first two narratives have since come to life to varying degrees, and the third isn’t as outlandish as it might initially sound. Because while love has long been the domain of the heart – beating, fluttering and pulsing from the chest – our brain is its real regulator. Touted as the most complex object in the known universe, it contains 86 billion neurons and can store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of data, or 4.7 billion books. When we feel affection and infatuation, the ventral area activates and surges with dopamine; it’s why the universal love lexicon is made up of phrases like ‘chemistry’, ‘losing your head’ and ‘on the same wavelength’.
“When two people fall in love, we see that their biology and brainwaves start to synchronise,” explains Dr Sarah McKay, neuroscientist and author, who will appear in a panel at this year’s Vogue Codes Summit about the impact of tech and the changing dating landscape on our brains. “This could represent that spark you feel when you randomly meet someone and just click; you’re in sync.”
But today the brain has to process more than biology when navigating romance and relationships. With every new medium, the human mind adapts, recruiting more neurons to the task at hand. When we began to read 5000-10,000 years ago, for example, our visual cortex dedicated itself to deciphering text, but lost some of its visual acuity to read nature. Today in a torrent of rapidly evolving tech – where apps dominate the dating scene (an estimated 49 per cent of Australians aged 18- 49 currently use them) and chatbots can spit out semi-coherent Hinge responses – it’s a brave new world for our brains.
“Swiping on a dating app looks similar to online shopping, or even gambling, in the brain,” says Dr McKay. “There’s excitement to begin with, but it’s far easier to become dependent or addicted to something when the number of times you get positive reinforcement is completely random. If every person you swiped right on did the same, these apps wouldn’t be as addictive. But it’s unpredictable, so you keep going back for more.”
Endless, mindless swiping could also encourage binary thinking – a potential match is either a right or a left, a yes or a no. In nullifying the ‘maybe’, and eliminating any grey area, are we training our brains to view the broader world in absolutes?
Then there’s the fact that online dating means opening yourself up to a string of micro-rejections, coupled with decision fatigue and cognitive overload. “Once upon a time your world was limited to what you could see with your eyes out to the horizon, but suddenly the whole world is streaming 10 or 20 centimetres from your face,” points out Dr McKay. “The brain and the body learned over millennia to react to something depending on how visually close it is, so now we’re trying to respond to everything on our screens.”
Yet the power and initial purpose of dating apps – idealistically thinking, at least – was to help us forge connections, a basic human longing. Two lonely hearts on opposite ends of the earth might bond over a shared love of K-dramas or a particular brand of hot sauce, and a shy or marginalised individual can find their tribe online.
A new field of research is exploring how people in stable, loving relationships interact online versus face-to-face based on brain synchrony (most of the studies thus far have been carried out on parents and teenage children rather than romantic partners).
“Findings show that their brain connections are really strong and synchronised in-person, but when the same conversation is taken to Zoom, almost all synchrony is lost,” says Dr McKay. “If you think about what’s happening on any kind of FaceTime, you’re either looking at someone’s image on the screen or you’re looking at the camera – you can’t both look each other in the eye at the same time. Immediately you’ve removed any kind of true visual interaction with the other person. You can’t touch or smell each other; it’s impossible to communicate social chemosignals [pheromones] digitally. You’ve nearly removed all emotional mandates. The only sense you’re left with is hearing, which is one source of connection that’s still pretty strong.”
“Swiping on dating apps looks similar to online shopping, or even gambling, in the brain”
According to Dr McKay, while digital interaction will never replace the real thing, it’s most beneficial to those in established relationships. It’s why virtual reality date nights for long-distance lovers are in development (the social network vTime XR already offers this tech), and intimacy-fostering online platforms such as Pillow Talk use AI chatbots to help couples have difficult and meaningful conversations. Down the track, artificial empathy could be employed to help us read and understand our partners better – by analysing their expressions, tone and physiological signals – to facilitate better communication and even predict challenges in a relationship.
In a world of hyper-distraction, is turning to tech to enhance our relationships counter-productive, though? Our brains might be malleable and evolving, but they’re not neurologically wired for the high-tech realities of modern love. Maybe the true potential of technology is to bridge the divide between the actual and the
virtual. Imagine if a dating app could do the groundwork and find you a pool of 100 potential matches, and then a virtual assistant swooped in and got them all in one room. You’d put down your device, enter a party buzzing with strangers and physically scan for that elusive spark – synchronised brainwaves and all.
“I met my husband at a college party over a bottle of gin,” recalls Dr McKay. “We were making eye contact then looking away. We didn’t fall in love immediately, but we spoke and there was instant attraction. We started drinking from the same bottle, which is a little bit dodgy, but it was like we were sharing all of our biology within an hour of meeting. If we’d been online, we wouldn’t have been able to share those basic biological signals to gauge one another.”
Shared biology. One day, with any luck, there’ll be an app for that.
Vogue Codes Summit returns to Sydney’s Carriageworks on June 22 with the theme Technotopia: Design the World of Tomorrow. Get tickets here.
This article appears in the May issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now
