On a recent night, with Valentine’s Day looming, I went out for drinks with a woman I know and a few of her friends. It was a Thursday, and the bar they chose, Bondurants, on the Upper East Side, was packed with people just like them: good-looking, semi-affluent millennials, downing craft beer and milling about in hungry-looking, monosexual clusters.
My acquaintance, Dana, who is 25 and works in public relations, is an enthusiastic, some might say obsessive, user of the dating app Tinder. She, like her friends, will often spend hours blithely swiping through its gallery of digitized faces — at work, at home, even in busy pickup bars.
But that’s New York’s technologized dating scene. Except for ordering their drinks, none of the people I was with that night spoke to any other actual human beings. Their erotic energy was focused on the touchscreens of their smartphones.
Each of them had six or seven Tinder chats going simultaneously. Chris Livoti, a 27-year-old marketing executive, was expertly toggling between Tinder and its gay-friendly forerunner, Grindr. Dana’s co-worker Krishna Antoine, 26, was chatting, in between sips of prosecco, with a guy named Andrew (Tinder uses only first names). When she sent Andrew a suggestive eye emoji and he failed to respond, she dropped him in frustration, clicking over to the profile of Mark, a man with a mustache, who, she soon determined, was actually a better match for Dana.
“I don’t like him,” Ms. Antoine said. “I’m passing him on to you.”
It has been three years since Tinder, which had been launched in California, landed in New York, bringing its addictive right swipes and rabid style of flirting to the city’s inherently frenetic dating culture. While the app has been blamed for devaluing romance and turning the search for love (or at least a nearby body) into a Ritalin-paced video game, it is probably more accurate to say that it has not fundamentally changed the local dating scene so much as quickened and coarsened its already abrupt, aggressive nature.
For those who are unfamiliar with it, Tinder is a matchmaking service that enables people to connect with one another through no more than a brief swipe on their smartphones. While traditional dating sites, like OKCupid or Match.com, use algorithms to sort through personal profiles and to link up strangers with complementary interests, Tinder makes the daters do the choosing, stripping down and speeding up the process. You look at a photo, tagged only with a name, an age and, with a tap, perhaps a short introduction, and then you vote yes by swiping to the right, or no by swiping left.
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“Yeah, but that’s New York,” Mr. Paramithiotti, 28, said.
Arriving at the bar, all of them pulled their phones out.
A few hours later, when the drinks were finally working, Mr. Livoti grabbed Dana’s phone and began responding to her texts like a Tinder version of Cyrano. This got creepy rather fast. Chatting with a guy named Roy, Mr. Livoti expressed interest in necrophilia and Rohypnol, the sedative commonly known as a date-rape drug. “Wanna meet up?” Roy wrote.
As the night went on, no one crossed the bridge from Tinder to the real world, not even the bartender, Johnny Walker White, who was using the app as he worked. He had posed the perfect question of Tinder ontology to one of his matches, a woman named Alexandra: “What do you feel is the meaning of life? In a sentence or two.” Perhaps a bit too earnestly, Alexandra wrote back, “Living, listening, learning, loving …”
In the end, only Mr. Paramithiotti wound up going home with someone — though not someone he met on Tinder. He took the old-fashioned route, calling a girlfriend who lived around the corner.
A version of this article appears in print on February 15, 2015, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Taking a Swipe at Love (or Something). Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
