The modern apps that cosplay Cupid promise sovereignty, then hand us suggestion.

Who controls our lives in the golden age of choice? Is it fate?

You can curate a playlist in two minutes, ‘Blinkit’ anything you want, and reinvent your personality with a photo and a seemingly thoughtful caption. It’s almost as though the modern self is now a menu. We pick our news, our clothes, our politics, and increasingly, our lovers, all with the same motion: scroll, tap. But the question is: are we really choosing freely, or being ushered down a corridor that’s been lit to shape our choices? Do these choices come with a moral weight? 

Schopenhauer had a way of ruining a relaxing Sunday morning with one sentence: you can do what you will, but you cannot will what you will. You get to act, but you do not quite get to choose the wanting that drives the act. Dating apps are the new stage where this old puzzle puts on a costume and joins the party. An infinite scroll of faces and bodies. Filters. Jokes. Preferences. Types. The apps sell freedom like an e-commerce inventory, giving one the feeling of sovereignty and free choice. But the feeling is not the same as the thing. What you are handed is a machine for shaping choice, one that nudges you toward what you already respond to, then hands it back as self-expression. It is not that the market gives you what you want. The market teaches you what to want, with good UX and a subtle marketing campaign.

One of the strangest tells is how romance has been split into neat little sub-genres, each with its own interface and moral mood. A quick google search will illuminate to you, how there are now discreet dating applications built for secrecy and plausible deniability, complete with quick “panic” logouts. At the other end sit faith-led apps that lean into verification, religious filters, and even the option of a wali or chaperone for those who want courtship to remain legible. The premium enclaves make you wait to be admitted and then charge you for the privilege, turning exclusivity into a subscription tier. Then come the impatience solutions that try to skip the pen-pal phase and push matches toward an offline date, while other apps keep rules like “women message first” as a blunt attempt to rebalance pursuit. Taken together, the entire landscape appears less like one dating culture and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure of modern intimacy, where the app you choose quietly decides whether you are flirting, vetting, auditioning, or disappearing.

There’s also the great irony, which would be funny if it weren’t so familiar: we have more options than any generation before us, and relationships, at least the stable, committed kind people say they want, seem shakier than ever. How did a world of abundance produce so much hesitancy? We’re surrounded by possibility, and still haunted by the idea that we chose badly, too early, or too earnestly. You can almost hear the modern anxiety talking: what if there’s someone slightly better, one thumb swipe away?

Psychologists have been studying this for years. When options explode, people often freeze, delay, regret, and second-guess. More choice makes us browse more, but commit less. That pattern doesn’t disappear in romance. In fact, it thrives there, because romance is the one domain where people want both freedom and destiny to be noticeable. The illusion of maximum control, but also the luxury and pride to say that ‘Oh, it just happened because it was meant to be.’

Online dating makes this worse in a particular way: it compresses personhood into quick signals. A face. A job title. A projected lifestyle. A little joke. An “energy” built from somebody’s best smile and perfect lighting. You have to make quick judgments, and the interface trains you to make them confidently. Creators cater to this because attention has become expensive. Viewers meet a representation and react to it and over time, over thousands of profiles, preference begins to behave like consumption. That is the danger. Once desire is treated like consumption, it starts obeying the logic of markets. Consumers optimise. They hedge and keep exits open. Without meaning to, we begin to date like shoppers.

Which is not to say the apps are evil. They do what platforms do: they increase access, widen pools, reduce friction. For some people, especially those outside conventional social circles, they offer a kind of freedom and liberation. But they also introduce a new default attitude: evaluation. You stay in the stance of appraisal. You’re always comparing, always scanning, always reserving the right to upgrade. 

Spinoza said people feel free because they’re aware of their desires but ignorant of their causes. Spinoza on freedom and the causes of desire. People experience their desires as “theirs,” while being strangely blind to what shaped them. We like to believe our choices are personal, authentic, self-authored. Yet research on choice architecture keeps showing the opposite: defaults, rankings, and presentation influence decisions more than we admit, and then we rationalize afterward with impressive confidence. choice architecture and defaults (Thaler & Sunstein). The apps are almost a laboratory for this. They teach you what is “high value,” what is “safe,” what is “hot,” what is “serious.” Then they watch what you do, and adjust the corridor’s decorations to take you exactly where you think you want to go.

In many places, dating apps are about personal preference with mostly private consequences. In South Asia, preference is rarely private. It collides with family, caste, class, religion, safety, and reputation. The app becomes a private arena where people try on a freer self while carrying the weight of a social world that may punish that freedom. You can be personally open-minded and socially vulnerable at the same time.

It’s understandably hard to merge the highly personal with the social. Indian profiles often read like a sentence of independence followed by a sentence of caution. “Modern, but traditional.” “Open-minded, but serious.” “Not here for timepass.” You can almost see the invisible committee behind the screen: parents, relatives, neighbours, WhatsApp groups. The individual tries to be free, but the social world keeps leaning in, clearing its throat.

This is where free will stops being a dinner-party topic and starts messing with real life. If you go against society and choose a kind of love that isn’t ‘acceptable’, and it doesn’t work out like it does in the movies, the finger pointing begins. If you chose it, you deserve it. If you didn’t, you’re off the hook. That’s why the free-will argument is also a moral system in disguise. And it gets personal fast: freedom is not only doing what you want, but being able to stand behind what you want, instead of feeling yanked around by impulses you barely recognise.

Too much “I am the sole author of everything” and life becomes an anxiety economy. Too little, and one becomes a passive, resentful observer. I’d reckon that the bravest kind of agency is embarrassingly simple: telling the truth about what you want, and what you’re ready to let go of. Perhaps it’s too easy to blame society for every cowardice, but also foolish to imagine that it has no grip on you at all. Someone who lives in that narrow space in between those two is the toughest customer a dating app will ever encounter, because that premium subscription with roses, wine and unlimited likes won’t tempt them. 

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