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Comment by aerodog | Hacker News Reader

People have a traditional way of building family. The American way, i.e. via casual dating, often enhanced by apps, is experimental (barely a generation in) and not looking good for society's long-term stability.

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This.

The saddest thing is that children are the main casualty in divorces.

Single-parent raised children are known to have more issues/anxiety/etc... than children raised in a normal family.

The divorce rate was going up long before online dating, and have actually been going down since the onset of online dating. Though I'm skeptical they're directly related.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...

> and have actually been going down since the onset of online dating.

I'm not blaming online dating (which I think is just a reflection of other cultural changes) but it's kind of hard to get divorced if you're not married and we know where marriage rates are going...

I don't know. I have a couple of friends who met there wife online. They all seems to have very stable releationships now and all have more than one child. Some had very wild times before, some almost nothing before.

That's a huge leap.

You know, people make jokes about, for example, Indian arranged marriages, but they have one significant upside: you get to know not only your future partner, but also their family, their past, the environment that they were raised in, etc. It's basically a full background check.

With casual dating via Tinder you might as well end up dating a serial killer, and even if you don't you still have much harder time really getting to know the person if you don't have any common friends, come from different cities, etc.

Why does using Tinder to meet someone suddenly negate meeting the family and doing these "background checks"?

Because the "background checks" happen upfront in case of arranged marriages. That way there isn't any emotional issues in case they fail.

I mean that is absolute rubbish. There are plenty of arranged marriages that fail because e.g one partner was gay and hid it from their family. No 'background' checks prevent it and there is plenty of fallout.

Nobody claimed that background checks are foolproof. They check for "background" e.g. is the family known in the neighbourhood for bad conduct - they are not likely to reveal stuff one may be hiding from everyone else.

What if it's a serial killer from a reputable family? You might as well end up marrying a serial killer.

Maybe even marry into a family of serial killers.

I got to know my in laws before I married my wife. I didn't have an Indian arranged marriage.

A wise man once said "in-laws are never a reason to get married or to not got married"

Also I know of many Pakistani arranged marriages between 1st cousins, it leads to a lot of premature babies. So as with everything there are pros and cons. I am pretty sure that a serial killer, as with most of them, would seem normal and respectable during any family gatherings. It's not like they would be like "ah welcome to my home future life partner, do you want to see my collection of severed hookers heads?"

What? Long-term relationships typically require two experienced partners who communicate well. Tinder is a super easy way to learn to get along with another person. Not to mention knowing one's sexual preferences make it much easier to find a long term partner.

Casual dating has been like this for a long time, not sure how Tinder makes it worse

Dating apps are not for building a family, I reckon. Nor their purpose is society's long-term stability.

> not looking good for society's long-term stability

That's funny, I met my current long term partner on Tinder. Is there any indication that Tinder and related apps are anything other than an expression of an existing societal shift and not on the causal side of the relationship?

There is. Just look at the studies of interaction dynamics of people on Tinder vs the physical world. It's very much a rich get richer dynamic. IMO we're going to look back on this generation of social apps as dangerously uncontrolled experiments in social engineering.

Man, this article really brought out the reactionaries in the comment section.

It did and I appreciate reading the views of people that I don't usually see on HN. I hope future articles will also bring out people with different views, and no one tries to make such people feel unwelcome.

Agreed. I'm about on the far end of laissez-faire when it comes to sexuality and dating, and fully in favor of apps like Tinder as a 'thing', but I think it's definitely valuable to hear other points of view. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that I believed sex before marriage was to be frowned upon.

Also clearly brings out the people who don't like to hear opinions that differ from theirs...

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