In the case of the girl I’m currently dating, I initially saw her face somewhere and approached her. I didn’t have an in-depth profile to peruse or a fancy algorithm. I just had her face, and we started talking and it worked out. Is that experience so different from swiping on Tinder?
“I think Tinder is a great thing,” says Helen Fisher, the anthropologist who studies dating. “All Tinder is doing is giving you someone to look at that’s in the neighborhood. Then you let the human brain with his brilliant little algorithm tick, tick, tick off what you’re looking for.”
In this sense, Tinder actually isn’t so different from what our grandparents did, nor is the way my friend used online dating to find someone Jewish who lived nearby. In a world of infinite possibilities, we’ve cut down our options to people we’re attracted to in our neighborhood.
USING TECHNOLOGY TO GAIN ROMANTIC FREEDOM
For those who don’t live in a world of infinite options, digital technology provides another benefit, and I hadn’t thought about it until we interviewed people in one of the world’s most unique dating cultures: Qatar.
The benefit is privacy. The secret worlds of the phone and the Internet provide single people a degree of freedom and choice in less open societies.
Needless to say, the singles scene in Qatar is not quite like what we observed anywhere else in the world. Those from religious and traditional families are literally prohibited from casual dating. Flirting in public places gets a young person in serious trouble, and it’s especially dangerous for young women, who are expected to be chaste until marriage and risk bringing terrible shame to themselves and their parents if they are caught courting a man.
One online guide warns: “No public displays of affection: Kissing, hugging, and some places even holding hands . . . The result is jail time.”17
That’s a pretty grim prison story.
“Hey, man, what are you in for?”
“Doing five years for holding hands in the park.”
“You?”
“Doing life . . . for smooches.”
? ? ?
Since casual dating is prohibited, families—mainly the mothers—do the matchmaking in Qatar. Marriages are arranged, and for the women we interviewed, the incentives to tie the knot are oddly reminiscent of those expressed by the older American women we interviewed in the senior centers.
A twenty-seven-year-old named Amirah told us, “The main thing you need to understand about marriage here is that the parties to the contract are rarely the man and woman entering it. It’s the families; it’s the group.
“There’s, like, a mating season,” Amirah said, “and it’s the mothers who do the initial screening. The mothers of boys go from one house to the other. They’re looking for women who are suitable based on family background and education. They’re looking for naseeb, their family’s destiny for marriage.
“The other thing to know about marriage,” Amirah continued, “is that it’s attractive to young girls because they want to move out and get their freedom.” Her friend Leila, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer who was also on the video chat, nodded in agreement. “When I first came back to Doha after I graduated from university, I went to visit [Amirah’s] house,” she began. “My mother called me and said, ‘It’s going to be nine P.M.; you should come home.’ They’d always call me when I was out to find out where I was and ask when I was coming home. If I went shopping, they’d say, ‘Stop. We have a maid who can do that!’ If I was with a friend, they’d say, ‘Come home!’ They just didn’t want me out.”
After college, Leila couldn’t tolerate this level of parental supervision. “I didn’t want to be at home with my family all the time,” she told us. “I wanted to have my freedom back. But women from traditional families can’t live alone in Qatar. The only way you can leave your family’s home is to get married or die.”
I told Leila that this brought up another point: that Get Married or Die Trying would be a great name for her debut rap album.
Eventually Leila decided to get married. She told her mother that she was ready for a husband, and her family quickly found a suitable man. They spoke by phone and had a few visits with each other’s families, though not any private time together. Leila was nervous. But she had the impression that “he really loved me.” More important: “He was offering me a chance to start my own life.”