Selling Romance
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dating apps like Tinder are a multi-billion dollar business, but have they reduced romance to a commodity? Vivienne Nunis speaks to Stanford University economist Paul Oyer, author of Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating. Historian Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love, explains how dating and commerce have always been intertwined, and Eric Silverberg, CEO and co-founder of Scruff, a dating app for gay and bisexual men, argues that dating apps are doing more than just selling romance.
(Photo: Dating apps on a phone, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me, Vivienne Nunes. |
| 0:04.2 | This is a program all about love. |
| 0:07.0 | I talk to people and then eventually set up dates with them if they wanted to. |
| 0:11.9 | And sure enough, after like three or four dates, I found somebody that was quite interested in and that's where I'm at now. |
| 0:18.2 | You can just scroll through thousands of profiles |
| 0:20.9 | and easily just discount someone on the basis of something small |
| 0:25.2 | like stupid photo that they put up. |
| 0:27.7 | But actually, because you don't have that opportunity |
| 0:30.3 | to really get to know someone, |
| 0:32.1 | and you're also there to be picky, |
| 0:34.2 | you're there to weed someone out. |
| 0:35.9 | It's really easy to overlook someone that you could |
| 0:38.7 | then go ahead and marry like I did. |
| 0:42.2 | Dating and economics may not strike you as obvious bedfellows. The rational and the emotional, |
| 0:48.8 | but if you think about it, we often use financial terms when talking about the search for love. |
| 0:54.4 | She's back on the market, we say, or try before you buy. |
| 0:58.7 | Why is that, you might wonder, when many relationship qualities like love, sex and affection, |
| 1:04.0 | are in theory at least completely unlimited. |
| 1:07.1 | They're free for us to dish out as we choose, possibly because there's always a cost involved, |
| 1:13.4 | even if it's time or energy. |
| 1:15.9 | Today we're taking a look at the economics of dating and asking, with the onset of online dating apps, |
| 1:21.9 | are we now seeing the commodification of romance? |
... |
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