“Has online dating made us personal shoppers?”

LIKE every non-attached human under the age of one hundred who is keen to pair up with another, you are probably internet dating.

Great fun, of course, but not unlike having a full-time admin job. All those questionnaires to fill out about what you look like and what you like to do at the weekend. Exhausting. If only there were a device that would cut through all of that and make the process even more instant.

Oh wait. There is. It’s called Tinder — as in spark — and you probably already have it on your phone. In fact you may be distractedly swiping through dozens of faces as we speak. If you fancy the look of them, you give them a tick — if not, you red X them and keep swiping. The New York Times says it’s “clearly addictive”, while another commentator noted that “Tinder is essentially a postmodern nod to a most primitive form of liberal dating”.

As in, the hook up. Grindr for straight people. So does this mean straights are finally getting in on the casual sex that for so long has been seen as the preserve of gay men, or would it take more than an app to change millennia of heterosexual behaviour? Are dating apps killing romance?

Tinder is a geosocial networking application — a phone app — for hetero dating that works via Facebook. (Grindr got there first, founded in 2009 by Joel Simkhai, and now with 4m users.)

If someone you think is hot also thinks you’re hot, your phone will beep — bypassing acres of dating site waffle.

As yet, there have been no Tinder or Grindr weddings. Tinder is still very new, but says Sean Rad, one of its founders, the app is now creating 4.5m matches per day. Like Facebook, it started at a Californian university — and saw a growth of 10,000% in its first three months.

Users check in several times a day to see if there is anyone hot in the vicinity, and each time they have a match and their phone pings, so too do their dopamine receptors in the brain.

But is it romantic? Or is it the crack cocaine of online dating? And Tinder aside, has online dating turned us all into personal shoppers — but not necessarily in a good way?

The crucial trick is to know when to stop shopping. When to leave the online supermarket of romance, rather than endlessly continuing to browse and discard, in case someone even more gorgeous/suitable is just a few unscanned profiles away.

Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York found that online dating continues to boom — it accounts for almost a quarter of how all heterosexual couples meet up, and comes second only after introductions through friends.

In comparison, research from Stanford University from the early 90s showed that just 1% had met their partners via pre-digital personal ads — but by 2005, 37% of internet users had tried online dating and by 2009, 22% of couples had met online.

Many of the current generation of small children are the babies of online dating — including several in my immediate family.

Worldwide, there are 25 million of us online dating at any given time. Online dating is now as much part of our culture as internet shopping.

Does spending hours online chatting to digital people make our face-to-face expectations unrealistically high? Or is it reducing romance to consumerism? One male friend described the various internet dating sites as a “catalogue of vaginas”. Female friends call online dating Man Tesco and other less repeatable things.

Because women are the shoppers of the world, we tend to be more attached to shopping lists. And that includes lists of romantic must-haves and must-bes, yet dating shopping lists can be at best prescriptive, at worst, myopic.

Is it all about the photo and the interests — so a good looking skydiver scores more highly on your shopping list than a quite nice looking cyclist?

We don’t judge books by their covers, so why do we do it with potential life partners?

And even if you find a profile that contains all your requirements, there is zero guarantee that meeting Mr Check List in the flesh will lead to anything other than a crushing feeling of disillusionment that he is not in reality what he represented digitally.

The other aspect of online dating as internet shopping is the impatience factor. Can you be bothered to even meet for a coffee if he looks slightly gerbil-like in his photo, despite having an engaging and seemingly compatible profile? The short answer should be yes — emphatically so. Meet everyone. Be broadminded, let go of expectation.

Perhaps the trick is to instead be shoppy about which site you date from, rather than the individuals on that site. Unless you really are just looking for a hook-up, which does not really come under the category of dating, it can be a better idea to use a reputable site, then meet as many people as possible from it.

Happy shopping!