About love and algorithms: Navigating the logics of contemporary dating

Abstract

Digital dating platforms have become the primary architects of modern intimacy, deploying algorithmic infrastructures that actively colonize the emotional landscape. While scholarship often interrogates dominant dating logics, it frequently neglects the fraught tension that users experience as they are forced to reconcile their private desires with prescriptive, data-driven frameworks. Utilizing consumer interviews, social media observations, and discourse analysis, we apply institutional theory to investigate how users exercise agency under the shadow of competing logics. We identify these logics and elucidate how consumers perform institutional work—adapting to, resisting, or negotiating platform norms—as a means of reclaiming psychological sovereignty from the digital apparatus. Our findings advance the critique of platformization and algorithmic governance by revealing how individuals navigate a landscape where intimacy is engineered, thereby sustaining the very markets that commodify their personal lives.