Swipe Right, Stay Silent: Why Dating Apps Are Making Consent Harder to Talk About

You matched. You have been messaging for a week. The banter is good, the chemistry feels real, and you have agreed to meet for drinks on Friday. You both know what might happen. And yet — nobody has actually said anything about it.

If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. And according to a landmark study published in 2025, it is not a coincidence.

Researchers at California State Polytechnic University, Syracuse University, and Fudan University surveyed 1,045 young adults aged 18 to 35 across the United States about their dating app habits, their attitudes toward consent, and their ability to discuss it in real life. What they found was a clear, statistically proven chain of cause and effect — one that begins the moment you open an app and picks up speed with every swipe.

The problem with the swipe

Dating apps are designed to be fast. That is the point. In the time it takes to read a single paragraph, a dating app user might swipe past a dozen people — each one reduced to a face, an age, and a first impression.

The researchers found that this speed has a consequence. The more frequently someone uses dating apps, the more they tend to engage in what psychologists call sexual objectification — viewing another person primarily through the lens of their physical attractiveness, rather than as a full human being with thoughts, feelings, and agency.

This is not a character flaw. It is a product design outcome. Dating apps are image-led by default: profile pictures are enlarged, written bios are minimised, and the swipe function encourages rapid evaluation of appearance above all else. The study describes them as "sexual marketplaces" where users "shop" through profiles. When that is how the tool works, that is how your brain learns to see the people in it.

The more frequently young adults use dating apps, the more they engage in the sexual objectification of others on those apps.

Smith, Mucedola, La, Ortiz & Tian (2025), Computers in Human Behavior, 167, 108621

From objectification to assumption

Here is where it gets more serious. The study found that people who were prone to objectifying others on apps were also significantly more likely to endorse what the researchers call "digital consent cues" — the belief that digital actions like matching, exchanging messages, or agreeing to meet up already imply consent to sex.

The assumption goes something like this: if they matched with me, they are interested. If they kept texting, they want it. If they agreed to come over, they have said yes. None of these things, of course, constitute consent to sexual activity. But the swipe-and-match mechanic — which turns human beings into objects to be evaluated and selected — appears to make this reasoning feel more natural.

This is not just an abstract finding. Nearly three-quarters of the participants in the study identified as heterosexual, and the gender breakdown reveals something worth sitting with: the link between objectification and these dangerous assumptions was significantly stronger for men than for women. Male participants were more likely to interpret matching, messaging, or agreeing to meet as signals that sex was a given. Women were more likely to require explicit, verbal communication.

Two people. Same app. Entirely different understanding of what they have agreed to.

The assumption that a match, a sext, or agreeing to meet face-to-face implies consent — this belief was found to directly increase difficulty discussing consent in person.

The silence that follows

The third finding in the chain is perhaps the most consequential. The study found that people who held these digital consent assumptions reported significantly greater difficulty actually talking about consent with partners they met on dating apps.

Why? Because the online experience carries over. If you have mentally registered a match as the beginning of a sexual encounter, asking for explicit consent in person feels redundant — or worse, like it might derail something that already feels settled. The researchers describe this as a "modality switching" problem: the impressions formed online do not reset when you meet face to face. They persist. And they shape behaviour.

The result is a generation of young adults navigating sexual encounters with a profound misalignment in expectations — and a cultural training that makes them less likely, not more, to simply ask.

What the researchers said should happen

The paper does not just describe the problem. It proposes a solution. And it is a strikingly specific one.

The research team recommended that dating apps implement a system that prompts users to initiate a consent conversation the moment they transition from online to in-person. When two people arrange to meet, the app should offer "consent conversation starters" — guided prompts that help people discuss what they are and are not comfortable with before they are sitting across from each other.

The logic is elegant. If the app is partly responsible for creating the silence, the app should help break it. Not with a lecture. Not with a warning. Just with a prompt — the same way a navigation app reminds you to check traffic before you leave.

Dating apps should provide users with consent conversation starters to help facilitate obtaining explicit, in-person consent when they transition from online to face-to-face.

Smith et al., 2025 — Practical Implications, Computers in Human Behavior. The researchers' own recommendation, published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The conversation we are not having

None of this means that everyone who uses Tinder is making dangerous assumptions about the people they match with. The study found variation — in gender, in motivation, in how people experienced these dynamics. Plenty of dating app users navigate consent conversations thoughtfully and well.

But the data makes clear that the design of these platforms — the gamification, the image-first interface, the frictionless matching — is actively working against explicit consent communication for a significant portion of users. And that has consequences that go beyond awkwardness.

Sexual assault, the researchers note, is defined by an absence of consent. The blurring of what consent looks like — the treating of a match as a yes, the silence that follows — sits on a spectrum that cannot be separated from that reality.

The conversation about consent is not about policing attraction. It is not about making intimacy clinical or transactional. It is about making sure that two people who want to be together actually understand each other. That is not a burden. It is the beginning of something good.

What this means for how we date

The culture is already changing. Younger generations are, by many measures, more consent-aware than any that came before them. But awareness and action are not the same thing. Knowing that you should ask is not the same as finding it easy to do so.

What this research suggests is that the tools we are using to find each other are, by their design, making that conversation harder. And that closing the gap is not just a matter of individual education — it requires a different kind of infrastructure.

Some platforms are already moving in this direction. WeConsent, a verified consent platform that works alongside any dating app, was built specifically to provide this layer — a place where people can establish mutual understanding before they meet, in a way that feels natural rather than transactional. The researchers' 2025 recommendation and WeConsent's 2026 existence are not a coincidence. They are a response to the same gap.