Young women, dating apps, and affective assemblages in the time of pandemic: No relationship is a linear transition to a fixed point

Abstract

The article aims to explore the centrality in young women’s life of the affective assemblages that took shape in their relationship with digital media during the pandemic, particularly fostered by the use of dating apps. Emotional and affective connection is and has been prevented by the pandemic in the form of physical distancing and the risk of contagion, but also by regulations that in some states, such as Italy, have only recognised legitimate familial relationships to grant permission to mobility (like marriage, birth family). So, what happens when people cannot take care and be sustained by their affective web of relationships? On one hand, this negative situation limited desire, mutual sharing, and pleasure as potential pushes for social change, and on the other hand, it opened up new mediated spaces in which to cultivate different and unexpected effects and relationships. Therefore, the article looks at the role of the affective realm as a political space linked to social change, and explores the use of dating apps by young women during the pandemic as an element of a broader affective assemblage. The article follows a subgroup of young women who used dating apps during the Covid lockdown over the three waves of interviews. The young women are aged 24–30 years and have been encountered as a part of a longitudinal research project on the transition to adulthood in Italy conducted from 2020 to 2022. Specifically, it focuses on those biographies of youth who are not in a stable romantic relationship, and often live alone, and who have therefore experienced unprecedented forms of emotional/affective isolation and have recurred to dating apps for different purposes. The goal here is to analyse the unexpected uses of these apps – not only centred in erotic or romantic purpose – and the online (and sometimes offline) relationships that ensue: for example, making sense of rarefied and solitary time, building relations of care in everyday life. These assemblages – made up of bodies, digital media, and affects – intervene in the current context of normalised crisis and precarity, characterised by a digitally saturated environment, giving the possibility to young people to produce and enjoy spaces for non-normative/linear/straight desire and sharing that go beyond the pandemic.