A study of 664 users found heavy, compulsive use associated with seeing love as meaningless — and mindful use associated with the opposite.

The claim that dating apps have changed how people think about romance is made constantly and tested rarely. A study in BMC Psychology attempts a version of the test, surveying 664 users of dating apps and online pornography about their use of those platforms and about the existential value they place on love.

The association it reports is with compulsive use rather than use. Addiction-like engagement with dating apps and pornography was linked to valuing love less; heavier users were more likely to describe love as meaningless, to believe it works only when money is involved, and to move quickly in and out of relationships.

The study’s first author is Reza Shabahang, a psychology researcher at Flinders University and the University of Technology Sydney, with co-authors including Zsolt Demetrovics, director of the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing, M. Akbari of Kharazmi University, G. Ouvrein of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ágnes Zsila of ELTE Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

Addiction-like use, not use

The distinction the study draws is the one that determines how it should be read. The construct being measured is not hours spent but a pattern resembling behavioural addiction: preoccupation, loss of control, and discomfort when not engaging. The release notes that some users feel bored or restless when they are not on these platforms.

That construct is the one associated with the attitudes toward love. A person who uses a dating app and closes it is not the subject of the finding. A person who cannot stop checking it is.

The other half of the result points the same way. Mindful use of technology — attention to what one is doing while doing it — was linked to a lower risk of becoming hooked and to fewer problems in how people viewed love.

“We think this simple awareness can help you get the good out of technology while protecting yourself from the harm,” Shabahang said.

The mechanisms proposed

The authors offer explanations, which are interpretations rather than measurements. Dating apps can overwhelm people with choice and encourage shallow conversation. Pornography tends to emphasise physical gratification over intimacy, which may frame relationships primarily as a means of meeting sexual needs.

Both are plausible and both are familiar from the wider literature. Choice overload is a well-studied effect in decision-making, where larger option sets reduce satisfaction with whatever is chosen, and a dating app is a close to pure implementation of a very large option set. The platforms are also designed for engagement, which is the commercial logic that connects compulsive use to platform success and makes it unsurprising that an addiction-like pattern is common enough to study.

None of that is tested here. The study measured use patterns and attitudes and found them correlated; the explanations describe how such a correlation might arise.

What cross-sectional data cannot do

This is a survey administered once, which means the causal question is wide open, and in this case it is open in a way that matters for how the result is read.

The finding is equally consistent with the reverse direction. Someone who already regards love as unlikely, transactional or not worth much is a plausible candidate for heavy, compulsive use of platforms offering low-commitment contact — in which case the attitude is upstream of the behaviour rather than produced by it. A third possibility is that both reflect something else, such as low relationship satisfaction or psychological distress, pushing the two together.

There is reason to take that last route seriously, since earlier research has linked heavy use of these platforms to anxiety, depression, unhealthy eating and difficulty controlling sexual behaviour. Distress is a candidate common cause as well as a candidate consequence.

The data are also self-reported on both sides of the correlation, and self-report on pornography use and on the meaningfulness of love is subject to the pressures you would expect. The sample is 664 users of the platforms rather than a general population sample, which is appropriate for the question and limits what can be said about prevalence.

Reading the headline claim

The release’s framing — asking whether digital technology is killing old-fashioned love — runs well ahead of what a single cross-sectional survey supports, and the finding underneath it is narrower and more useful.

Narrower, because the association is with compulsive use rather than with technology as such, and the same study finds mindful use associated with better outcomes. That pattern points at how people use these platforms, not at whether the platforms exist.

More useful, because the mindfulness result is at least in principle actionable in a way that a verdict on digital technology is not. Whether deliberate attention to one’s own use actually changes either the compulsive pattern or the attitudes would need a trial, and this study is not one; the association is a reason to run that trial rather than a result from it.

One further reading should be headed off. Finding that a pattern of use correlates with devaluing love does not establish that the people in the heavy-use group are worse off, since the study measured attitudes toward love rather than wellbeing, satisfaction or relationship outcomes. Those are different things, and the release does not report the last three.

The paper was published online on 21 July 2026. Open access funding was provided by Eötvös Loránd University, and Ágnes Zsila was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

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Notes

1. Shabahang, R., Demetrovics, Z., Akbari, M., Ouvrein, G., Zsila, Á. BMC Psychology, 2026. DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05173-2.
2. Flinders University. “Farewell Romeo and Juliet. Is digital tech killing old-fashioned love?” EurekAlert!, 3 August 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138573.

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