Lexicon ·
Tinderella syndrome
noun
- Stated meaning
- Being unable to form a relationship except through dating apps.
- Operating meaning
- A skill the apps were built to make unnecessary, diagnosed in their users as a disorder once it had gone.
- Origin
- British press and blogs in August 2014, where it was attributed to unnamed psychologists. Cambridge Dictionary entered it in February 2015.
In February 2015 Cambridge Dictionary (opens in a new window) entered the term as “the inability to form romantic relationships other than through online dating sites.” Its citation was a HuffPost UK blog from the previous August: “In a phenomenon now affectionately referred to as the Tinderella syndrome, psychologists claim we’re damaging our love lives and ability to flirt by spending too much time communicating on screen.” The line names no psychologist, and it does not say who held the affection.
The name is borrowed from a story about a matching system. In it, one woman was identified by one slipper, fitted in person, by a party who had already met her. The app runs the same search in the opposite order, at a distance and in volume, and fits the slipper last. The syndrome describes a user who can no longer run it the original way, and it is filed under the brand of the system that runs it the new one.
Under load, the diagnosis and the product describe the same person from 2 sides. The app removes the need to approach anyone in a room, and the syndrome is the observation that the need, once removed, does not come back on request. The skill was never measured before it went. It is measured only by its absence, by people who notice they last used it before they downloaded anything.