Dating and Digital Labour: How Young Women Navigate Dating Apps in Their Thirties

Dating apps are but one of the many digital technologies that extend digital labours, but limited research has examined this in the context of one's thirties. Much of the research on how people navigate dating apps has focused on users’ goals and motivations, with less focus on the different temporalities that are negotiated and produced. This paper explores the distinct dating app experiences of Australian heterosexual women in their mid-thirties, drawing on in-depth interviews with women 34 to 35 years old. This study shows that for these women, online dating is a unique gendered imperative characterized by conscious awareness of how they “invest” their time. Analysing the “time work” of online dating illustrates how, for these women, apps are reconfiguring and intensifying the labour of dating, therefore becoming another form of domestic labour that produces ambivalent feelings and connections.