If there is one thing that is emblematic of modern love, it’s Tinder. Above all else, the design of the app is liberating. It parades a line of faces, each attached to a name and a brief self-description, and users simply need to swipe right if they’re attractive, left if they’re not. The formula combines the convenience of portable dating with the impulsiveness of across-the-room glances, creating a dating experience free of the pretensions and tiptoes of traditional dating. As co-founder Sean Rad put it, Tinder “removes all the social barriers, all the psychological barriers with meeting someone.” If you like their face and their bio isn’t terribly off-putting, you can get in contact — there’s nothing else to it.

Tinder’s newly released update, which pulled education and job information from Facebook and placed it on every user’s profile, challenges the bold promise of carefree dating. After all, people have selected potential partners by job and educational attainment for a long time. And when partners select by income brackets, they create income-stratified households that contribute to inequality and immobility. Free love, which can unite households of different socioeconomic strata, can contribute significantly to improving economic equality, especially as more and more Tinder relationships end in marriage. By including information about employment and education, Tinder is narrowing relationship prospects the same way that people have always done. Whether consciously or unconsciously, people judge each other by their earning prospects, particularly on traditional dating sites where that information is front and center.

But there was a reason Tinder caught on like a storm amidst a sea of traditional dating sites.

Tinder offered something that no other site did: unique simplicity, a service that appealed to a different kind of relationship experience. In a world full of sites with profiles that read like job applications, Tinder empowered a different kind of user through a streamlined, intuitive platform, encouraging them to show rather than tell and to speak to each other rather than rush to judgment by glancing at bullet-points. When forging a relationship, a self-description is no substitute for real conversation, and Tinder made it so anyone could have that conversation, regardless of economic barriers.

By stripping away all the baggage of traditional dating, Tinder had the potential to renew the belief in love indivisible by class and to become an integral part of a more egalitarian future. But instead, it joins the ranks of sites where users with less social and economic capital suffer, where users pore over virtual resumes before even beginning a conversation. By imposing this new standard for all users, the creators behind Tinder have removed a part of the freedom that initially made their app so unique.

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, Nov. 30 print edition.

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