A 2026 study published in BMC Psychology carries the memorable title “Romeo swipes Juliet left!?” — and under the pun is a genuinely uncomfortable finding. Researchers surveyed 664 adult dating-app and pornography users and found that the more compulsively people used these platforms, the less they believed love actually meant anything. Not less time spent looking for it. Less existential weight once they found it. Heavy users were more likely to call love meaningless, to see it as something that works better with money attached, and to fall in and out of it fast — hard, then gone, then hard again with somebody new. Erich Fromm read this exact split in 1956, in a book that never once mentions a phone. He just called it by its real name: mistaking the falling for the standing.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
Who ran the study?	Reza Shabahang (Flinders University), Zsolt Demetrovics, Mehdi Akbari, Gaelle Ouvrein, and Agnes Zsila
Where and when?	BMC Psychology, published online August 2026
How big was it?	664 adult dating-app and pornography users in Iran, average age 26
What was measured?	Problematic dating-app use and problematic pornography use, checked against existential reflection on love, perceived meaningfulness of love, a pragmatic/transactional view of romance, and emotional promiscuity
What was the twist?	Mindful social media use — staying aware of why you’re on the app instead of scrolling on autopilot — predicted lower levels of both problematic behaviors, acting as a protective factor
What did Fromm already argue?	In The Art of Loving (1956), people confuse falling in love, a passive and intoxicating peak experience, with standing in love, an active power that requires discipline, knowledge, patience, and concentration

The Quick Version

A 2026 study of 664 dating-app and pornography users found that problematic, addiction-like use of these platforms predicts falling in love fast and often — while feeling less existential meaning in it and viewing romance in more transactional terms. Mindful use, where people stayed aware of why they were on the app rather than scrolling out of habit, showed up as protective. Erich Fromm drew the identical line in 1956: the passive high of falling in love versus the active, disciplined work of standing in it. He warned that a culture built around instant gratification would get very good at producing the first and very bad at the second — decades before either of us had a phone to test it on.

What the 2026 Study Actually Found

Shabahang’s team wasn’t trying to prove dating apps ruin romance. They were testing something narrower: whether problematic use of these platforms — not use itself, but the compulsive, can’t-stop-even-when-it-costs-you version — tracks with how people actually think and feel about love. So they surveyed 664 adult dating-app and pornography users in Iran, average age 26, using validated scales for problematic dating-app use and problematic pornography use. It’s worth noting that two of the study’s own co-authors, Zsolt Demetrovics and Ágnes Zsila, spent years before this paper helping build the standard instruments this field uses to measure exactly that — problematic pornography consumption, in particular. They weren’t guessing at what “problematic” means. They’d already spent a decade defining it.

Against those two predictors, the team measured four things: existential reflection on love (how much people actually think about what love means, beyond the feeling of it), perceived meaningfulness of love (how much significance they assign to it at all), a pragmatic or transactional view of romance (love as a deal, an exchange, something that works better with resources attached), and emotional promiscuity — falling in love quickly and often, but without much depth to it.

The pattern held across both predictors. Problematic dating-app use and problematic pornography use were each linked to lower existential reflection on love, lower perceived meaningfulness of love, a more transactional view of romance, and higher emotional promiscuity. As lead author Reza Shabahang put it in comments to PsyPost, “The way you use these apps matters more than whether you use them.” Frequency wasn’t the variable that mattered. Compulsion was. “Someone can spend a fair bit of time on dating apps and come away fine,” he added, “if they know why they’re there and when to stop.”

The detail that keeps this from being a simple “apps bad” study is the protective factor. Mindful social media use — described by the researchers as staying aware of your own habits rather than operating on autopilot — was linked to lower levels of both problematic dating-app use and problematic pornography use. Co-author Ágnes Zsila summarized the pattern to Flinders University: heavy, compulsive users “were more likely to see love as meaningless, to believe it only works when there is money involved.” That’s not a claim about the existence of dating apps. It’s a claim about what happens to your relationship to love when you use them in a specific, addictive way — and about the mode of attention that keeps you out of that mode in the first place.

Fromm Already Diagnosed This, Seventy Years Before the Swipe

Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, published in 1956, opens with a provocation most readers still resist: love is not something you fall into and simply have. It’s a skill, and most people are bad at it because they’ve never practiced it as one. “Love is an activity, not a passive affect,” Fromm writes. “It is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.’” Falling in love, in his account, is what happens when the ordinary barriers between two strangers suddenly collapse — a rush, a peak, genuinely overwhelming while it lasts. But a peak experience is exactly what it sounds like: sudden, intense, and temporary by design. Fromm’s complaint isn’t that falling in love feels good. It’s that people mistake the fall for proof they’ve mastered something, when it required no skill at all. Standing in love is the part that does — discipline, knowledge, patience, concentration, the same raw materials that go into learning any other art, from carpentry to music. You don’t get good at it by wanting it more. You get good at it the way you get good at anything: slowly, and with practice you’d rather skip.

What makes The Art of Loving land so precisely on the 2026 data is a section most casual readers skim past — Fromm’s account of what he called the marketing orientation. “Modern man,” he wrote, “has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market.” Applied to romance, the same logic produces a blunt conclusion: “Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.” Fromm was diagnosing 1950s American consumer capitalism, not a piece of software. But a dating app is that diagnosis given a literal interface — profiles as listings, swipes as browsing, matches as the moment two “exchange values” clear. The study’s pragmatic, transactional view of love isn’t a new mutation. It’s the market logic Fromm named seventy years ago, running on infrastructure built specifically to make that logic frictionless.

The mechanism connecting the two is instant gratification. Fromm’s target throughout the book is a culture organized around getting things quickly and easily — and his argument is that this orientation is corrosive to love specifically because love is one of the few things that can’t be gotten that way. A swipe produces a match in seconds. A search produces an image instantly. Neither produces the slower thing Fromm calls standing in love, and he’d expect exactly what the study found: platforms optimized for fast, frictionless hits of romantic or sexual intensity get very good at delivering falling, and correspondingly worse at cultivating whatever comes after it.

What Did Fromm Actually Mean by “Standing in Love”?

1. Falling in love is passive. It’s something that happens to you — barriers dropping, intensity rising — not something you do. It requires no skill and, for Fromm, proves nothing about whether real love is present.
2. Standing in love is an activity. It requires knowledge of another person, discipline in showing up for them, patience with what doesn’t resolve quickly, and concentration — full attention, not divided attention.
3. Confusing the two is the central mistake. Modern culture treats the intensity of the fall as evidence you’ve found love. Fromm says it’s the entry point, not the destination — the easiest part of the entire process.
4. The confusion has a market logic underneath it. Fromm argued people evaluate potential partners against their own “exchange value,” like goods on a market — and that a culture built around fast, effortless gratification will keep producing more falling and less standing, because standing was never going to be fast or effortless.

This Site Has Covered Fromm and Desire Before — Here’s the Difference

An earlier post here covered Fromm’s later book, To Have or To Be?, and its distinction between the having mode and the being mode — a table in that piece already noted, almost in passing, that the having mode “has a partner,” while the being mode “knows and is known by another person.” This post is that same distinction, twenty years earlier in Fromm’s career, applied specifically to the moment two people first fall for each other rather than to what happens after. Having a partner is the transactional, exchange-value version the 2026 study measured. Standing in love is the being-mode version Fromm spent his whole career trying to describe.

This site’s post on Plato’s Symposium argues that desire, structurally, always reaches beyond any single object it lands on — which sounds, at first, like philosophical cover for exactly the pattern the study calls emotional promiscuity. It isn’t. Plato’s claim is about what desire is; Fromm’s claim is about what you do in response to it. Diotima’s ladder assumes you keep climbing toward something more, not that you abandon each rung the moment it stops producing a rush.

The post on Buber’s I-Thou distinguishes genuine encounter, where another person can surprise and resist you, from I-It relating, where they’re managed as an object. A pragmatic, transactional view of love — assessing a date by exchange value — is I-It relating wearing a romance costume. Fromm and Buber are describing the same failure from two different philosophical traditions, decades apart.

And the post on Rousseau’s amour propre makes a structural argument that rhymes with Fromm’s: the problem isn’t an individual character flaw, it’s a mechanism a system installs and then keeps running. Rousseau’s system was visible social ranking. Fromm’s is the personality market. Both predate the platforms that eventually automated them.

Where This Doesn’t Hold Up

None of this makes Fromm a survey researcher, and the honest version of this piece says so directly.

The study is cross-sectional — a single snapshot, not a study that follows people over time. The researchers themselves are candid about what that means: it can’t establish which way the causal arrow runs. It’s entirely possible that people who already find love meaningless, for reasons that have nothing to do with an app, are drawn toward more compulsive, low-investment use of dating apps and pornography in the first place. The correlation is real. The direction isn’t settled.

The sample is also specific — Iranian adults who already use dating apps and pornography, not a general population, and not a Western one. Dating culture, marriage norms, and the social risk attached to both dating apps and pornography differ meaningfully by country. The pattern found here is worth taking seriously. It isn’t automatically the pattern you’d find surveying 664 adults somewhere else.

Fromm’s argument is a different kind of claim entirely. He wasn’t measuring anything — he was making a moral and clinical argument, built from psychoanalytic practice and a Marxist-inflected reading of postwar capitalism, about what a market-organized society does to people’s capacity for love. That argument doesn’t need dating apps to exist as a critique. It was aimed at 1956 America, at a culture with plenty of ways to reduce people to their exchange value long before an app did it with a swipe gesture. The 2026 data doesn’t prove Fromm’s account of modern capitalism. It’s compatible with the shape of his diagnosis in a way that’s genuinely striking — a smaller, more honest claim than saying a 1956 book predicted a psychology study.

A Practice Worth Trying

Neither Shabahang’s team nor Fromm wrote this as a five-step plan, but the shared shape of what they found points somewhere specific.

1. Treat the fall as information, not a verdict. The rush of falling in love tells you something is happening. It doesn’t tell you whether the harder, slower work of standing in it is possible with this person, or whether you’re capable of it right now. Fromm’s whole argument is that these are separate questions.
2. Practice one discipline this week, on purpose. Pick concentration: one full, undivided conversation with a partner or date, phone somewhere else, attention actually there. Fromm treats this as basic craft, not a grand romantic gesture.
3. Notice your own exchange-value math. Height, income, follower count, job title stacked against your own. Everyone runs some version of this. The point isn’t to feel guilty about it — it’s to notice when it’s doing all the deciding.
4. Ask why you’re opening the app, before you open it. The 2026 study’s protective factor wasn’t abstinence. It was awareness — knowing what you’re there for, and noticing when scrolling has replaced the reason you opened it.

The Standing Was the Point

Shabahang’s team wasn’t testing Fromm. They were asking a narrower, more measurable question — what happens to how people think and feel about love when their use of dating apps and pornography becomes compulsive — and they found something sharper than “these apps are bad for romance”: a specific pattern of thinner existential meaning, more transactional thinking, and faster, shallower falling, offset by one identifiable protective factor, awareness of your own use. Fromm wasn’t running surveys. He was working out, from clinical practice and a hard look at postwar consumer culture, why a society organized around fast and easy would get worse at the one thing that can’t be gotten that way. Co-author Zsolt Demetrovics put the stakes plainly to Flinders University: “Society and future generations still need romantic stories worth telling.” Neither he nor Fromm needed the other to be right. It’s just hard to ignore that a 1956 book about the art of loving and a 2026 study with a pun for a title are describing the same unglamorous mechanism: falling proves nothing. Standing is the part you have to build.

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This post discusses a 2026 psychology study on dating-app and pornography use alongside a classical philosophical text. It isn’t a diagnosis of anyone’s relationship habits or technology use. If compulsive app or pornography use is significantly affecting your life or relationships, a therapist can help in ways a philosophy essay can’t.