Belle Burden’s best-selling memoir Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, which chronicles the sudden collapse of her 21-year marriage, has brought a once-obscure phenomenon into public conversation: The blindside divorce.

Sometimes referred to as “sudden divorce syndrome”, a blindside divorce describes the unexpected dissolution of a relationship. One partner appears to vanish emotionally overnight.

Stories abound of spouses leaving to “buy milk” and never returning, or calmly serving dinner before announcing they have already filed for divorce. The defining feature is not merely separation itself, but the absence of warning, discussion or any visible lead-up to the rupture.

Critics might argue that divorce is rarely mutual, or that blindsiding reflects individual attachment styles. Avoidantly attached individuals, for example, are thought to be more likely to withdraw rather than confront conflict directly. Yet, after years researching intimacy, relationships and digital culture, I have become convinced that blindside divorce is also a product of a wider social transformation ushered in by dating apps.

The behaviours that dominate app culture (ghosting, low accountability and transactional attitudes to intimacy) have increasingly migrated into relationships themselves.

Seven years ago, one participant in a focus group told me about a man she had met on a dating app. They shared effortless banter and quickly became inseparable. One Saturday they were making plans for that night when he abruptly stopped responding. At first she assumed he had become distracted. By nightfall, anxiety crept in. Had something happened to him? Was he hurt? Dead? Over the following days she cycled through disbelief, sadness and denial before eventually discovering his profile back on the app. He had updated his bio with a joke she had made during their courtship.

He had disappeared without explanation.

She had been ghosted.

The term “ghosting” entered popular usage around 2010 – almost precisely when dating apps began their rapid ascent – and had become part of everyday language by 2014. Tales of people disappearing from relationships have always existed, but ghosting transformed abandonment from an exceptional act into a recognised social behaviour.

My own research found that virtually every participant had either ghosted someone or been ghosted while using dating apps. Why do people do it? Quite simply, because it is easier.

As one participant explained to me:

“Why would I risk rejection face-to-face when I can do it online and save myself the embarrassment?”

The logic is revealing. If difficult conversations can be avoided in early dating, why not avoid them later too? Why endure painful discussions when one can emotionally withdraw, cultivate an alternative relationship, and leave only once the decision has already been made?

A majority of young people now meet their romantic partners online. Photo: Pexels

Ghosting teaches us that exits need not involve explanation.

When I began researching dating apps in 2018, many regarded the topic as academically frivolous. Yet few technologies have altered the landscape of intimacy so profoundly.

According to the Australian Study of Health and Relationships, released in 2024, more than half (52 per cent) of Australians aged 20-39 met their current partner online – dating apps have become one of the dominant gateways to romance.

The architecture of these platforms carries consequences. Swipe right, match, chat, ghost, block, repeat. The pattern is strikingly transactional. The mechanics resemble market behaviour: Rapid assessment, low investment and easy exit.

The gamification of dating – endless swipes, dopamine hits from matches and intermittent bursts of attention rewards novelty and instant gratification while quietly eroding patience, trust and perseverance. People become disposable not because we are inherently cruel, but because the system conditions us to think in terms of endless alternatives.

The consequences extend far beyond dating itself.

We are witnessing the rise of heterofatalism – a growing belief, particularly among younger women, that heterosexual relationships are structurally disappointing or difficult to sustain. While marriage rates have declined across much of the world, those who do marry are, on average, doing so later and with greater intentionality. At the same time, a growing number of people remain suspended in a “grass is greener” culture of perpetual optimisation, where another swipe, message, or match always holds out the possibility of someone better.

Alongside this, grey divorce (separations after the age of 50) is also increasing, including in Australia, where later-life divorce has become one of the fastest-growing forms of relationship breakdown.

Taken together, these shifts point to a broader and more unsettling rupture in the landscape of intimacy: Relationships are becoming both more chosen and more fragile.

Not all of this can be attributed to dating apps. The narrative conditions of love have changed over decades. What might once have been considered a “normal” relationship in our grandparents’ era, shaped by endurance, obligation, and the primacy of the family unit, has gradually given way to a model centred on individual fulfilment, self-actualisation, and personal brand.

But power and technology rarely act in isolation, they circulate through one another. Dating apps did not emerge in a vacuum. They are both a product of, and an accelerant for, a broader cultural logic that increasingly frames relationships as optional, contingent and replaceable. If app culture has socialised us into viewing intimacy as endlessly substitutable, then the emotional labour required to repair dissatisfaction may begin to feel inefficient or unnecessary. Why endure discomfort, compromise, or difficult conversation when exit is frictionless and alternatives are constantly available?

Dating apps did not invent abandonment, nor did they create human selfishness. But technologies shape habits, and habits shape culture. The swipe economy has ushered in a new era of intimacy – one defined by abundance, optionality and frictionless exits.

Dr Lisa Portolan is a casual academic at the University of Technology Sydney. Her PhD on dating apps and intimacy from Western Sydney University was published in 2024. It has also been released as a book: Love, intimacy and online dating (Routledge, 2023)