Apps promised a sexual revolution but they have just made dating weird Rachel Connolly “A new book, The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy, by Marie Bergström, a sociologist and researcher who works at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in France, explores this premise. She argues convincingly that the growing popularity of online dating has increasingly removed it from the public sphere, turning it into an entirely “domestic and individual practice”. She terms this the “privatisation of intimacy”