When other dating apps entered the market, these newcomers figured they couldn’t compete with the shopping mall, so they instead decided to build boutique stores. There was the app for all the farmers. The app for the left-handers. Then the app for the left-handed farmers. The apps became increasingly niche to the point that a big player like Hinge realised that some people like to search based on type and allowed you to opt in to a silo for education, a silo for ethnicity, a kissbrides.com ver o site silo for age, and so on. However, I believe that we’re now reaching a point where interrelationships – interracial, interreligious, international – will be the standard and not the exception. On Tinder, 61 per cent of users have dated someone of a different ethnicity and 80 per cent are open to marrying someone of a different ethnicity, while 70 per cent are open to someone of a different religion. And you have people identifying in a more diverse way than they ever have before. So, long story short, I think frictionless dating and not pushing people into silos is the future, because that’s what Gen Z wants, and, as we’ve seen, it makes up the majority of the dating population.
You’re more in control, and you’re able to make connections in a way that feels safe. There’s not the same fear or sense of shame. And you can meet people who have the same relationship goals as you and assess if there’s some level of compatibility right off the bat.
As a result of all of this, people can become disgruntled with online dating very quickly
Your potential matches can also be from anywhere in the world. Tinder has a feature called Passport, which allows you to select a city in another country and look for people there. On Tinder Passport, London is the number-one city in the world. I have an American friend, a popular television personality, who thinks she’s going to meet her husband in London. In fact, I suspect a lot of Americans think they’re going to meet their prince or princess there.
In fact, financial romance fraud, whereby someone is tricked into entering a relationship so that money can be stolen from them, is one of the fastest growing types of fraud in the United States at the time of writing
The downside to this is that, if you can select someone from any city in the world, it can be pretty overwhelming. It also means that you can be rejected by anyone in the world. And it’s painful to be rejected. The sting of rejection is relative. For some people, being rejected online could have as much of an impact as someone else being publicly humiliated.
Men in the incel movement – ‘incel’ being short for ‘involuntary celibate’ – are at the extreme end of this spectrum, as they are not even willing to engage in the process. Because they believe it’s a zero-sum game and that they’re not going to win, they choose to opt out and instead place the blame on women. This extreme reaction speaks to the disillusionment that can arise with dating. It can be a difficult and tiring process, especially if you have to meet a lot of people in order to maximise your chances of finding someone suitable. With online dating, a lot of people drop out after three months – some because they have found a match but many out of frustration. Often, though, these people come back, and a cycle of leaving and then returning develops.
Another downside of online dating is that there’s a significant amount of fraud, ranging from catfishing to financial. This is why online safety has become an increasing focus for apps such as Tinder, leading to them building in features that deter fraud, as well as preventing crude messages and any photos apart from those on your profile from being shared.
