“Where did you find your partner?”, 10-year-old me asked my nanny. And that’s a story I’d love to share. It all started with a newspaper advertisement about a man looking for a girl. Anyone living in Rotterdam that would’ve read the paper could reply by sending a letter to the corresponding address. And my nanny did! And after writing letters for some time, the two eventually met up and eventually got married. Can you believe it? Through an advertisement in the Rotterdam newspaper?!
Dating hasn’t changed, but the way we can reach each other has. Off course there’s still the offline channels such as bars, school, fraternities and study associations where people meet up. Or that one friend that connects you with the other single guy/girl. But huge change came with the rise of the internet (with regards to these channels). Why would you put advertisements in the newspaper if you can find each other online and simply apply filters on age, location, education, hair colour, name it. And so did the people. Whereas the use of these dating platforms always corresponds with some sort of awkwardness, there’s literally no one in my personal bubble of friends who haven’t ever used Tinder. As a matter of fact, Tinder accumulates over 50 million users worldwide today (Iqbal, 2020).
But does a platform such as Tinder actually satisfy the needs of dating? Would my old nanny have actually sent a message to her potential husband if she could have used the channels of today, such as Tinder? I think not! Whereas conversations on Tinder were positively associated with offline Tinder encounters, less than half of the sample reported having had an offline meeting with another Tinder user (Timmermans & Courtois, 2020). Thus, we want to date and meet offline, but we meet online and are somewhat stuck online. Although there are definitely some success stories, why do we find it so hard to go from online chatting to offline dating?
That’s exactly what one high school friend thought off by introducing the dating app Breeze. Why not combine the benefits of the internet, improved channel and filtering options, with the functionality to facilitate offline dating? Consider the business model, it’s brilliant. Instead of having the interactions online, the application provides matchmaking and then pushes both users to meet offline. There’s no online communication at all, just a profile, a match, a date schedular, and a small fee for the first drinks at a restaurant the application provides. If you ask me, this is what online dating is all about, getting offline as soon as possible.
References:
Iqbal M. Tinder revenue and usage statistics (2020). https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/
Elisabeth Timmermans & Cédric Courtois (2018) From swiping to casual sex and/or committed relationships: Exploring the experiences of Tinder users, The Information Society, 34:2, 59-70, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2017.1414093
Dear Tjalling Oosterhuis,
I really enjoyed reading your post. Because not only am I part of the 50 million users of Tinder, but I am also very interested in the development of online dating in the last couple of years, and the place it has taken in all our lives. It is especially a very trending topic, as people spend more time in front of their screens than outside. With the pandemic, online dating has boomed too, but as you rightly explained it, only to a certain extent. People only want to swipe, they want the diversion, they want the ego boost of having a new match. I believe a majority of people are using Tinder as a distraction more than to actually date someone, and that psychological barrier of meeting a stranger is still very high. The point I would like to make, is that Breeze sounds like a fantastic app, where people finally meet offline again, but is the public really interested in that? Do people actually want to meet offline, or are we not just moving towards a selfish, lonely and lazy society?