Tinder was the first to say, ‘There is no…

A big part of the success of Tinder was the sense that everybody was there, and it quickly became the number-one dating app, and it’s continued to retain the top spot in the world today

In this extract from Find Love, matchmaker and Tinder’s Global Relationship Science Expert Paul Brunson unpacks the evolution, advantages, and pitfalls of online dating – and how to set up the ideal profile.

While there are many ways of meeting people in real life, and this might be preferable for a lot of people, the reality is online is such a big part of dating today that it can’t be ignored. If you want to maximise the size of your pool of potential partners, you have to take advantage of every means at your disposal.

Tinder also opened up the dating landscape to casual dating, or what we now know evolutionary psychologists would call short-term mating, leading to it being known as the hook-up app

Although online dating came to prominence in the twenty-first century, most people probably don’t realise that it really started in the 1960s. And it began where a lot of tech ideas come from: a prestigious university. In 1965, three Harvard undergraduates by the names of Jeffrey C. Tarr, David L. Crump and Vaughan Morrill created Operation Match for students of Ivy League universities. Users filled out a questionnaire and returned it with a fee. Their answers were then run through a computer algorithm and, a couple of weeks later, a list of matches and their telephone numbers was sent back. It was all about matching people based on their interests and values. One of the things I find most interesting about Operation Match is that it didn’t include a photo, and there were very few questions about attractiveness – the only one was along the lines of ‘How important is attractiveness to you?’ When you fast-forward to today, it’s all about photos. Lire la suite de « Tinder was the first to say, ‘There is no judgement – everybody is welcome to jump into this party » →