Tinder

For me, discovering dating apps was like happening upon crack cocaine. The starting pistol for my ‘dating’ was the decree absolute. I guessed it from the envelope. Still, it was stark seeing it on paper. For so long it had been pencilled, now it was in ink: ‘The marriage solemnised on…  has legally ended.’   My first instinct was to crack open a six-pack. Of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. I ripped off the foil, bit open the chocolate shell and licked out the fondant. My second response was even more gluttonous: setting up a dating app profile.

It’s 30 years since a website called Match.com opened the Pandora’s box of online dating. Until then, with the tiny exception of the classifieds, meeting a mate had to begin out there and in person. But from 1995, dating retreated to a desktop computer – a virtual shop window of real people. Match.com was launched as a minimum viable product that sold, so said the wags, other minimum viable products. Today, the online dating industry makes more than $9 billion. By 2033, its revenues are expected to double. There are now tons of apps, yet still so many loners. According to one survey, 44 per cent of Londoners are single. If Pandora’s box opened years ago, today it’s surely shattering.

There’s a online blacklist of men you should avoid dating and I’m on it. I discovered this over the summer when a colleague gave me a nudge and showed me a screenshot of my dating profile. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ A wave of fear passed through me. I had been posted on a Facebook group named ‘Are we dating the same guy?’. I set out to discover more.  The group itself was easy enough to find. It was started in New York last year to help the city’s single women avoid ‘red flag’ men. The group describes itself as a place where women can ‘warn other women about liars, cheaters, abusers, or anyone who exhibits any type of toxic or dangerous behaviour’. Now it has more than two million members from 120 cities across the world.

The world is home to 7.8 billion people. Roughly one in 14 of these people (530 million) are on Tinder. Badoo, the second most popular dating app, has ‘only’ 318 million users. Tinder is the most popular dating app in the world, by far. Now, though, a new challenger appears to be emerging. Unlike Badoo and other less robust dating apps, all of whom try to offer a variation of what Tinder provides, this competitor offers something completely different. You see, this new dating app, a next generation dating app, plans to inject artificial intelligence into matchmaking.