Newsweek - USA (2021-02-19)

Group’s annual report: married, mar- riage, wedding, couple, boyfriend,

girlfriend, spouse, husband and wife. The word partner does appear

three times—but only in reference to the company’s business partners. Tinder, Match and OKCupid do

not want to get you off the market. They want to transform you into life- long shoppers. Match Group admits

as much in its annual report, boast- ing that “successful experiences...

drive repeat usage.” Translation: Start dating someone terrific on Tinder, and you’ll keep

returning to the app to find someone even more terrific. If Match Group really wanted to

help you get married, they’d focus on connecting you with people you

already know from real life. Surveys show, for example, that couples who meet at work marry at a very high

rate—as high as 30 percent.

Given the complications sur- rounding workplace dating, and

COVID-19 of course, wouldn’t it be great if there were an app that revealed mutual attraction between

co-workers before anyone risked getting sent to HR? Connecting singles within the

same social sphere was, in fact, Hinge’s business model back before it was acquired by Match Group. In

Hinge’s early days, users needed to be friends or friends-of-friends with

one another on Facebook before the Hinge app would ever match them. Hinge’s Facebook requirement

paid off romantically for its users: According to Bustle, Hinge was the most mentioned dating app in The

New York Times wedding section in

But then in June 2018—which

was the same month Match Group acquired a majority stake in Hinge— Hinge announced it was eliminat-

ing the Facebook requirement and adopting a more open-ended model. Something else happened in June

2018: It was the last time Hinge put out a press release touting itself as “the #1 mobile-first dating app mentioned in

the NY Times Wedding section.”

Ơ Adapted from make your move: the new science of dating and why women are in charge. Jon Birger is

a former senior writer at fortune and the author of date-onomics, which, along with make your move,

can be purchased through Ama- zon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound,

Walmart and other retailers. Birger can be reached at jonbirger.com or on Twitter at @jonbirger1.

WORKING IT “Wouldn’t it be great if there were an app that revealed mutual attraction between co-workers before anyone risked getting sent to HR?”

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