I click ‘no’ to all of them, but it’s nice to be asked it means I won’t end up on a date with a coke-snorting, beer-guzzling stoner, or with a clean-living green tea-sipper. In the lifestyle questions, you are asked if you drink, smoke, smoke weed, or use drugs. The ethnicity options are equally so, and the religion options include agnostic, which is refreshing.
Under ‘What’s your gender?’, as well as man and woman, there are more than fifty options, from androgyne to polygender, trans to hijra to two-spirit nobody has been left out, and there are categories I have never heard of. I download the app and set about filling in my details (“adding basic information leads to better matches, so that you can delete us”). US presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg met his husband on Hinge, and user volume spiked afterwards, says McLeod. We want you to delete it, then tell your friends about it, rather than keeping you on here. Hinge is not about being cool, but about being real, and showing vulnerability, and letting people in. Lots of ‘likes’ provide validation and excitement, but not necessarily connection. With online dating, people are craving something different: authenticity something real and refreshing. “Social media is designed for people to become products not even users. “We’ve been losing sight of the original purpose of connection,” he says. The team even employed a ‘healthy tech advisor’, Catherine Price (author of How To Break Up With Your Phone) to drive users to connect in real life. Ironically, McLeod is not a big fan of tech - he avoids social media, because “the less I’m on it, the happier I am” - and wants Hinge to be used to connect people, rather than keeping people online, glued to their screens.
McLeod wants people to use the app to connect meaningfully. It’s about connecting, rather than matching.” If Tinder is fast food, then Hinge is nourishment, he says. “It’s designed to be deleted,” says Hinge founder, Justin McLeod. Why is Hinge different? Could it be that we are all just exhausted by the hollow disposability of its rival apps? Although he provides no figures, he says that compared with other markets where Hinge recently launched - Scandinavia, the Netherlands - the uptake in Ireland is twice as high. It launched here in April, and its founder says Hinge is the fastest-growing dating app in Ireland.
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