Love apptually: the dating apps to help you find romance rather than a quick shag

Dating apps can be all about casual sex — just swipe and shag — but Phoebe Luckhurst finds some for those of a more romantic bent
Love Apptually
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Once upon a time, men performed feats of derring-do to impress Rapunzels in towers. Then the ideal shifted from one fantasy to another and they flounced about on country estates, stealing tortured glances at well-bred ladies and engaging in protracted, evasive correspondence that finally — about 20 pages before the end — elicited a rushed but utterly expected marriage. Then the ideal shifted from fantasy to nightmare and they started sending dick pics and initiating flirting with poorly expressed but definitely explicit chat-up lines.v

Not, of course, that this applies to all men — nor even all the men prowling London’s sexual playground, Tinder. Some chaps have far more sophisticated methods of scoring, and some women far less sophisticated ways. But when an app not only enables but encourages our simplest instincts — “want sex” — then it’s unsurprising that the tactics employed to sate these instincts would also be relatively base. Essentially, anyone looking for romance on Tinder is likely to be looking for quite a long time.

A new generation of dating apps suggests that the criteria and tactics employed so far have been simplistic and unlikely to yield long-term love — so their modus operandi is to take a more discerning tack. Wyldfire, a dating app that launches in the UK next month, intends to bar creeps from entering the community altogether, and it hands the keys of this brave new world to the women. Men are granted access only if they are recommended and invited by a female member of the site; they can be recommended through Facebook or via email.

The theory is that the recommendation system will create a pool of men whom women actually want to date; it will also offer feedback such as trending profiles and the styles of profile photo that yield the most “hits”. The process for trawling the site is similar to Tinder’s swipe-and-like set-up — but hopefully with fewer unwanted cocks in your inbox.

Before launching lesbian dating app Dattch, CEO Robyn Exton did seven months of research into how women use online dating platforms. “The biggest problem to overcome was working out how to get women to send the first message,” she explains. “We realised women engage more with images, so Dattch profiles have an Instagram or Pinterest feel to them. When it comes to written profiles, men tend to oversell themselves, whereas women are more likely to undersell, which is why the visual works better as it provides a glimpse at someone’s life without the need to fill in the gaps with words.

“Dattch is about making it easy for girls to get talking — research shows that girls need this easier way.” Obviously, this research applies to women meeting women but it’s still relevant as a model of the new, discerning dating app that operates on a higher plane than swipe and shag.

And trust the French to try something romantic: new app Happn fans the flames of those chance encounters across the city, charged with attraction but blighted by typically modern reserve. Users of the app can see profiles of those within a 250m radius — like Tinder, if you like what you see you can designate a “crush”, and if the feeling is reciprocated you can start messaging. The app scored more than 100,000 French users in three months, and 20,000 British users have signed up in the first three weeks. Some have commented on the similarity to Grindr, a hook-up app for gay men also predicated on proximity, although Happn’s motives claim to be loftier.

The app started as a foil for missed connections, explains Marie Cosnard, its communications manager. “When you just instantly fall in love with a guy cycling past you, when you’re too shy to talk to that girl who’s surrounded by all her friends, or when you were actually on your way to ask someone out but they jumped on a bus. It’s an ice-breaker for the shy, to find out who we keep bumping into every day without having the chance ever to meet them, to allow people who have been at the same place at the same time to meet again.

“Unlike other dating apps, the experience starts in real life: thanks to real-time geolocation the app shows you a timeline of the people you have really crossed paths with. They are the people you have seen and would like to talk to and meet once again. You can see how many times you’ve crossed paths with someone, and where you’ve last crossed paths: a little map roughly shows the last crossing point.”

If you’re still looking for love in a hopeless place, it could be time to update your apps.

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