Are Dating Apps the New Way to Socialise?

Since the pandemic, are more people going onto dating apps to find their special someone?

With everyone being locked away in their homes for what seems like an eternity, people have become desperate for social interaction and turned to dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and many more successors that have been released after. The match-making industry saw a meteoric rise in recent years making around $10 billion since the pandemic started.

I wondered, have all the recent love-birds in the last two years met on dating apps because of the pandemic? I asked people on social media about their experiences with using dating apps during that time and the responses were very varied and also extremely surprising.

“I met two guys who didn’t want anything sexual which was a surprise for once.”

“I met my boyfriend after a long time… it was worth it.”

And some people responded with very straight-forward answers…

“BORING.”

However, two responses created an interesting observation that many people just use dating apps to just fill a social void in their lives and meet people for fun or to create dating profiles out of sheer boredom.

“It was hard to actually find a relationship and not just friends with benefits.”

“It was typically the same as pre-pandemic but I supposed people did it more out of boredom and for fun.”

So, out of snoopiness, I conducted my own research to see people’s intentions of using dating apps. Over the course of twenty-four hours, I released a poll asking people whether they used dating apps for fun or to find someone during the pandemic. The results were unanticipated. 74% of people said that they used dating apps for fun and 26% said they used them to find someone.

The pandemic has warped the way we socialise with people with the modern social media era that has just started to get traction and take over everyone's lives whether they like it or not. It seems like recently, dating apps are the new Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. People use them to solely find a new person to make friends with and finding love is an added bonus.