Online dating is how most young professionals meet today. Vice reported last year that online dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Lex, Her and OKCupid, reported an increase in the amount of time users spend on the app since social distancing became our new reality two years ago.
But finding friendship and love has been moving into the digital space even before the pandemic. A report released in 2016 by the Pew Research Center found that the use of online dating sites by 18- to 24-year-olds tripled since 2013, making this group now the most likely to use the internet to find partners.
Individuals searching for love have the usual ‘deal-breaker’ traits that they disdain in a partner. From chewing with their mouths open or smoking to disliking cats or singing too loud, we all have traits that we want a potential partner to have and hopefully not have.
But recently, one trait seems to be dominating dating apps. Opinions surrounding climate change are the biggest "deal breaker" out of several topics when it comes to finding a match on the popular dating app OKCupid, new data from the company shows.
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The company surveyed a quarter of a million users from around the globe and found that 9 out of 10 love-seekers said that it is "important" for their match to care about climate change with 81% of 6 million users surveyed over the past three years saying that they were "concerned" about climate change. This tops other potential deal breaker issues such as gender equality and gun control.
Jane Reynolds, director of product marketing at OKCupid, told The Hill that “we have just seen over time, climate change being more and more this huge topic for our millennials daters, especially. People feel that with climate change, it says so much more about you, if that's something that you believe in and are concerned about.”
OKCupid’s dating app makes use of a matchmaking algorithm which asks users a variety of multiple-choice questions on everything from the mundane to current events issues, according to the company.
“One of our questions is, ‘Cilantro, yes or no?’” Reynolds said, noting that while such a question can be a “good conversation starter,” it won’t usually “make or break” whether a user decides to date a potential match. Reynolds explained that the company has thousands of queries with new ones coming through almost weekly.
Over the past year, 250,000 individuals worldwide answered the question "Is it important that your match cares about the environment?" Ninety percent of the respondents said that it’s important for their match to care about the planet, while women were 7 percent more likely than men to care, according to the data.
Millennials, the apps largest user base, were the generation most concerned about climate change, with 83 percent of these daters replying in the affirmative to this question, according to the data.
Evaluating these figures, Reynolds acknowledged that OKCupid is “a progressive app” and does tend to attract individuals who are “more open-minded and concerned” about topics like climate change.