A few years ago, when Tinder made a foray into the Indian market, it released a campaign which attempted to make dating ‘acceptable’ albeit with parental approval. It showed a young girl getting ready to go out on a date with her Tinder match. As she steps out, her mother asks her where she’s headed to and the girl lies. Just then, her phone starts buzzing with messages from her Tinder match and all hell breaks loose. When the girl tries to explain the concept of Tinder to her mother, she immediately scans the boy’s photo and description and ‘approves of him’. That was then. Today with proliferation of apps such as Bumble, Woo and OkCupid, the concept of dating is fast becoming a part of the Indian psyche.
Raghav Vishwanathan has been in the dating circle for the last two years now. While he appreciates the interest such apps are finally generating, he rues the fact that even now most profiles say they are looking for ‘friends’, or a large number are looking for a long-term commitment. “The idea of casual dating is yet to find wide acceptability here,” he says. Though the Indian society has made a long journey from Tinder’s early days six years ago, when dating was still a hush-hush and much-underplayed practice, and parental approval was a much-needed checkbox to be filled, things are still far from being as ‘cool’ as in the West.
TrulyMadly is a re-packaged Tinder app-of-sorts to make it fit for the Indian market. Unlike Tinder, which is more confined to Tier I cities and the largely ultra-urban youth, TrulyMadly helps users in Tier II cities build meaningful connections and pave the way for a long-term relationship. Business head Snehil Khanor says, “Even in the 21st century, users in India are unwilling to talk on social media platforms about the dating app they are using because they are not yet comfortable. While it’s not going to be a smooth growth like in the West, we need to stick around for longer and continue putting out a positive narrative with success stories one couple at a time.”
Of course, with the world becoming a global village, India is becoming more Westernised in this aspect. Though there are many who still feel apprehensive about using dating apps and are shy to talk about it with their family, there are those who are becoming quite open to the concept—some are even going all out on so-called ‘global dates’, where two people from different countries, and even across continents find a common ground.
That being said, the culture is certainly changing. The Indian society is undergoing a slow but steady transition. And it’s not just technological advancements, access to smartphones and internet is providing more exposure for Indians to meet new people beyond their circle of friends, family and colleagues. The increasing need for choice, the need to make independent decisions about their life, love and career is pushing millennials to explore dating and find the right match for themselves. Suddenly, the hookups are no longer a taboo and life-long commitment is not the priority.
figuratively speaking
A survey held by Assocham Social Media Foundation in 2018 throws up some interesting figures. Conversations with 1,500 people aged 20-30 years reveal that 55 percent of the respondents have used an app for casual dating, 20 percent have been to it to find long-term relationships and 10 percent for networking and expanding their social circle.
As Taru Kapoor, the India GM for Tinder and Match Group, puts it: “Youth today increasingly demand and exercise more choice and control over their life decisions than previous generations.” And, mind you, youth represents one-third of the current population in India which was born after 1982—a whopping 400 million. Facebook is looking to cash in on too, rolling out a dating service in some countries.
But even such high numbers, there is a catch: the gender divide. Homegrown dating app Woo with a user base of five million and features such as Tag Search, Question Cast and Woo Phone, addresses the gap between casual dating apps and matrimony businesses. It is particularly designed for women safety and comfort. For instance, ‘Woo Phone’ enables women to call their matched profiles from within the app without revealing their phone numbers.
Despite such measure, in a survey of 20,000 urban Indians, Woo discovered that the gender divide on these apps is massive, with only 26 percent of their users being female. This is far lesser than in the US, where women are slightly more than 40 percent of the user base on dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble. The skewed gender ratio also reflects the larger divide in Indians’ access to the internet. After all, 89 percent of mobile internet users in the country are male.
Even on social media platforms such as Facebook, men outnumber women three to one. It’s no-brainer that the number of women users on dating apps in India is well below average. In fact, fearing harassment, 70 percent of the female users of dating apps are also apprehensive about sharing their personal information.
Kavipriya Moorthy, an author and poet, who has been in the dating circle for four years now, has an interesting take to it. “It could be a North-South thing too,” she says, and adds that while she’s been in Chennai most of her life, in between when she travels to Goa or up North, she ends up getting more matches. “In fact, people up North seem to be more open to meeting strangers,” she adds.
Date with a difference
With the Indian market slowly becoming more open to dating, it didn’t take long for dating apps to smell an opportunity. Tinder’s entry was soon followed by a slew of apps—homegrown and global. While each of these apps’ core focus is on capitalising on the dating culture in India, each comes with their own set of unique features to woo users—and algorithm-based questions and answers are the trendsetters. “We believe that the more you can get a sense of someone’s personality and values before you initiate a conversation with them, the more comforting it is, especially in India given the cultural background,” says Melissa Hobley, CMO, OkCupid.
The app claims it facilitates almost 50,000 drinks/coffee dates every week internationally. It prides itself in providing thoughtful matches by going beyond looks and focusing on what makes someone who they really are below the surface. The platform gets its users to answer a list of questions about themselves and about what they are looking for in a partner while making their profiles. These end up being the deal breakers and makers to find like-minded people.
What is needed is crafting the perfect online dating profile. Also, peak dating season approaches with the holidays, and the love lives of thousands literally hang on to how algorithms combine and present their data. Dating peaks between December 24 and Valentine’s Day, according to data from online dating giant Match Group, which owns Match, Tinder and OkCupid, among others. More than 60 million messages are sent on the Match app alone during that time. In fact, to keep up with the changing dynamics of the digital world and flitting attention spans that can bin your hopes in one swipe of the thumb, now there are online classes on how to approach online dating.
The rule is simple: You have “about three milliseconds” to make a first impression online, so you better make the most of it. Algorithms learn from users’ preferences and gather data on how users interact, and calculate which profiles will appear in feeds or as matches. If a user tends not to engage with people with blonde hair, the app may stop showing them people with blonde hair, for example. While it may sound like quite a dance, what worries most users is what if they miss out on a potential match just because their algorithm has decided it is not a perfect match for them? Many counter this problem by venturing beyond the feed, and searching profiles on their own. As someone rightly said: “It takes some legwork to find the right match”.
Relationships matter
Unlike in the West, where dating platforms are used mostly for hookups, Indians use these services with more serious goals. “The millennial population is spurring the demand for instant services and solutions that simplifies their lives, whether it’s shopping online or errands to be run. And dating is no different. They demand a dating app that helps them find the ‘right’ partner on their own terms so that they can enjoy a compatible relationship and healthy companionship with equal respect and commitments,” opines Hobley.
Woo wants to stay away from being the destination for hookups and casual dating, and focuses on bridging the gap between casual fling-oriented dating apps and the old-fashioned matrimonial portals. More specifically, its focus is on allaying the concerns of the women users. “We were certain that if we are able to create a product that appeals to women, in terms of giving them control over their privacy, their personal details and their interactions, we’d be onto something,” says Sumesh Menon, co-founder and CEO, Woo. It was this focus that resulted in features like Woo Hide where women can browse profiles in ‘incognito’ mode and Woo Phone where women can call their right-swiped matches without revealing the phone numbers.
TrulyMadly operates on a similar thought process. In fact, the app launched with quite a viral presence on social media. It promoted on Facebook images of 20-something men and women holding placards with quirky one-liners such as, “I run an NGO and I still love my H&M blazer” or “I’m an artist and I’m not unemployed”. The goal was to convey that it’s time to break stereotypes. While the app aimed to pave the way between Tinder and Matrimony.com, it has now turned away from the metros, with the belief that the market is saturated, and is instead looking at Tier II cities.
“Building a dating app in metros is like introducing another nightclub in India. It will be the same set of people signing up on different apps,” adds Khanor. The mindset of the users in Tier II cities, believes Khanor, is quite different. “They prefer to chat and get to know each other for a considerable period of time before they meet in person,” he adds. In fact, TrulyMadly classifies its users into two different segments. “There are the 18-21-year-olds who are looking for causal relationships or to make friends, and the 26+-year-olds who are looking at a more serious, long-term relationship—they prefer to find a match on their own instead of relying on matrimony sites,” he explains.
Seeing beyond cisgenders
One could call it an almost parallel revolution—people from the LGBTQIA community are fastening their pace to not just be accepted for who they are, but to also find dating a safe haven, instead of having to keep it behind closed doors. There are dating apps such as Delta and Grindr, which act as platforms to champion and bring about a change in the perception of this community. Delta, founded by Ishaan Sethi, for example, operates on three spheres: it connects like-minded people with verified profiles and trust scores, it has a community where people can come together to discuss on an array of topics like sports, lifestyle, travel and more. And, it networks and partners with external brands to build awareness and sensitise the challenges faced by this community.
Grindr, on the other hand, is a location-based dating app, which helps its users (in the LGBTQIA community) create meaningful relationships, while also engaging the community through various means, such as advancing the community’s health and human rights by partnering with organisations across the world, and running a queer publishing platform. Talking about awareness Arielle Noronha, a Mumbai-based PR professional, says: “I had known that I was a transwoman two years ago but I changed my bio on Tinder only much later. While I did get more matches after that, sometimes my dates would come with questions like: are you a man or a woman? Or, what does it feel like to be a transperson? But there is something more to us, beyond just appearance. That level of awareness and education is needed.”
Sethi, who was present in the Supreme Court at the time of the Section 377 judgement, says the move has brought in a two-fold change for the app. “We got a lot more app visibility and more users came out and signed up on the app. Secondly, earlier, corporate India shied away from working with us. But now more of them are reaching out to us and saying that they want to collaborate in bringing about a change in the society.” In fact, some dating apps, such as Woo, even see this as a move to consider launching an exclusive app for the LGBTQIA community in the coming years. “While our current focus has been on building a women-centric app, we are exploring coming up with an app tailored to this community by 2020,” reveals Menon.
Need of the hour
While the dating apps started off as a move to break household stereotypes and became a better and more accepted (for the youth) version of matrimonial sites, they are now turning into a revolution of sorts to empower the youth in India to start early in the dating game and find the match of their choice.
As Sethi puts it, it’s a trickle-down effect in the society. While the acceptance and the necessary momentum to make dating mainstream are still a few years away, India is certainly progressing towards becoming a more inclusive society. “If there’s one thing we, as a society could do, is to be more open to the idea of dating. When it comes to users, I wish they would be more open to what they are looking for—be it a hookup, to be a friend or more. Because, often, what I find is that, someone who follows me on social media platforms on the pretext of being a friend, suddenly becomes a stalker, or is too creepy to converse with,” says Moorthy.
Echoing her thoughts, Tejas Kinger, a 20-something employee of a Chennai-based IT company, who has been an active user of Tinder, says: “I’m not from this city, so Tinder is one way I get to meet interesting people. They might be strangers but sometimes meeting new people gives a lot of exposure and helps us learn more. That being said, if I find red flags I call it off immediately.”
Even while the concept is slowly finding large-scale acceptability, the one thought on everyone’s mind is how safe the apps are really. Recently, in the US, a group petitioned to make the dating app Tinder a “safer” place to hook up. According to a press release from the group A Secure Life, consumers see a lack of safety measures in the dating sector. It has approached Tinder to be the first dating app to protect users from registered sex offenders and violent criminals. Keeping users safe is a problem facing all online dating apps, and it is something that founders need to address immediately.
Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra’s maiden venture as an investor in social and dating application Bumble, which recently launched in India, aims at bringing social change and women empowerment by letting only the woman make the first move in heterosexual matches. Steps such as these also help address the issue of safety. And as you step into the world of dating, just know that it is all about finding out who you are and who others are. And in the process, you find love and companionship.
Be polite Being aloof, insulting, pretentious, or rude won't get you anywhere.
Be concise. Have a bio that is both fun and consistent with what you’re looking for.
Don't be a pushover
If someone is being disrespectful, shut down the conversation.
Keep your guard. Don't meet with someone when you haven’t been talking long enough.
Be true. Don’t mislead a potential partner out of what you want in a relationship.
Don’t judge. Just because someone doesn't agree with you, doesn't make them a bad person.
Play safe. The first time you meet your date, let it be in public.
Don’t pretend. Be who you are. Pretending to someone you are not is unfair to your date.
Block out bad vibes. If someone is harassing you, then get out of the situation.
Don't be mean. Don't block people just because you think they are ugly, or not fancy enough.
Be open. Share your hobbies, your hopes, and your aspirations.
Keep your secrets. Don’t reveal intimate details right at the outset.
Don’t hide behind a mask. Don’t be afraid of sharing what you look like.
Coffee Meets Bagel
It requires logging in through your Facebook in order to create a profile. And it definitely has the cutest name of all the dating apps. The service also offers more specific preference options.
How it works Once you’ve set up your profile, it will send you a “bagel” a day, which is essentially the profile of a potential match. You have 24 hours to either “like” or “pass” your bagel.
USP
You can narrow your choices to certain religious beliefs or ethnicities.
RAYA
It stands out from the pack and is elitist. The members-only site is as much for dating as it is networking. Also, if you want to join Raya, be prepared to do a little legwork.
How it works Your application needs a referral from a current member. It is then assessed by certain algorithmic values before being evaluated by an anonymous committee.
USP
Well-designed, members are more respectful of others.
OkCupid
Users answer relevant questions while making a profile. The algorithm considers their responses to questions, their preferences, interests and hobbies to find compatible matches.
How it works To browse for someone you like, you merely tap the “matches” option, which shows you the people you could potentially match with. There is also a “quickmatch” option.
USP
Users can see who has liked them only if they have upgraded to “A-list” status.
Happn
It shows the profiles of other singles, and pinpoints the last place and time you were near to each other. All your prospective matches are people you’ve crossed paths with.How it works You can like people secretly, and they won’t find out unless they like you, too. If you’re comfortable being bolder, you can tap the Charm button to let them know you’re interested.
USP
Quick and easy to set up and use. It uses GPS to track your movements