In a 2023 Pew survey of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they’d felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches.
Online, it isn’t always easy to know whether the human behind an alluring profile is who and what they say they are. Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions – such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments – can be disheartening. Then there are the people who fabricate or steal their entire profile, a practice known as “catfishing,” leaving anyone getting hit up by a stranger online justifiably skeptical. All these deceptions have left many people with dating-software weakness as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.
LinkedIn’s appeal as the a dating internet site, based on those who make use of it this way, ‘s the platform’s ability to hand back the one to manage and you can improve the caliber of their applicants. While the top-notch-marketing webpages requires users to help you relationship to their newest and former employers’ reputation users, this has an additional level off trustworthiness one to other personal-news programs lack. Of numerous users include basic-people references off former acquaintances and you will executives – actual people with actual character users.
For even individuals who bashful out of having fun with LinkedIn to angle getting schedules, this site was a go-so you can product to possess vetting close people discover because of conventional matchmaking applications or even in-individual encounters
Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after post an excellent TikTok videos in which she said LinkedIn had “A-grade filters” for finding “A-grade men” – namely, doctors, lawyers, and “finance bros.” In the post, she touted the various filters you could use to track down ideal partners. More recently, a screenshot of the tech entrepreneur George Hotz’s LinkedIn bio was shared on X. In his bio, Hotz declared that he now used the site “exclusively as a dating platform” and laid out a catalog of requisite attributes – “intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego” – for his ideal match. “Send me a message and invite me out for a drink,” he wrote.
“Social media is the one huge dating application,” John told me. “Any type of social media where you could see man’s photos can wife Durango change toward a matchmaking software. And you may LinkedIn is even better because it is just proving people’s phony lifetime.”
A matter of concur
Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok video throughout the matchmaking and has received more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Though she said that the men were usually reaching out under some flimsy guise of professional networking or “mentorship,” many had bare-bones profile pages that suggested they weren’t seriously using the platform for work. Several of her friends and colleagues across genders have received similar messages, she said, and were similarly put off by them.
“Men and women uses LinkedIn in a different way, but I think generally, some body see it fairly invasive and incorrect” for all those to use it as a way to discover intimate lovers, Warren told me.
