With the rise of online dating services and phone dating applications, love might be as close as your pants pockets.
A 2013 report by the Pew Research Center found that one out of 10 Americans have used an online dating site or dating app, and the proportion has only grown since then.
The numbers have been fueled by the popularity of products like Tinder, especially among the college population. The dating app, which has more than 40 million individual users, has accumulated about 50 percent of its users through college-based users aged 18 to 24.
The rapid growth and pace of the app has attracted students as both a dating service and as a mode of entertainment among friends.
“It wasn’t serious when I first got (Tinder). I was a few months into being single, and I wanted to see what was available,” said Rachel Feldman, a fourth-year psychobiology student. “My roommate and I got it, and right away we were hooked.”
Feldman pointed to the ease of meeting people without the fear of rejection as one of the major factors in the app’s popularity.
“Rejection is totally different on Tinder – if you don’t match with someone, the app is designed in a way that you can’t linger on that person,” Feldman said.
Benjamin Karney, a UCLA psychology professor who does extensive research on interpersonal relationships, said online dating networks provide an easy space for prospective daters to find each other.
“Ease of use makes a real difference,” Karney said. “Quite frankly, the convenience can’t be beat.”
Users say the applications provide a way to meet people when they can find time in their busy schedules: swiping left or right for a few minutes for some casual fun.
“I feel like (dating apps) are just a means to meet someone,” said Matt Schulte, a fourth-year environmental science student. “People are often too busy now to even notice if someone’s flirting with them.”
But some aspiring entrepreneurs, aware of the emerging market of online daters, have intentionally moved away from Tinder and the “just for hookups” reputation it has brought to dating applications.
Dawoon Kang, co-founder of online dating service Coffee Meets Bagel, said her service aims to fix what she believes is a major gender imbalance found on a lot of the other mainstream sites and create meaningful matches with the possibility of a long-term relationship.
“With a lot of these services, people call it a sausage fest because it’s like a 70 to 30 percent ratio between men and women,” Kang said. “Most of the mainstream services have been founded by men, and that shows in the way they approach dating, just putting out as many profiles and pictures as possible.”
Kang said Coffee Meets Bagel attempts to correct this overabundance of profiles, by slowing down the pace of online dating by providing one match a day to users, curated by the site’s unique algorithm.
Kang said by slowing down the pace of online dating, her service addresses what she said is one of the major criticisms of applications like Tinder, which is that it relies on superficial judgments based simply on pictures.
But Karney said there is no research that matching surveys find romantically compatible partners.
“The science of relationships is about 80 years old by now and in all that time, nobody’s created an algorithm to predict which two strangers will click romantically,” Karney said.
Another common criticism of popular applications like Tinder is the plethora of fake profiles that populate the app, which are often a front for prostitution services or online scam websites.
Zircle, a Bay Area-based meet-up application, chooses to beef up the privacy and cut down on the spam profiles by limiting users to college students with emails linked to their educational institutions.
Hai Le, a co-founder of Zircle, said the closed nature of their social network allows them to validate the authenticity of accounts and profiles.
Le said even within the social cauldron of college, students are often looking for a way to meet people with similar interests.
“I think college students are in a highly social environment and meet a lot of people; however, we want to make meeting people more efficient,” Le said. “Dating going forward is going to be very, very interesting, and we hope to help students to meet more and more interesting people.”
But even with the traffic on dating sites growing, users say a stigma still exists against relationships that start online.
Some online entrepreneurs like Kang said this is a by-product of the “Tinder effect,” which places all dating applications under the same category as the current most popular online service.
“In this industry there’s so many different products and so many services they provide,” Kang said. “It’s sad that (dating applications have) all been grouped under the same banner.”
Still, users say part of the positive of online dating sites is the amount of social interactions that provide experience and confidence going forward in dating and relationships.
“I know a lot of people who don’t know how to ask somebody on a date and that’s what I learned from it,” Schulte said. “(Our generation) still wants to meet somebody in person and have that whole normal thing, but even with Tinder, the time period still exists to figure out that person and who they are.”