Relationships

A new study by dating app Hinge shows that people are more likely to match when they have certain traits in common, rather than the old adage “opposites attract.”

According to the results of the study, people are more likely to match when they share similar backgrounds, particularly religious affiliation, education, and even their initials. The study was conducted by Jon Levy and Moran Cerf of the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, and Devin Markell of Hinge. According to an article in Business Insider, they analyzed the outcomes of more than 421 million potential matches on the app to see how similarities in certain traits affected the likelihood of people matching. This included assessing indications of users wanting to communicate outside the dating app.

The average American spends over $120,000 over his or her lifetime on dating, according to a new study. Not surprisingly, seventy percent of daters think that dating is too expensive.

Online banking company Simple.com partnered with OnePoll to survey 2,000 Americans about their expenses when it comes to dating and found on average it costs people $168.17 per month. According to Fox News, they also discovered that dating expenses actually increase once the couple gets married – on average to $185.65 per month - because they want to do things to “keep the spark alive,” according to the report.

Plus-sized daters are feeling more positive about finding love with dating apps, according to a new study by dating app WooPlus.

The company conducted a survey of its 3 million users to find out what they think of the body positivity movement, which has become extremely popular thanks to outspoken stars like Lizzo, Ashley Graham and Tess Holiday, who have brought attention to the cause. These celebrities have been instrumental in shining a light on the problem of fat-shaming by encouraging people to embrace their curves and recognize their own beauty in all aspects of their lives – including their love lives.

Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)

Match Group is serious about its expansion in the Asian market. It just announced the launch of its new app Pairs Engaged – a “marriage concierge” service to compete with the country’s popular arranged marriage industry.

Pairs Engaged is the opposite of the company’s star dating app Tinder. There’s no casual glancing through photos and swiping left and right. Instead, the customers Match Group is targeting are looking to get married within a year and are serious about the search process.

The pressure to write the perfect dating profile is enormous. It needs to be confident but not arrogant, intriguing but not cryptic, unique but not outlandish, alluring but not unapproachable. There’s nothing easy about condensing your personality into a few carefully curated sentences and photographs. Inevitably, things must be left out. But which things?

For many users, the answer is sexual preferences. It’s an easy detail to omit - and some would say the rules of decency require such details to be omitted - but brothers Emerson and Morris Hsieh see things differently. The young co-founders launched Waves, a dating app that allows users to match based on sexual interests, and are currently part of famed incubator Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch.