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 Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions – such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments – can be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 exhaustion as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.
LinkedIn’s desire as a dating site, predicated on people who make use of it by doing this, is the platform’s capacity to hand back several of one manage and you may boost the caliber of their prospects. Due to the fact professional-marketing webpages requires users in order to link to its most recent and previous employers’ character pages, it’s got an additional covering regarding credibility one to other societal-mass media networks lack. Many profiles additionally include basic-individual recommendations out of previous associates and you can managers – genuine people with genuine character profiles.
For even individuals who timid regarding playing with LinkedIn so you’re able to perspective to possess schedules, your website has been a go-so you can tool to have vetting romantic candidates found by way of antique relationships apps or even in-people knowledge
Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after upload an excellent TikTok video 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 bride Hua hin 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 networking is just one large dating application,” John told me. “Any social network where you can discover mans photo are able to turn into the a dating software. And you can LinkedIn is much better because it’s not simply proving people’s fake existence.”
An issue of agree
Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok video in 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.
“Someone uses LinkedIn in a different way, but In my opinion typically, some body view it pretty invasive and you can inappropriate” for all of us to use it as a way to pick intimate lovers, Warren told me.
