It’s ten years since Tinder launched, but in dating years, that’s almost a lifetime. Back then, seeking a partner online was still something you admitted to sheepishly, and the courting moved at a quaint and charming pace. You signed up to a website, wrote a thoughtful profile, and exchanged long messages with those you were attracted to, like some kind of Jane Austen character. It wasn’t just about copy-and-pasting ‘Good weekend? lol’ to your top five matches, accompanying it with an emoji with its tongue hanging out.
Tinder, an app that encouraged a pacier interaction, caught on fast and hard: within two years, it was generating more than six million matches a day. Happn, Bumble, Feeld, Hinge, Thursday, Grindr, Raya, Lumen, Inner Circle and Badoo are among the countless other apps that have cropped up along the way, using not dissimilar functionality. Dating services in the UK currently have a market of £311million, and using one is now the norm, not the exception.
