Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. The gnawing suspicion is a common one. The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it. Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perks—visibility boosts, unlimited likes—marketed as tools for finding love.
Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance. But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute. A handful of them actually exist. Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.
The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in ; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates. Researchers did tell me that state dating apps have some potential benefits. Users might hope, for instance, that such platforms share their goal—that governments looking to raise marriage and birth rates, as well as increase trust in the state, want people to swiftly find love.
A state platform could also be effective at providing certain kinds of security. Luke Brunning, a University of Leeds philosopher who co-runs the Ethical Dating Online research network, told me that some for-profit companies might fear that requiring too much information at sign-up could turn away potential customers.
Read: The dating-app diversity paradox. The major commercial dating apps do grant users the ability to report a profile in the case of perceived abuse. Even with these safeguards in place and many millions spent on trust-and-safety teams, users of commercial dating apps continue to encounter fake profiles—and to report sometimes-harrowing experiences.
