First published by The Times on 6 April 2019
It’s a Monday evening, and I am rushing from work to meet a man I don’t know at a bar. I’m tired. I apply lipstick on the Tube. I’m sure he doesn’t really want to be meeting me on a Monday night either, but it was the only time this week we could make it work. Now we’ve both got to put our best feet forward.
I’m 35 and, somewhat regretfully, I’m an experienced online dater. I’ve used three or four apps over the years, and walked into plenty of blind dates. So this situation has a ring of familiarity to it – except that it’s a work appointment. I’m on my way to meet Justin McLeod, the 35-year-old, Kentucky-born founder of the dating app Hinge.
As it happens, I’m dating someone else at the moment anyway, thank you very much, but you could say that McLeod is part of the relationship, too, since I met the man in question via Hinge itself. We matched in January and exchanged some polite conversation through the app’s texting feature – enough for me to decide that he sounded clever and kind. We met for our first coffee in early February. When I see McLeod, I’m five weeks into something that’s making me feel cautiously hopeful.
We Brits have become a nation of people for whom seeking romantic or sexual partners online is normal. In December, a YouGov survey of 3,312 adults found that 9 per cent had used a dating app in the past month. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, that figure rose to 21 per cent. Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Happn, Ok Cupid and Plenty Of Fish: for those of us who want to meet someone, there is no shortage of tech brands offering to help us.
The problem is that app dating can feel brutal and superficial – that you’re being measured up by strangers who only care how sexy your holiday pictures are. It can also feel as if it’s draining your humanity. Faced with just a couple of photos and a first name, I’ve often rejected men for details that may well be irrelevant to the overall tapestry of their personality: because they’d taken a selfie at the gym; because they’d used “your” instead of “you’re”; because their pictures were full of guffawing, champagne-drinking men in suits.
When a friend recommended Hinge to me last summer, I found I liked it more than the others. It wasn’t wildly different, but it felt a bit more sincere. The profiles are more detailed than those on other apps, which means they require a little more effort to fill in. That’s a good thing, because it weeds out some of those who are either looking for an easy shag or just window shopping. The process of signing up for Hinge also involves answering a few key questions: do you have kids? How tall are you? Do you smoke weed? These are all things it would be nice to know before I’m looking at you over a gin and tonic.
The app provides prompts that you can choose to fill in on your profile, ranging from the lighthearted (“My last meal would be …”) to the heartfelt (“I’ll know I’ve found the one when …”). People use them with varying degrees of success: a flick through my app today reveals a Simon who has completed the prompt, “We’ll get along if …” with the words, “... you’re sporty and a bit of an alcoholic”; a Matteo who “likes to talk about ideas”; and a Darren who wants a woman who will “drive me bananas” (red flag). At their best, though, they give you a leg-up into the awkward process of starting a conversation.
According to App Annie (which specialises in mobile market data), Hinge is the fastest-growing dating app in the UK. McLeod tells me that its UK user base has grown tenfold in the past year.
Hinge is McLeod’s baby. He started working on it in 2011 and made the first version available in early 2013. At that point he hadn’t even heard of Tinder, which had launched in California a couple of months earlier. When he walks into the bar today, I’m expecting a flashy tech guy, a Social Network type. Instead, I quickly reclassify him as a wide-eyed romantic. He is literally wide-eyed, in fact, with a boyish face and an open, earnest manner. When I tell him I’m seeing someone I met through his app, he lights up: “Amazing! I love it.” He hears this on a regular basis now. He also has his own love story, which he claims has been a guiding influence at every step of the app’s evolution. It doesn’t involve swiping.
McLeod met Kate, the subject of this tale, at college, where they dated for years – off and on, and then eventually off. “I was a wreck,” he says. He was heavily into booze and drugs. “I was sent to rehab a lot, not really going to class, and that was a big reason why I told Kate to run for her life.”
Four years later, having been sober since college, he was doing remarkably better. He was in his second year at Harvard Business School, with a job awaiting him at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He wrote to Kate, who was now living in London, asking if they might meet up next time she was in the States. She said no. She had a serious boyfriend. “I was totally heartbroken.”
If you’re wondering why we’re taking a walk down this poignant memory lane, understand that it’s Hinge’s backstory, too. Following the heartbreak, inspiration struck. McLeod had been roped into developing a Valentine’s Day matchmaking game for students. It sparked an idea. “I don’t know how to describe it, but I had been working on a couple of start-up ideas before that and I’d had to force myself to work on them. But when this idea came into my head, it was like it was coming through me. Nothing could stop me from working on it. The end of the school year came and I turned down the McKinsey offer and decided to keep going.”
At first, Hinge was a service that would connect people with friends of their friends. “It would allow you to start meeting the people you would otherwise eventually meet at weddings or dinner parties. Again, I was now four years into not drinking, not doing drugs. Business school was a big party, and it was hard for me to meet people, honestly. Really I built this for me, because I wanted to find someone and I didn’t think I was ever going to find someone as great as Kate.”
McLeod and a small team developed a swiping app in which you’d see a photo and some basic info and could say yes or no. It grew steadily. Alongside it, Tinder took off, and they were joined by a number of other swiping apps. “We were doing OK. We had a sizeable user base, we had received a lot of investor interest at that point, but it just wasn’t …” McLeod shrugs. In 2015, he recalls, Vanity Fair published a much discussed article headlined “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’ ”. It painted a picture of young people having bleak, impersonal encounters through apps including Hinge, and said that finding sex partners had become a process akin to ordering a takeaway.
McLeod looks queasy as he describes it. “It was just like, this is not the world that I wanted to create when I built Hinge. Gamification, flattening of people into little objects that you can toss left and right … We had done research at that point, and 80 per cent of app users had never even found a boyfriend or a girlfriend, so it wasn’t effective. It was just this addictive little game that you would play, and the whole experience was designed around being fun and engaging, and not around helping you find your life partner. Again, my story can’t be divorced from this, because 2015 is also when Kate came back.”
Earlier that year, McLeod had been planning a trip to London to launch Hinge in the UK. As far as he knew, Kate was still living there, and he emailed her again to ask if she’d meet him. She replied, explaining that she’d now moved to Switzerland and was engaged to her boyfriend, whom we’ll call Gabriel, but that Gabriel would be away that weekend, and so she could make time for a phone call. McLeod, in a gesture borrowed straight from a rom-com, immediately bought a plane ticket to Zurich. “So I land, and I’m going through customs, and she texts me, ‘Hey, you’re probably asleep, but text me when you wake up and we can chat.’ And I say, ‘Great, because I’m here.’ ”
Hearing this, I can’t help but think that one man’s romance might have been another woman’s stalking behaviour – but, of course, he knew Kate better than I do. They met at a café and, within minutes, he says, it was clear they were still in love. “And so she left the next week and came back,” he says happily. They’re now married. (Don’t worry about Gabriel – he’s married, too.)
McLeod admits that when Kate moved into his flat in New York, he’d never had a grown-up relationship before. “Looking back on it now, I think I had my first heartbreak when I was in middle school. I was so torn up over it. And from then on, relationships for me were about validation. It was just about, ‘Can I get this person to like me?’ And as soon as they would like me, I was over it and on to the next person, over and over again.”
What he’s learnt from his and Kate’s happy ending, however, surprises me. “Although my story may make it seem otherwise, it’s not actually about scanning 10,000 people to find your right person. It’s about helping people open up, be vulnerable and commit to something, and that’s where the real magic starts to happen. I think there are reasons to believe there are some matches out there that are better than others, but I don’t think you need a pool of 10,000 or 100,000.”
So he doesn’t believe in The One? He shifts uncomfortably. “That’s such a hard question, because Kate and I have made each other The One, I think, over time. Kate would say that we’re soulmates. But what we have done since she has come back is learn to really open up with all our flaws – which I was not OK with before. I was not OK with other people’s flaws or my flaws – just no flaws.” He smiles.
The swiping model played into that dysfunction, he says, because it’s about moving swiftly from one person to the next without any intimacy or emotional risk. As a result of these revelations, he changed tack with Hinge. He shed half his staff and started the app again from scratch.
The improved version, launched in 2016, is focused squarely on getting people into a meaningful relationship. The app’s slogan is “Designed to be deleted”. “The first thing that people notice is that the profiles are different: people can add captions to their photos and they also have these prompts, these questions that are designed to get you out on dates,” says McLeod. “We’ve really optimised those over time to figure out which ones work, which ones don’t, and which ones lead to conversations. No surprise, but it’s the ones that really make you think or ask you to reveal something about yourself, versus, ‘Where to find me at a party,’ or, ‘My go-to karaoke song,’ which don’t work.”
The other major difference is that there’s no swiping. Instead, you have to “like” something specific about the other person – one of their photos, one of their jokes – and you have the option of commenting, too. In my experience, there are still a lot of men on Hinge who just “like” the first photo they see, not bothering with a comment, thus tossing the ball into your court to start a conversation. But there are also some who introduce themselves with a thoughtful or funny response, having really read my profile, and that’s not something I’ve seen much on other apps.
“It makes people way more selective about whom they’re choosing and why, and so we can zero in on your type much better,” says McLeod. “We also show you upfront who likes you, so there’s no reason to like people just to see if they’ve liked you – which may have created a lot of engagement and fun, but also led to people feeling ghosted and rejected all the time, and that’s not good.”
He tests the success of the app by keeping an eye on how people’s relationships are developing, like a sort of nosy uncle. Your interactions trigger automated flags at HQ: when you match with someone, Hinge knows. When a conversation turns into a longer conversation, Hinge knows. When you exchange phone numbers, Hinge knows. (“We’re not keeping the phone numbers or anything,” McLeod says hastily.) The app also asks you to record when you’ve met up with someone and whether they were the type of person you’d like to see again.
All this information feeds into an algorithm that tries to show you people you’ll like, by roughly grouping you with others who have similar taste. Every day, Hinge sends you someone you’re theoretically “most compatible” with, and sends your profile to them, too. It’s a good idea in theory, although I’m not convinced the algorithms are up to the task of predicting human attraction. Some of mine have been so wildly not my type that I’ve felt vaguely insulted.
Nevertheless, “the relationship app”, as Hinge markets itself, is doing strikingly well. The American company Match Group (which also owns Match.com and Tinder) acquired a 51 per cent stake in June last year, and in February this year announced that it had acquired the whole business.
McLeod says the next step is to narrow down the kinds of people using it. “We already design an interface and a sign-up flow that rejects 20 per cent of people because they don’t want to put in effort, so that’s great. Now we have to start thinking about how to curate a community of people who are really looking for meaningful connections,” he says. “How do we remove the time-wasters and the detractors who are constantly ghosting people – who are clearly not looking for a relationship?”
I ask him for his top tips on using Hinge and he looks exasperated. “I can tell you that in a picture a man should not be smiling, looking directly at the camera, and a woman should be smiling, looking away from the camera,” he begins. Mentally scanning my own profile, I interject, “Really?”
“Yes, but who cares?” he says, rolling his eyes. “Ultimately what matters most is to put yourself out there, take time with the prompts and really allow yourself to be seen, because that’s how someone is going to find you and realise that you’re their type of person. It’s so clichéd, but just be yourself. That is the secret hack.”
It is clichéd. Nevertheless, I find it hard not to be swept up into McLeod’s romantic, optimistic vision, and I go home thinking that Hinge might actually change the way we date, and stop the process from being so soul-destroying. But then I bring myself back down to earth. I go through my app history for some cold, hard statistics.
On Hinge – don’t judge me – I’ve matched with 83 men since July. With 54 of those, the conversations fizzled out without us ever bothering to meet; 25 never even replied to my first message (and there was one I ignored altogether – sorry). I spoke to one on the phone and have met two more in real life, and one of those has turned into someone I genuinely like. A 1-in-83 hit rate suggests Hinge hasn’t quite become “the relationship app” yet; hasn’t quite cracked the secrets of human connection. And yet one, if it’s a good one, is enough. And if things carry on like this, I might even delete the app.