2020—A Digital Love Story

For all practical purposes, the Garden of Eden was a lonely place for Adam and so, God created Eve out of the first man’s RIB. Hold on, this is the 21st century and RIB stands for a gender-neutral “routing information base”—the data in a router that lists the routes to network destinations. For all those listless lonely hearts in this Covid-sequestered world, this is the route to find love. It’s called digital or online dating. The juicy apple even Satan couldn’t conjure. And more and more people are biting it since they are forced to stay indoors and told to be stay off fellow humans (at least six feet away). Far removed from the in-person stuff, digital dating allows people to meet over a computer app “like-minded” persons looking for, what else, a date. A blind date where you just log out if the hook-up doesn’t work out. Continue if it does. That’s half the guilt and convenient too, right? But the big question is: when is a digital date a real date? It is all very reminiscent of surrealism master Rene Magritte, who painted a picture of a pipe and wrote under it “This is not a pipe”—because, of course, it is an image of a pipe. The Treachery of Images, as the painting is called, also applies to online dating.

It’s not all about Adam either. When God created Eve and Satan played a practical joke, they didn’t foresee the modern, emancipated woman looking for love in a wired world trying to ride out a coronavirus pandemic. Take Ayandrali Dutta, 38 and a singleton. She has been de-stressing via online dating, sharing some good laughter, some stories and some promises to meet in future. “It’s great to meet in the evening over a glass of wine, virtually. But I have my rules, loud and clear. I never date a married man.” The good-natured romance is just one part of the story.

In the modern Eden, Adam and Eve are happy to have a side hustle, called innocent infidelity, the phrasal expression that allows extramarital virtual dating with half the guilt. Secretive platforms allow such flings where married people, or those in a steady relationship, live their fantasies. One such is Gleeden from France— a portmanteau of “Glee” and “Eden”, or the Garden of Eden. It advertises itself as the “first extramarital dating website for married and unfaithful people. Taste adultery and try a discreet relationship with your lover”.

The company, which claims to have a 100 per cent female team running it, gives top priority to member privacy and hence, has delinked the platform from social media. Its marketing director Solene Paillet says people prefer the mobile app more because of features such as a “discreet mode” in which Gleeden’s interface imitates Facebook and no one can tell. There’s also a “Shake to Exit” function, which allows users to close the app by just quickly shaking the phone. “That’s useful when the spouse sneaks up on you,” Paillet says. “Gleeden’s community is open to adults of all relationship statuses…married, separated, divorced, cohabitating, and single. And sexual orientations such as heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual.”

Since women are its preferred clientele, the company’s constant push is to address its audience through an all-female team. “As girls, we speak the same language and know what we need because we share the same values. That’s why our percentage of female subscribers is the highest in the industry. Women know the difference immediately when they are on Gleeden,” Paillet says. What could be the average age of its members? Ranges between 34 and 49—young enough to date, yet more mature than users found on dating sites for singles.

Online dating has been around for some time, but Indian women were a little off and out of character with such dalliances, while many men jumped onto such relationships blindsided by lust. Before the pandemic shut the world outside, women saw a virtual date with a tinge of snobbishness that was anathema to what was to come. But the Covid crisis has shown how the physical can be replaced with digital. QuackQuack, a leading app, says it has noticed 30 per cent surge in its number of woman users in India—Delhi-NCR being the most active, followed by Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. It crossed 10 million Indian users recently. “We are overwhelmed with the response from women,” says Ravi Mittal, the company’s founder. QuackQuack conducted a survey among 2,000 new users and found that chivalry exists in the millennial crowd. Who should pay on the first date? In response to the question, 73 per cent women won’t mind splitting the bill while 60 per cent men don’t mind footing the entire amount.

Bumble, a location-based app that allows only female users to make the first contact, found through a survey that dating during the pandemic has undergone a paradigm shift in India. Virtual relationships are becoming the new normal. This is what the figures say: 83 per cent are interested in dating, 81 per cent want deeper relationships, and 66 per cent are content with just chatting. Bumble also expanded its distance filters and removed the 100-mile-location cap—which allowed users to connect with a “match” within that radius. People can now search for a date anywhere in India.

The dating platforms are recording a serious uptick in membership and user base since March. Tinder, the forerunner in the business since it was introduced on an American college campus in 2012, has registered a spike in time spent by users chatting with their matches—up by an average of 20 per cent around the world, and 39 per cent in India. Gleeden reports an upsurge too. “Currently, subscriptions have inc­reased by 70-plus per cent and we are expecting more,” Paillet says. OkCupid, an app for single millennials, has reported a spike in virtual dates around the world, inc­luding a 26 per cent increase in conversations in India. Singles prefer such “slow dating” with long chit-chats and 85 per cent OkCupid users believe an emotional connection must precede physical contact.  “People aren’t able to meet in-person, but they still find a way to date. There have been over 50 million intro messages sent on OkCupid over the past month among daters connecting for the first time,” says Ariel Charytan, CEO, OkCupid.

That brings us the question: are people getting more time because of Covid restrictions to slow date, spend hours chatting with a stranger? Shalini Singh, founder of andwemet, another dating app, thinks so. “The numbers have gone up by an average of 400 per cent week on week. The rational could be that people are having the me-time slightly more.”

It is also observed that there is fatigue in trusting online matchmaking platforms. The question now is: will coronavirus change the dating scene permanently or online dating is a transitory comfort standing in for the real deal? Like Adam meeting his date, Eve, in a favourite restaurant in a scenic brick building in the town’s centre…the skies are grey but the rain holds off while she walks in. Not even the best digital native can replicate that scene on an app’s interface.