This Sunday brings 'dating's Superbowl,' Match.com says
Commentary: The dating site estimates a 42 percent spike in searches for love this Sunday. But why now?
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
Has love passed you by without so much as a look or a wave? Do you feel like you'll never meet cute -- or even tolerably attractive -- before your time is up on this fickle Earth?
On Sunday, your heart may soar.
To you, I say: Gird your loins. Sunday may be your lucky day. For it's the most active day of the year for online dating, Match.com insists.
It calls Sunday, Jan. 7 Dating Sunday, a moniker it invented and hopes you'll love.
In case you don't, the company also described this day to me as "dating's Superbowl."
Match's says its more than 20 years of data suggests Sunday will bring a 42 percent increase in new singles coming to its site.
This, therefore, maximizes your chances. Or, at least, offers you hours of fascination seeing who's new on the site, who's been there a while and who's someone a bot invented.
But why do so many flock on this particular day?
"Singles are feeling inspired and motivated to meet someone in the beginning of 2017," a Match spokeswoman told me. "They've just spent the holidays with their families, getting an earful of dating advice from their aunt and their parents prying into their dating lives and asking when they're going to get grandkids." (It seems that uncles are somehow free of such hectoring qualities.)
Half of single Americans have an online dating profile, Match says. So, I fancy, do half of married Americans.
Online dating has surely lost its stigma and become the de rigueur manner to meet anyone, with a Pew study reporting that 15 percent of US adults have used online dating sites or mobile dating apps. Why, one of my married friends, having recently moved to New York, is even using dating app Bumble just to make friends.
At least that's what he says.
Surely, though, a lot of people still meet in bars, don't they? It seems not. Match claims that only 7 percent of people met their last date at a bar.
Still, do you want to spend all day staring into your dating app, hoping this will be the moment? No, you don't.
Helpfully, Match claims 5:55 p.m. PT will be the peak moment on the peak day to have your loving senses piqued.
But what if you log on at that time and find nothing? Well, there's always OKCupid. I understand that site's the home for, well, DTF.
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