Taking a break from online dating
02-Aug-2017 05:24
well, in this crazy day and age, first and foremost, someone who did not vote for Trump,” says a profile on Bumble, a dating app in which women make the first move.
“His presidency has created this new deal-breaker,” said Laurie Davis Edwards, a relationship coach and founder of the website
In the treacherous, amusing and sometimes rewarding world of online dating, Donald Trump has become the newest way to find – or reject – a romantic match. “Trump voters please swipe left, and go to your room and think about what you’ve done,” wrote another Tinder user, referring to the way to dismiss a potential date in the app. Dating, online and off, is more supercharged with politics than it’s ever been, said online dating experts who specialize in matchmaking.
It would never work,” one user says in the opener to his bio on Tinder, a popular mobile dating platform that boasts 26 million matches per day. Since his election, the president has become a new measure of compatibility – much like someone’s age, religion, wanting kids or simply finding things in common.
“But I have clients all over the country, and people are saying, ‘If you’re a Trump supporter, swipe left.’ ” More people are online dating than ever before, according to data collected by the Pew Research Center last year.Those numbers swell to to 70 percent and 62 percent, respectively, for people who vote regularly or are otherwise politically active.It also concluded there’s broad agreement – 70 percent for Democrats and 63 percent for Republicans – that a person’s political beliefs say “a lot about the kind of person they are,” Pew found.“It really does suck,” said Alexandra Gonzalez, 22, who lives in Sacramento and voted for Trump.
“It’s something that I don’t necessarily say on a first date or even a second date. With such a controversial topic, it’s something that I tend to veer away from.” Anti-Trump users could be finding fewer matches online.Fifteen percent of all Americans reported using an online dating site or mobile app, up from 11 percent in 2013, and dating online has nearly tripled since among 18- to 24-year-olds over the same period. The outsized mention of Trump on dating sites could reflect the growing partisan divide across the country.