On the market right now, there is a deluge of dating apps, the most successful one being Tinder (at the time of writing)
And of course, for most of us living above the poverty line, looking for companionship is a desire that needs to be fulfilled. Current technology is either limited or the app creators have not been able to inject the most crucial element into the apps — emotions (which translate into love)
Personally I think OKCupid and Tinder have done a good job at creating a two sided market and give users a platform to connect with each other. However apart from connecting, there’s little else to turn the spark into a passionate lasting flame.
Both rely heavily on mutual matching followed by a series of exchanges of messages. It’s a good start, but it’s rather difficult to get flirty with 26 letters 14 punctuation marks and 1300 emojis (assuming you are running iOS9 — and honestly, I doubt anyone uses more than 30 different types of emojis, most of us have no clue what some of them even mean)
Looking at how my single friends have fared, I think they is a lot of space in the romance market.
Ingredients to start a romance
- trust
- spontaneity
Process to romance:
- Sharing information (this is the trust building exercise. More trust, more information is shared)
- Dating (when trust and interest both reach a certain level, individuals will go on dates)
- Forming a bond
Romance is similar to chemistry. A set of conditions to create bonds, a complimentary set to break them. Different molecules will have different conditions, so scientifically I think people operate at a similar model. (We’re really not as special as we would like to believe ourselves to be)
It would be interesting to create a periodic table of people (the closest we have is the DSM V at the moment) and figure out how best to create bonds with each other. The closest “science” we have to cultivating romantic relationships are horoscopes. It’s interesting to ancient wisdom dictates certain horoscopes are better suited for each other. In some ways this makes sense. If we turn back to the chemistry analogy, there will be individuals who are like noble gases and will prefer to remain single, while others are heavily volatile but when paired with the right compliment, they will form a stable relationship like sodium, chlorine and common table salt.
It would be fascinating to dive deeper into understanding how people function. For now it feels like the periodic table pre 1869 before Mendeleev came along.
With better classification, better understanding of each classification, people will have a much better chance and much faster methods to finding their soul mate.
I guess when the time comes, the whole notion of romance would be dead :)
