In a 2023 Pew survey of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they’d felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches.

Online, it isn’t always easy to know whether the human behind an alluring profile is who and what they say they are. Even relatively innocuous virtual deceptions – such as outdated or ultraflattering photos of themselves that misrepresent how they look in person or fudged facts about their interests and accomplishments – can be disheartening. Then there are the people who fabricate or steal their entire profile, a practice known as “catfishing,” leaving anyone getting hit up by a stranger online justifiably skeptical. All these deceptions have left many people with dating-app fatigue as they search for ways to take back some control of their romantic fate.

LinkedIn’s focus given that a dating site, according to individuals who use it that way, ‘s the platform’s ability to surrender several of you to definitely handle and you can boost the quality of their prospects. As the elite-network website asks pages to relationship to the most recent and you will previous employers’ reputation profiles, it has got a supplementary layer away from trustworthiness that almost every other social-media systems lack. Of several pages likewise incorporate basic-individual recommendations off former associates and you may managers – real people who have actual character pages.

For even those who bashful regarding having fun with LinkedIn in order to angle to possess schedules, this site happens to be a chance-in order to device to have vetting romantic people discovered courtesy old-fashioned dating applications or perhaps in-people experience

Some users have taken this idea to the extreme. Last summer, a British expat in Singapore, Candice Gallagher, made waves after post a beneficial TikTok video in which she said LinkedIn had “A-grade filters” for finding “A-grade men” – namely, doctors, lawyers, and “finance bros.” In the post, she touted the various filters you could use to track down ideal partners. More recently, a screenshot of the tech entrepreneur George Hotz’s LinkedIn bio was shared on X. In his bio, Hotz declared that he now used the site “exclusively as a dating platform” and laid out a catalog of requisite attributes – “intelligent, attractive, female, in or visiting San Diego” – for his ideal match. “Send me a message and invite me out for a drink,” he wrote.

“Social networking is just one large matchmaking software,” John informed me. “Almost any social media where you could pick man’s images are able to turn on a dating application. And LinkedIn is even better since it is not only showing man’s phony lifetime.”

A question of consent

Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content creator who lives in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts TikTok films about matchmaking and has received more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Though she said that the men were usually reaching out under some flimsy guise of professional networking or “mentorship,” many had bare-bones profile pages that suggested they weren’t seriously using the platform for work. Several of her friends and colleagues across genders have received similar messages, she said, and were similarly put off by order a spanish wife them.

“Folk spends LinkedIn in a different way, but I do believe usually, someone find it rather invasive and incorrect” for people to use it as a way to see intimate partners, Warren explained.