The “loneliest generation” will now be able to add their emotional support friend to their Tinder profile.
On Tuesday, the dating app launched “Double Date,” a feature that allows you to create a joint profile with your bestie and swipe right on other pairs for a group date.
Tinder hopes the new feature will be a hit with younger generations, especially Gen Z.
Gen Z accounts for over half of its global user base, the company said. During testing, which began earlier this year, about 90% of Double Date profiles were under 29 years old.
Tinder and its parent company, Match Group, need Gen Z more than ever.
Match Group’s new CEO, Spencer Rascoff, said one of the biggest problems facing dating apps like Tinder is the “failure to recognize and respond to” what younger generations want.
“We have to build lower-pressure ways for Gen Z users to interact with each other,” Rascoff said during the company’s first quarter earnings call in May.
He said he thinks new features like Double Date will “start to change user perception of Tinder.”
Gen Z’s social dilemma
A number of studies have found that Gen Z, typically considered those born between 1997 and 2012, is lonely.
Nearly a quarter of adults ages 18 to 29 in the US said that they felt lonely, Pew Research Center reported in a September survey of over 6,000 participants. For comparison, 6% of adults 65 and older said the same.
Coming of age in the pandemic meant fewer in-person interactions, and Gen Z is taking their transition into adulthood slow. They aren’t rushing to marry and have children, according to Jean Twenge, a psychologist and the author of “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future.”
For Gen Z, dating has been largely defined by the chilling rejection felt from ghosting and the endless swiping on dating apps.
In an effort to help navigate that, matches on Tinder’s Double Date are put into a group chat of both pairs to coordinate a hangout. Tinder said it only requires one like per pair to match.
Group dates can be a casual way to break the ice and explore a human connection before deciding if there’s a romantic connection.
Other startups, like Fourplay, have apps built entirely around group dating. Dating events, too, are en vogue as users experience dating app burnout and swap swiping for in-person connection.
Tinder is not alone in vying for Gen Z. Bumble is also grappling with how to meet the generation’s needs.
“I think the reason Gen Z has abandoned the apps is because they’re getting on the apps and they’re not seeing who they want to see and they’re feeling two things, which I take full accountability for at Bumble,” Bumble’s newly-returned CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd told The New York Times in May. “They’re feeling rejected and they’re feeling judged.”
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