Valentine Week - 4

“Modern dating is moving more and more towards dating apps. This is an immediate gratification or rejection in many ways, and often times skips the normal courtship of talking and getting to know each other. I see the dating start and burn out much faster before they find the one. Dating has changed due to people focusing more on career into longer years, and prioritizing this, or they were married young, divorced, and are back out in the dating world. They need new avenues to meet people and connect.” -Psychologist and counselor, Nikki Martinez, Psy.d., LCPC

I am not sure of what she is saying. But dug into dating apps famous in India to find out the size of online dating culture.

Tinder's Indian user count grew a staggering 400 percent in 2015. The amount of daily swipes has jumped from 7.5 million to 14 million. Let's settle on 20-25 million by today as we speak. Truly Madly users count stands at 2.2 million as of 2016.

Other popular ones are Woo, OKCupid, Aisle. We can all agree of another 2 million users on these platforms. Assuming part overlap, there looks like nearly 25 million are looking for partners online.

Haa, but aren't we ignoring the elephant in the room? The big fat blue "f" elephant. In 2015, Facebook touched 125 million users in India, making it the social networking giant's second largest market globally, men made up an overwhelming 76% of the user base. An APAC report in 2016, says that the overall social media usage in the country has grown by 23% since March 2015.

This is getting to be significant proportion of the Indian youth population and here are few of my observations.

1. Online space as much as it is proving to be safer to transact is also now getting comfortable for youngsters to trust the people they come across

2. Distance matters and location advantage provided by dating apps is a game changer

3. The seriousness spectrum is hard to decode as it changes with the individual's mind set at that point. The view changes so fast with experiences

4. There is a thing called finding someone online and there is an entirely different thing of loving online. Only one specific way of communication as primary (sometimes only) preference is in itself a huge subject to ponder upon

Above all, I still have trouble believing the probability of diving into cheating, disappointments, heart breaks is higher here than it can be in real world meet-cutes.