A few years ago, a single friend of mine did what many only dream of: she stopped swiping. She was still seeking a romantic partner, but she was tired of wading through the equivalent of an Olympic-size swimming pool of new strangers each day to try to find one. Instead, she asked her friends to set her up with people they knew, betting there was someone already within her larger circles who might make a better match. She wound up on several dates with “great people,” she told me recently, and while there weren’t sparks with every single one, “it was all positive experiences, made richer because of our mutual connections.”
“The apps are just so overwhelming, especially as a woman,” she continued. But your friends know you and know what you’re looking for, “so asking them to refer you to other people takes a lot of the vetting out of the equation.”
My friend is just one of a growing number of young people who are disillusioned with dating apps and looking for something deeper. It’s safe to say that the cold, remote ding of a new Tinder match may never truly cut it for a generation raised on Disney Channel yearning and love at first “I think you dropped this.” Still, some apps are trying to meet the moment, attempting to spark connections based on more factors than just proximity and hotness.
“You will never trust a computer more than your friends out at dinner.”
One way of doing that, as my own friend figured out, is to involve friends in the process. There’s not only been an uptick in double-date features on apps like Tinder, but an emergence of apps devoted entirely to double dates, like PlotTwist (formerly Fourplay Social). These at least give users the illusion of dating as part of a community instead of solely as an individual — the idea being that when you’re accountable to a community, you behave better, and you show up more authentically.
One app is taking this trend a step further, attempting to mimic “friends-first dating,” or matching through mutuals. Rather than siccing the entire population of dating hopefuls within a five-mile radius on you at once, Cerca uses your phone contacts to connect you to a more curated edit of eligibles who are all part of your greater social ecosystem, whether you share a mutual friend, a former coworker, or even an ex. The app, which quickly became popular on several college campuses, was conceived in part by a student at Georgetown named Myles Slayton, who saw a need for a new kind of swiping experience.
“It’s not that people hate dating apps, they hate the products that are out there,” Slayton, now 23 and living in New York City, tells Popsugar. Especially given the “scary direction” of AI, young people desperately need more reliable ways to connect that are bound to real opinions from their real friends, he says — not the disembodied advice of a machine.
“Soon you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s not,” Slayton says. “But what won’t change is going out to dinner with your friends; you’re only going to value more what your friend thinks about something. You will never trust a computer more than your friends out at dinner.”
The mechanics of the app are relatively simple: for each profile, a user can see the mutual contacts they have in common. If that user is interested, they can send a “like,” which will notify the owner of the profile, giving them the chance to like them back (or not), depending on vibes and, of course, what info they can squeeze out of their mutual contacts about the user. Any matches that are made all drop at the same time every night — so if you don’t match with someone, you never know.
Some have raised concerns about the ethics and safety of handing over your contact list to a third-party app. In April of this year, a computer science student at Yale accused Cerca of allowing for an “insane” security breach, leaving some user data like phone numbers, sexual preferences, and even passport scans vulnerable to potential hackers. Slayton says Cerca’s team “values the privacy of our users” and has taken precautions to prevent security breaches, like prohibiting screenshots and screen recordings. But ultimately Slayton insists that sharing contacts is the only way to make the online dating experience more tolerable.
“If you want to match with mutuals, you have to do it through your phone book,” Slayton says. “We’re not selling your data. We’re not asking for your ID, or your bank account. We don’t read your messages. [But] you need to have your friends on Cerca for it to work.”
And while everyone has a different level of tolerance for the security of their data and their friends’ data, 23-year-old former Cerca user Dana* cites a different kind of safety as the number one reason she started using the app in the first place.
“There’s more incentive to treat others with respect and behave in a manner we are proud of when we know our friends or mutuals could hear about it.”
“As a woman, I had to be extremely careful who l decided to go on dates with from the other apps because these people are total strangers, and you can’t be sure of who they are or what their intentions are from a few text conversations,” she tells Popsugar.
On dating apps, Dana says, people can present themselves however they want, and that’s true for Cerca, too. But where Cerca differs is that Dana can reach out to their mutual contact and vet her dates first, “or basically check their references to understand more about who they are before I go out with them.”
The friends-first dating model had unexpected ripple effects for Dana, whose friends in NYC still use the app. “There’s more incentive to treat others with respect and behave in a manner we are proud of when we know our friends or mutuals could hear about it,” she says.
Dana used the app briefly herself before settling into a committed relationship with her current boyfriend, whom she actually first met on Hinge — though they didn’t immediately start dating. First, they discovered they had a bunch of friends in common, then they struck up a friendship of their own. It wasn’t until months later, when they both had graduated from college, that they got together — an irresistibly romantic arc. Dana herself is hardly immune to the meet-cute daydream: her “ideal scenario” involves meeting someone “‘in the wild’ rather than on an app” and falling for someone “who’s kind of been there all along, an invisible string, if you will.”
As long as we keep chasing meet-cutes in our personal lives, there will always be tech entrepreneurs who try to synthesize those meet-cutes into algorithms and engineer them on-demand. Does that suck the magic out of it? Slayton would say no. But as for my friend who went analog in her search for love, ditching the apps altogether, the magic isn’t in the matches, but in the intention: to come together and fortify the bonds that are already there.
“It’s one of the best feelings in the world to bring people together and to see people you love start to love each other, too,” my friend told me, reflecting on how she’s also started connecting friends of her own, sometimes romantically, other times platonically. “It weaves a richer tapestry of community, which is kind of the whole point.”
*Name has been changed for privacy.
Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she’s covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.