Spending time on dating apps, I know from experience, can make you a little paranoid. The gnawing suspicion is a common one. The idea was so familiar to the researchers whom I interviewed while reporting this article that I hardly needed to explain it.
Some wariness of dating sites is understandable. One recent investigation found that, more and more, apps are nudging people to pay for perksβvisibility boosts, unlimited likesβmarketed as tools for finding love.
But recently, I started wondering whether another solution might be out there, one that still allows people to meet online and set up a date rather than begging friends for a setup or hoping for a meet-cute. A handful of them actually exist.
Some are run by governments, and at least one option comes from scientists. So I set out to explore these alternatives, hoping to understand whether the experience of virtual courtship might ever change.
The most common type of nonprofit dating app, I quickly discovered, is the state-sponsored site, which is typically created in response to flagging marriage and fertility rates. Guixi, a city in China, unveiled a dating-app venture in ; it draws on state-gathered data to make matches for its customers and then sends them off on blind dates.
