The highest seat in (digital) love

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View in browser  |  Your newsletter preferences Not yet a subscriber? By Samantha Spengler | 11.04.23 It's cuffing season! Halloween is over. The temperature is dropping and the wind suddenly has a bite. In the parlance of the dating community, it is officially the start of "cuffing season," a term reserved for those colder months when single people enter relationships and people in relationships enter engagements. It seems we instinctually initiate or strengthen attachment before we head indoors to hibernate. For the past decade, we've done this largely with the aid of dating apps. Cuffing season turned into a cuffing year in March 2020 when a pandemic forced us to stay inside the safety of our homes. One year after the shutdown, WIRED writer Arielle Pardes checked in with the CEO of Match Group—the behemoth that owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match.com, and more—to learn more about what happened when the very thing the company depends on, in-person socialization, became impossible. In "When the Boss of All Dating Apps Met the Pandemic," Pardes details Match's then-CEO Shar Dubey's ascension to the highest seat in (digital) love and her vision for the future of dating. Many believed that quarantine would negatively impact Match Group's bottom line. If dating IRL was no longer an option, people asked, would consumers stop using dating apps altogether? It turned out that rather than gut dating culture, Covid-19 reinvented it. Housebound singles flocked to the apps in droves and swiped through potential matches more than they ever had before. Match Group rushed to implement video capabilities, causing users to spend even more hours on their apps. Dubey told Pardes that moving forward, she believes people will stick around online for longer and that "getting to know each other and flirting is going to be more online than offline." She even suggested that dating might increasingly take place in the metaverse. More than two years later, pandemic-era predictions like this haven't fully materialized, at least not yet. People are visiting brick-and-mortar stores more frequently. They are going back to the office and watching movies in actual theaters. Dating still requires a certain amount of offline connection and hasn't yet transitioned to the metaverse. However, I think it's fair to say that some things have permanently shifted. So I ask, how has the pandemic impacted human connection for you? Maybe you're single and dating, or single and not dating. You might be in a budding but committed relationship or a decades-long marriage. Maybe you're part of a polycule who met on Feeld. No matter the relationship status, Covid-19 has universally altered the way we find and nurture love. I'd love to hear about your experience. Leave a comment below the story or send me an email. See you next week! Sam Samantha Spengler, Research Editor Read the Full Story Originally published in April 2021. When the Boss of All Dating Apps Met the Pandemic Tinder. Hinge. OkCupid. Match. A year ago, Shar Dubey became the CEO of a multibillion-dollar matchmaking empire. Then singles everywhere went into lockdown. You Might Also Like 'Date Me' Google Docs and the Hyper-Optimized Quest for Love Some people have ditched dating apps—and opted to bare their souls via a public, view-only link instead. Love, Loss, and Pig Butchering Scams Bruce had kind eyes and dressed well. Evelyn fell for him on Hinge, and then he stole $300,000. Now, she's following the money trail. People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science Large data sets provide intriguing—and dismaying—insights into who we're drawn to and how much that matters for our romantic happiness. I Uncovered an Army of Fake Men on Hinge They had gleaming teeth, perfect hair, and selfies with baby animals. But could they pass the Turing test? This Is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale Hired as customer service reps, these freelancers were instead tasked with luring in the lonely and lovestruck through a network of dating and hookup sites. ADVERTISEMENT Nightmare Scenario Last week we looked at the digital economy's nightmare scenario—when a firm takes millions of dollars from donors to build a cryptocurrency and then fails to deliver. In Gideon Lewis-Kraus' "Inside the Crypto World's Biggest Scandal," the organization tasked with creating the coin "tez" and the high-minded decentralized infrastructure around it flounders because its creators put their trust in the wrong person. I asked Classics subscribers whether they believed it was possible to create a decentralized system dependent on trust in technology without having to first trust another human. Reader Leonard Glantz challenged the premise of the question itself. "The first question that needs to be addressed is why anyone needs a 'decentralized system' in the first place," Glantz wrote. "Crypto has only been useful for drugs dealers, outlaw states like North Korea, terrorists and scammers, and it is traded between a few true believers inside an "economy " entirely separate from the real economy. In the years that cryptocurrency has existed, has it solved any problems or produced anything socially useful?"   Tell me about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories, and each week I'll feature one of you here. Write to me at samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include "CLASSICS" in the subject line. Or, simply join the conversation by posting a comment below the article. GET WIRED Our Fall Sale is Officially live! Subscribe to WIRED for only $29.99 $5. That includes subscriber-only content like Steven Levy's Plaintext column, plus FREE WIRED stickers as a special bonus! ADVERTISEMENT Have questions or comments? 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