Samuela John will never use LinkedIn for dating. Instead, the suitors came to see her.
Three different men entered his direct messages at the beginning of 2023. Although I had previously received messages on the workplace-focused social networking site, they were different. “They would sneak it up by saying, ‘I have this business and I’m looking for someone to fill this position,'” John, a 24-year-old private organizer in New York, told me. Although each of the men may rightly deny one or two habitual ties to her, she immediately made it clear that their motivations were not strictly professional: one of them worked in the oil industry, another in a domain she more than got rid of. of everything I had. I already did it to make a living. Someone else might have laughed at her advances, but John was newly single at the time and she intrigued her.
“I’m looking for someone who has a solid career, who is preferably well-off,” he said, “not to say I’m looking for someone who is a sugar daddy, but someone who can take care of himself. “On LinkedIn, she thought, she could simply assess whether a rogue prospect’s history, education, and career aspirations matched the kind of spouse he was contemplating for her. At least she’d know if this guy had a job.
While the other two failed to catch her interest, John sensed chemistry with the oil-industry man and decided to see where things would go. One conversation led to another until the two had spent 1 ½ months flirting over phone calls and text messages. It was during that phase of the relationship that John posed a question on TikTok: “Why is LinkedIn low-key a good dating app?”
It’s hard to estimate how many of LinkedIn’s 1 billion reported members are using the site to find love. The company doesn’t collect or release data on the matter, and its community-policies page prohibits using the platform for romantic advances, emphasizing: “LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, not a dating site.” But plenty of posts and articles suggest many LinkedIn users have long used the site for romance. And as LinkedIn use has soared in the age of remote work, using the platform to find a date has gotten more popular. But that leaves the question: Is it a good idea to mix work and love?
Dustin Kidd, a sociology professor at Temple University who studies social media and pop culture, said LinkedIn dating is part of a long culture of “dating tricks”: online teams designed for other purposes to download an appointment. “In the ’80s this happened with Friendster and then Myspace,” Kidd said, but it has since spread to countless platforms that are seemingly romance-free. Even fitness tracking sites like Strava are fair game. The common thread among social media sites hijacked through love is a single feature, Kidd said: direct messages.
“LinkedIn’s design helps focus on the professional, but any platform that offers a direct messaging option is probably also used for sexual and dating purposes,” he told me.
The relative ease and privacy of direct messages is helping other people use LinkedIn for romantic purposes, but it doesn’t explain why. In a time with so many compromised dating platforms, from giants like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge to niche apps like Feeld (for the unconventional), Pure (for the avoidant) and NUiT (for astrology enthusiasts), why combine Cupid’s arrow with corporate updates?
One answer may simply be the growing number of Americans who are tired of the roulette experience presented through trendy dating apps. In a 2023 Pew survey of American adults, about a third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app. at least once. More than a portion of women who have used the apps said they feel defeated by the number of messages they have gained in the last year, while 64% of men said they feel insecure by the lack of messages they have gained. Even though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they felt enthusiastic about the other people they were in contact with, an even larger proportion of respondents said they rarely or infrequently felt disappointed with their partners.
Online, it’s not easy to tell if the human behind a horny profile is who they say they are. Even relatively innocent virtual deceptions, such as replaced or ultra-flattering images of themselves that misrepresent their appearance to users or manipulated data about their interests and achievements, can be off-putting. Then there are other people who fabricate or borrow their entire profile, a practice known as “catfishing,” which rightly leaves anyone who is contacted through a stranger online with reason skeptical. All this deception has left many other people tired of dating apps as they look for tactics to regain some control over their romantic destiny.
LinkedIn’s appeal as a dating site, according to people who use it that way, is the platform’s ability to give back some of that control and boost the caliber of their prospects. Because the professional-networking site asks users to link to their current and former employers’ profile pages, it offers an additional layer of credibility that other social-media platforms lack. Many profiles also include first-person references from former colleagues and managers — real people with real profile pages.
Some users have taken this concept to the extreme. Last summer, British expat in Singapore Candice Gallagher caused a sensation after posting a video on TikTok in which she said that LinkedIn had “category A filters” to locate “category A men”, namely doctors, lawyers and “financial brothers. ” In the post, he touted the other filters you can use to search for concept partners. Most recently, a screenshot of tech entrepreneur George Hotz’s LinkedIn bio shared on X. In his bio, Hotz said he now uses the site “exclusively as a dating platform” and presented a catalog of required attributes – “smart, attractive, female, in San Diego or visiting” – for his conceptual partner “Message me and ask me out for a drink,” he wrote.
Even for those who are hesitant to use LinkedIn to look for dates, the site has a tool to screen romantic seekers discovered through traditional dating apps or in-person meetings.
“Social media is just one big dating app,” John told me. “Any type of social media where you can see people’s pictures can turn into a dating app. And LinkedIn is even better because it’s not just showing people’s fake lives.”
Charlotte Warren, a 30-year-old content writer living in Austin, sees things differently. Warren posts dating videos on TikTok and has earned more than her fair share of advances from unknown men on LinkedIn. Although he said the men typically reached out under the guise of professional networking or “mentoring,” many had simplified profile pages warning they were not seriously using the platform for work. Several of her friends and colleagues of all genders received similar messages. he said, and they were also discouraged by them.
“Everyone uses LinkedIn differently, but I think for the most part, people find it pretty invasive and inappropriate” for people to use it as a way to find romantic partners, Warren told me.
In a survey last year, respondents agreed. In May, Passport Photo Online surveyed more than 1,000 female LinkedIn users in the United States about dating on the platform. While the survey is strictly scientific, an overwhelming 91% said they had won romantic overtures or out-of-place messages on the platform. Three-quarters say that at one time or another, those unwanted developments have led them to restrict their activity on the site.
Caitlin Begg, the founder of the organizational-communications consultancy Authentic Social and a former LinkedIn employee, boiled the dilemma down to a question of consent. “When I sign up for a dating app, I am signing up to get messages around dating. I’m open to these kinds of messages,” Begg said. On LinkedIn, where no such understanding is in place, those who cross the platform’s implicit boundaries risk damaging their professional relationships and reputations. It’s kind of like flirting at the office or trying to pick up dates at a big company off-site event: It might kindle a mutual spark, but it might get you fired.
Jan Yager, a sociology professor at John Jay College and author of several books on friendship and dating, said LinkedIn users deserve caution: “LinkedIn’s primary purpose is professional connections and career-related benefits. ” “Anyone on LinkedIn deserves to be very careful not to do anything out of character when it comes to looking for a romantic date if that is your purpose; otherwise, it can backfire. “
On the other hand, the web has blurred the lines between people’s professional and non-public lives for years: Warren met her current boyfriend on TikTok, and my own association grew direct messages on Twitter, a site we used to build professional relationships and publicize our paintings as journalists. Even offline, long-term couples can cross paths in the workplace or professional settings. For those reasons, Yager admitted that LinkedIn can also live up to the hype by uniting those seeking romance organically and ethically. It all comes down to how.
“If someone is willing to take their time and let the initial professional dates evolve in a mutually respectful manner,” Yager said, “and if either party expresses their availability for a romantic date and needs to take the next step, what It can simply mean a phone call or Zoom or an in-person meeting in a safe public place; I hope it will be beneficial for everyone. “
Begg, the communications consultancy, suspects that the growing interest in LinkedIn for dating is at least partly due to a broader sense of social disconnection. For her work, she researches how digital communication influences what other people expect from relationships. , he says, more and more people are craving a slower, more original hookup bureaucracy.
“Notification culture — phone brain — has kind of overtaken things,” Begg told me. “As it pertains to dating apps, I think everyone, especially post-COVID, has become a little bit jaded. We’re sick of the same prompts from the same dating apps and the same kinds of outreach.”
Begg has noticed that more people are choosing to forgo virtual communication when possible and look for “real-life situations” to interact with, he said. Some of his friends have even gone so far as to delete dating apps from their phones so they can meet other people in person. For his part, Begg installed a landline in his apartment to make smartphone-free weekends less difficult, much to the delight of his analog-curious, camera-filming Gen Z cousins.
While LinkedIn is, of course, a virtual platform, Begg believes some users might be drawn to the site because of its preference for reflecting (or at least mimicking) an analog pleasure similar to that of a water cooler, he added. In workplaces, this experience has been reduced or lost altogether due to the rise of remote and hybrid work. It’s possible that a significant proportion of young professionals would have missed this kind of in-person camaraderie in the workplace, which can also help LinkedIn. recent rise in popularity among teenagers and young people in their twenties.
“We’ve so atomized,” Begg said. “And that is what I think other folks are looking to get on LinkedIn, a sense of collectivity. “
In addition, LinkedIn itself seems less strictly professional. ” LinkedIn influencers exist and I’m noticing a lot more content on LinkedIn that’s a little more social or outside of work,” said Warren, the TikToker who posts about dating. “People feel more comfortable saying, ‘This is how I spend my free time’ or ‘This is what I do after work. ‘”
As for John, she said that even though her flirtation with the tanker had faded before they could meet in person, she was still open to someone on the platform.
“I don’t think you’re going to come into this and say, ‘Okay, I’ll track my husband down on LinkedIn,'” John said. “I think you carry on as if you’re just networking, in an informal sense. And then, if you finish meeting the person, you see the vibes and move on from there. “
Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She’s based in New York City.
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