From catfishing, to ghosting and breadcrumbing, online dating can be a hellscape, but recently one issue has been uniting its users, and, more importantly, helping them to get laid. In case you needed another incentive to join the fight against impending ecological collapse, new data from dating site OkCupid has shown that it’s hot to care about climate change.
OkCupid rolled out a feature earlier this month that lets users filter out climate change deniers when searching for a potential partner. The company also said there’s been a 240 per cent increase in mentions of environmental terms on people’s profiles like “climate change,” “environment,” “global warming,” “Greta Thunberg” and “recycle.”
97 per cent of OkCupid’s users believe climate change is real, and 82 per cent say they’re concerned about it. The app matches people based on shared interests and beliefs, so even if you don’t have the ‘climate denier’ filter on, showing a lack of concern for the environment could leave you with very slim-pickings to choose from.
“Since your match percentage with someone shows how compatible you two are, if you are a climate change activist and they think climate change is fake news, your match percentage is going to decrease,” Michael Kaye, OkCupid’s Global Communication Manager, told Gizmodo.
Beyond the realm of chirpsing, concerns over the climate reflect a very real shift in attitudes occuring in society more widely. The World Economic Forum’s annual report found that, for the first time in its 15-year history, the top five risks facing the world are all linked to the climate crisis. These included extreme weather, climate action failure, natural disasters, biodiversity loss, and human-made environmental disasters.
So while we continue to wade through countless dating profiles and ponder the precarious future of apps, we can at least swipe with the assurance that climate denial – whether it’s URL or IRL – has no place in 2020.
