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There’s an app for ‘reflecting’ on your dates and turning them into data

There’s an app for ‘reflecting’ on your dates and turning them into data

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Sorry! If I were a teen, I’d do this all day

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evolve

Most people who are looking for love in a densely populated city have one problem: how (how?) to keep track of the many dozens of promising romantic options they have at any given time. I’m sure you can relate. You’re busy! You have time to date 12 people but not to think about whether you like them. Wow, finally, there’s an app that gets it.

Evolve, launched post-beta last month by a small team in Boston, is a “datings and relationships manager.” It’s pretty simple, and I guess a brilliant idea because these four dudes got $1 million in seed money for it.

wow, finally

Every time you go on a date, you just rate qualities of the outing from 1 to 10, type in if you got a smooch, “more,” or whether you’d rather not say. (That’s your business!) Then, you can rate the date spot (so others can learn from you), and, well, you know — rate the person you were with on a numeric scale. You can also add pros and cons, like “Trustworthy,” “Sketchy,” “Ambitious,” or “Baggage.” It’s cold, but what are you gonna do, trust your gut? Ridiculous, your gut is an idiot. That’s how you got here.

According to Evolve’s promotional materials, you have been waiting for this all along: a chance to “weigh your options,” “reflect on your dates,” and “see your patterns.” Just ask Stephanie Gold from New York, NY, who said exactly one of these things verbatim when they spoke to her:

You can add photos and basic info about people to the app manually, or you can take screenshots of their dating app profiles and let Evolve pull information out for you. That feature is admittedly fun to use and something I would do a lot if I were maybe just 18 months younger than I am right now.

The more info you input about a potential romantic partner over time, the more the app will tell you about whether you like them. And the more romantic partners you add to the app, the more it will be able to tell you about your “patterns.” Evolve also gives you “insights” based on the dating behaviors of other people your age, e.g., Are you getting as many second dates as everyone else? As many first-date hook-ups? Picking date spots that don’t suck? Going on enough dates per month?

When you are done with someone you can move them to “the past,” which is nice, I suppose, if you’re not the sort of person that will haunt forever for no reason.

As with just about every modern dating solution I’ve ever heard of, this is obviously insane and nobody’s feelings work this way. But then again, the same could be said of the world’s most revered and time-honored dating solution — a high school cafeteria game of MASH. And that doesn’t stop anyone from doing it, because it’s super fun. Love is absolutely so dumb, there’s no attempted solve for it that could be dumber. So that’s nice.

Jokes aside, it is my responsibility to beg you not to actually use this app to make decisions about people. But I don’t think it will hurt you to peruse Evolve’s hilarious Instagram. It’s what I imagine the world would look like if I did bath salts and then sat in an American Eagle for 12 hours. Very cool.

(“Classic fort date.”)

You can download Evolve in the App Store if you want. I can’t stop you.