Turns out, gorgeous gorgeous girls get vaccinated (and boosted, too).
There’s a lot of different things that can make your dating profile stand out among the rest. You can add a well-crafted bio, include adventurous pictures of yourself from faraway places, and insert fun facts about your hobbies and interests. But as we continue dating through the pandemic, another alluring factor emerges: COVID-19 vaccinations.
As it turns out, those who are vaccinated get more likes and swipes than those who do not. OkCupid recently added “Will you get the COVID-19 vaccine?” to a series of questions users could ask others. Those who responded “yes” ended up receiving 20% more likes and 12% more matches than those who answered “no.”
“Basically, getting the vaccine is the hottest thing you could be doing on a dating app right now,” OkCupid spokesperson Michael Kaye told The New York Times.
Tinder reiterates a similar sentiment and found the same trend to be true. In its Future of Dating report, Tinder cites an eightfold increase in the word "vaccine" and a 20-fold increase in the word "antibodies" in member bios since the start of the pandemic.
For many, adding your vaccination status may be an easy way to establish common ground with people you’re interested in. In today’s day and age, adding your vaccine status is similar to displaying your relationship with drugs and alcohol or your political party.
But besides establishing a common perspective, it can also ease the concerns of health-conscious daters. Meeting new people always carries some risk, but as we know, vaccinated people are far less at risk for transmitting COVID-19, according to a recent study. As the CDC writes on their website, “fully vaccinated people who still get COVID-19 are likely to have a milder, shorter illness and appear to be less likely to spread the virus to others.”
Even the White House is bringing dating apps into its latest effort to push Americans to get their COVID shots. Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, Match, Bumble, OkCupid are incorporating vaccine statuses into their apps and will be offering incentives to daters who’ve received their shots, according to a White House press release.
Notable perks include super likes and super swipes, which Tinder has already adopted for vaccinated users. Those who have been vaccinated will have access to free premium advantages like the coveted “Super Like,” a way to show your potential match you like them before both swiping right.
Among the other perks is being able to filter through only vaccinated users. OkCupid allows vaccinated users the ability to set parameters and search for potential dates by vaccination status. A differentiation women-owned app Bumble has introduced as well. The app allows users to add a “vaccinated” badge to their profiles.
Hopefully, there’ll come a day when the pandemic is a thing of the past and we won’t need to add our vaccine status to our bio to establish connections. But for now, we will use this factor as an advantage to connect with more people and accept (perhaps, begrudgingly) all the vaccine puns that come along the way.