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Apparently, climate denial is a major turn-off.
New data from dating app OKCupid shared with The Hill on Thursday revealed that a potential match’s opinion on the climate crisis was the biggest “deal breaker” issue for love seekers.
“We have just seen over time, climate change being more and more this huge topic for our millennial[] daters especially,” OKCupid director of product marketing Jane Reynolds told The Hill. “People feel that with climate change, it says so much more about you — if that’s something that you believe in and are concerned about.”
Over the past three years, the app has surveyed six million users about their top “dealbreaker” issue when looking for a date. A total of 81 percent said that they were concerned about climate change. This is more than the 76 percent of 650,000 users who were concerned about gender equality last year and the 66 percent of two-million U.S. users who said they were worried about gun control.
The app also surveyed 250,000 global users last year and found that 90 percent of them said it was “important” that their date care about climate change.
This isn’t the first time that OKCupid has noticed the importance of climate for its users. In April 2021, the app announced on its blog that nine of 10 users said it was important to match with someone who cared about the environment. This prompted the app to add a Climate Change Advocate profile badge to profiles last April in honor of Earth Month. Users received the badge by answering “Yes” to the question “Do you want to support the environment by adding a Climate Change Advocate badge to your profile?” They were also added to a Climate Change Stack so that other Earth-conscious users could find them.
Reynolds told Yale Climate Connections in August of last year that the badge actually led to some dates. She said users had told her that they began talking to people because of their shared climate commitments and went on first dates volunteering to help the planet.
“So we love to hear those stories and we feel really confident that it helped people match on the things that are important to them,” she told Yale Climate Connections.
OKCupid data echoes national and global polls showing that people are increasingly concerned about the climate crisis. In April 2021, the app said there had been a more-than 450 percent increase in people mentioning climate change and the environment on their profiles over the preceding four years. People who expressed concern about climate also got 37 percent more likes and 11 percent more matches.
The most recent data shared with The Hill revealed that women are 7 percent more likely to care about climate than men. It was pretty much equally a dealbreaker issue across the U.S., with 94 percent of respondents in San Francisco, 90 percent in New York, 90 percent in San Diego, 89 percent in Los Angeles, 88 percent in Washington, D.C. and 85 percent in Miami saying it was important for their date to care about the issue.
However, Reynolds said that the OKCupid dating pool might not reflect the country overall, since it is “a progressive app” that tends to have users who are “more open-minded and concerned” about issues like climate.
“We’re everywhere around the world and in the U.S., but we certainly lean to more metro areas,” she told The Hill.
OKCupid was the fifth-most popular dating app in the U.S. in 2019 and had 1.79 million subscribers.