Ship: New dating app lets your friends choose your dates for you
New year, new dating app
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Your support makes all the difference.When it comes to finding love at first swipe, you might think the likes of Bumble and Tinder have all bases covered. But there’s a new kid on the block that’s switching things up.
Ship is an innovative dating app that allows friends to swipe for one another and takes its name from the phrase used as shorthand to endorse romantic relationships in popular culture e.g. “I ship Ron and Hermione”.
The idea is that your friends often know you better than you know yourself and may be able to identify suitable profiles of people you might’ve otherwise ignored.
It’s the brainchild of Aleen Kuperman, Jordana Abraham and Samantha Fishbein, creators of Betches, meme account-turned-millennial media company, and Match Group, which owns Tinder and OkCupid.
“Dating apps are a huge part of today’s dating culture and people in relationships are begging their single friends to let them swipe for them,” the Betches founders said in a statement.
Most dating app users will be familiar with the concept of swiping and screenshotting, with countless profiles doing the rounds on WhatsApp groups before non-swipers reach a unilateral decision on which way the singleton should go. What Ship has done is essentially turn this behaviour into an app.
“We felt like there could be a better way to incorporate your friends into your online dating experience,” the founders add.
Ship works by allowing single users to set up their own profile, prompting them to fill in the usual details on height, job, age etc.
Then, they can invite their friends, single or otherwise, to join their “crew” so they can swipe on their behalf.
A group chat will be automatically generated for each “crew” that a user belongs to so that they can engage in heated debates about matchmaking, share profiles with one another and take the opportunity to discuss the newest brunch spots.
You can choose your matches yourself, but your “crew” will be notified, likewise anytime you start a conversation with a match. But don’t worry, you can choose to turn this feature off and nobody in your group will be able to read your conversations once you start talking to someone – this isn’t an episode of Black Mirror.
But just how beneficial is it to relinquish control of your dating life to your friends? Sure, everyone loves a trusty wing-person, but when matchmaking becomes an online-only experience, dating experts are dubious as to how much this concept helps budding singletons.
While it sure is fun to play matchmaker, dating coach James Preece tells The Independent that thinking our friends see things in us we may not is far more nuanced when it comes to helping us with our love lives.
“Our friends know what we tell them,” he says, adding that very few of us have a good idea of what we’re looking for in a relationship, particularly if someone has been single for a long period of time.
“What we say we want, what we think we want, what we need and what we can get are all completely different things,” he adds, explaining that this can make it difficult for friends to make choices for us that accurately reflect our tastes.
Dating and relationships psychologist Madeleine Mason Roantree adds that the friends in your "crew" may also have their own agenda with regards to choosing dates for you, which can obviously complicate things further.
“The more open and honest you are to your friends about who you are and what you are looking for, the greater the chance of success you’ll have on this app,” she tells The Independent.
Also, there's no doubt that it’s hard enough to judge a dating profile for yourself. It’s a whole different ball game when you’re trying to decide how suited they will be for someone else.
What's their sense of humour like? How engaging are they to have a conversation with? Do they put people at ease?
These are things you might only really be able to make a judgement on in person, Mason adds.
“If you’re going to choose someone for your friend to date, it’s likely to be more beneficial to make an assessment in real life,” she says.
So, if you’re quite happy playing the field yourself via Bumble/Hinge/Happn/all of the above... maybe don’t jump ship quite yet.
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