Welcome to the app where you can meet the person of your dreams, but only if you’re posh enough

Inner Circle may be one of the least savoury ones out there, but the world is now teeming with depressing exclusivist apps. Gluten Free Singles, anyone?

(Rex Features)

They don’t let any old rapscallion into the Inner Circle. All hopeful singles go through a strict vetting process to ensure that the dating app’s members are “ambitious” and “appealing” enough for each other. Websites like LinkedIn and Facebook are perused by Inner Circle employees to judge your eligibility in terms of education, photos and career. The result is that 35,000 rich Londoners are living in an exclusive dating bubble. In a city that has the biggest wealth gap in the country, this is the last thing we need.

Everyone has heard the urban myth that someone’s friend’s auntie’s boyfriend’s daughter found the love of her life on Tinder. The reality looks a lot more like this: you’ll end up on a date with Roger, who is rotting away in sales and marketing. After a few awkward meet-ups, Roger will roger you. Then he’ll “ghost” you (vanish into thin air). This is because Roger has lots of other girls on an app in his jeans pocket who don’t mind his boring job, and the app that facilitates his rogering them has led him to completely devalue his current relationship with you.

This kind of superficial online dating, although bleak, is tolerable. Elitist dating apps are not. A breakdown of the Inner Circle’s member profiles by Business Insider shows that most men on the app are in finance, closely followed by consulting. What’s more, a recent survey by the app also showed that 60 per cent of its female members admitted refusing a second date with a man after finding out he had a lower salary than them. And 41 per cent even confessed they would definitely ditch a man if he "expected them" to chip in for the restaurant bill.

Not only is this app billed as exclusively for “high end” people, its users are perpetuating some very questionable values. If eHarmony is right, then in the future half of us will be dating those in our own “class” and men will be in control of all the money.

The Inner Circle is not, however, the only culprit of exclusivity. Singles are becoming overwhelmed with the choice they have on conventional dating sites, which means that new niche dating apps are popping up all the time, and thriving on people’s need to express themselves in the narrowest of terms.

Farmers Only is a thing for god’s sake. With the tag line “City folks just don’t get it!”, it doesn’t get much more exclusive than that. What if I fancy a romp on a hay bale? Do I have to milk a cow to qualify? There is also Gluten Free Singles. Seriously. We live in a diverse society full of perfectly suitable weirdos that we could meet at every corner, but with these dating apps, we can’t see what’s right under our noses. Instead of opening us up to new people, they are in fact limiting us to one class, one profession, one dietary requirement. Even the prospect of Roger is better than that.