Relationships

This Is The Best Day To Be On Dating Apps In The New Year

There’s a science to maximising your chance of finding a match in 2023.

by Alice Broster and Sophie McEvoy
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
Stock image of woman using smart phone
Getty Images/Jordi Salas

After 18 months of change and uncertainty, you definitely deserve something to look forward to in 2023. While kissing a stranger as the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve is going to be off the table for most of us, you can still kick off the new year with a new, meaningful connection. And if you don’t want to leave things to chance, you may be interested to know that there’s actually a tried-and-tested “best” time to get back on dating apps after Christmas, according to research.

If you want to bag yourself a new boo for 2023 then Sunday, Jan. 8 is the date you need to put in your diary to start swiping. The first Sunday of the year has historically been the busiest day of the year for online dating, with Tinder, Inner Circle, Match.com, and Bumble all recording record numbers.

As Tinder’s in-house sociologist Jess Carbino has previously explained, “The end of the year is really a good time of reflection. People have the opportunity to really think about what they’ve done in the past year and what they want to do in the future. And for many single people, finding a partner is something that they really want to establish as a goal for the new year.”

And if you want to go one step further, Bumble has even more specific instructions for potential daters. The dating app tells Bustle that you can maximise your matching potential by logging on between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Bumble says that 2023 will be a “Dating Renaissance” for singles, with 1 in 3 people surveyed having “ended a marriage or serious relationship in the last two years” and a third “now using dating apps for the first time.”

Despite face-to-face social plans being impossible over much of 2020 and 2021, Tinder has reported that lockdown hasn’t stopped people from matching. Far from it. With introductions of features like in-app video dating, video sharing, and extended user verification, people were able to continue dating without too much trouble.

Happy swiping!

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