Lauren was sick of “swiping left” on Tinder. The Greenpoint-based accounting assistant wanted to get to know someone on a deep level — but the 28-year-old felt the wildly popular dating app was just “a giant meat market” that led to empty exchanges and even emptier dates.
That’s why she started using the new free dating app Glimpse in February. Glimpse lets you “smile” at potential mates based not on only their headshots — a la Tinder — but also on their Instagram photos. (When you sign up, you can filter your matches by age and by sexuality, and Glimpse also prioritizes prospects by location.)
“I’m a huge foodie, so when I saw this one guy’s picture of bacon and a champagne glass, I ‘smiled’ at him, because I knew we had shared interests,” says Lauren, who asked not to reveal her last name due to privacy reasons. “Then he messaged me, we went on a six-hour date that ended at three in the morning, and now we’ve been dating seriously since our first date on February 18.”
She’s not the only New Yorker who’s had success with the so-called “Instalove” approach. Scott Muska, 26, started dating his now-ex-girlfriend, Beth, after she found him on Instagram about a year ago. The two had attended the same college and were friends on Facebook but didn’t actually know each other. Then, Beth got Instagram and automatically followed all of her Facebook friends using the app — including Scott. Soon, she started liking his pictures of his dog, at which point he started following her back. After a couple of weeks, she wrote him a message on Facebook telling him his dog pictures were cute, and boom — they dated for about four months.
“I didn’t think it was weird at all that she found me on Insta,” recalls Muska, a writer from Bushwick. “I felt like by the time we actually met, we knew so much about each others’ daily lives . . . we had a more intimate connection right away.”
That look into a person’s daily life is precisely the logic behind Glimpse. “Most people use Instagram to document their daily lives — where they went for brunch, the concert they saw last night — so the result is that you get a really natural and up-to-date peek into someone’s actual world,” explains Elan Miller, the app’s co-founder and CEO.
And in a world full of heavily-crafted dating profiles and glamorous Tinder headshots, a sense of authenticity can be refreshing — which might explain why Glimpse is already so successful: Launched in early February, the app has a 70 percent reply rate — meaning its users respond to 70 percent of the messages they receive — whereas most dating sites have just 15 to 20 percent reply rates. The app is invite-only, but Miller says they expect to make it available to everyone in early May.
So, aside from using Glimpse, how exactly do you go about finding Instalove yourself? “First, find someone who interests you, and start following him or her,” advises Julie Spira, an online dating expert and founder of cyberdatingexpert.com. Then, start liking a couple of his or her photos, and after a week or so, start commenting on them. Finally, find your person on Facebook and send him or her a message. “People do it all the time!” assures Spira.
Lauren agrees: “Seeing my date’s Instagram photos before I met him made our first date so much easier, because I knew we had similar taste in restaurants and had gone to some of the same events. When you have shared experiences and visuals, everything is very natural!”