Will you accept this rosé?
by Reem Khaleel Feb 15, 2023
In modern dating, love and alcohol seem to go hand-in-hand. Between pre-date jitters and happy hour meet-ups, dating app matches are likely to down adult bevs before and during a first date just to ease anxiety. Despite this, a recent uptick in the sober curious movement — the mindful decision to re-evaluate your relationship with alcohol, namely by not drinking or imbibing less — presents the future of sober dating.
On the hunt to discover who makes a more desirable candidate, the casual drinker or the openly sober, The Bottle Club conducted a social experiment to test who is the more likely match on three dating apps: Tinder, Hinge, and Plenty of Fish. Team members created two profiles for one individual who identifies as male and one who identifies as female: one featuring alcohol in profile images and the other with booze-less photos. The team was then asked to swipe right on 100 females and males on Tinder and maintain active profiles for 72 hours on Hinge and 24 hours on Plenty of Fish to compare data.
When it comes to finding love, the male profile with alcohol received 140% more matches across all three dating apps, with a special interest amongst other males on Tinder. Conversely, the female sober profile noticed an overall 39.4% match increase, mainly on Hinge from other women.
Although results from all three dating apps show that both men and women are more interested in a man who enjoys an alcoholic beverage, the female profile varied across apps. On Tinder, the female sober profile received 29.1% more right swipes from men, showing that women who don’t drink are perceived by the opposite sex as more desirable. In contrast, the same profile received 300% fewer right swipes from women, who seem to prefer other women who consume the occasional alcoholic bev. On Hinge, the female sober profile received slightly more interest, with 23.6% more matches from men and 31.6% from women, and on Plenty of Fish, men alone preferred the sober profile a whopping 255% more.
Additionally, all female sober profiles received messages like “wifey material,” “biggest green flag I’ve ever seen,” and “I have a lot of respect for that” from heterosexual matches, which implies the overall male desire for a female who imbibes less or not at all.
These total findings indicate the presence of a gender stereotype, reflecting women who don’t drink as more desirable and men who don’t as less, pulling from the notion that women who drink lack personal and social control, while their male counterparts are considered more masculine and good company. Although this experiment indicates a future for sober dating, it also reiterates that love and alcohol are still a perfect match.
