The office is now officially the second most popular spot for swiping on dating apps, after home. That’s according to the latest survey from dating app Hily, as 74% of Gen Z and 92% of millennial daters admit to swiping on dating apps while at work.
The survey says 45% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials swipe during lunch—and 3% of Gen Z and 5% of millennials have no shame swiping through Zoom meetings.
Dating itself is a full-time job. According to dating statistics from eharmony, around 80 million people in the U.S. are now using dating apps or websites—or about 30% of the adult population. A 2023 Pew Research Center report found that one in 10 partnered adults met their significant other on a dating app, and the numbers are even higher for young people.
Swiping on company time is nothing new. Back in 2017, Tinder launched a Desk Mode feature that enables users to disguise their swiping on a work computer, switching the screen to a fake chart titled “Meeting Notes,” just in case the boss is nearby.
The downsides of swiping at work, however, is the increased location-based likelihood of stumbling across one of your single colleagues’ profiles. (It is decidedly less sexy to swipe right on a colleague from across the room than to catch eyes over the coffee machine.) The workplace has long been a breeding ground for love and lust, even if HR mostly frowns upon dipping your pen in the company ink. It could be the start of a blossoming office romance, or make your next internal meeting rather uncomfortable.
“Just as Slack messaging has replaced water cooler banter, dating app conversations have replaced mid-day coffee shop trips or smoke breaks,” Hily’s relationship expert and clinical psychologist, Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, told Fast Company. “Daily work life has always included breaks for socialization and the potential to meet a new partner, it’s just become more efficient, digital, and streamlined, just as our work has evolved in this direction.”
Romanoff doesn’t see this as much different from replying to texts, or taking a cursory scroll on social media throughout the day, “as long as people are able to compartmentalize these interactions,” she said. “And can easily shift back into work mode when they close the app.”
One third of dating app users have even turned to the apps to leverage professional or career-related reasons in the last year, like networking or angling for referrals, according to a new ResumeBuilder.com survey. Nearly 1 in 10 cited it as their main reason for using the apps, as the lines between work and life continue to blur.
Even if you don’t end up finding the one on company time, you at least might land a new LinkedIn connection as a consolation.