Pandemic Relationships

Brandwatch Bulletin #10: Pandemic Relationships

Dating apps and sharing problems.

8 October 2020

What a stressful week it’s been. This year has been full of them, so today we’re looking at whether the stress of the pandemic has affected our relationships and dating habits.

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Talking love online in 2020

With lockdowns coming and going all over the world, we wondered how relationships may be affected by an unpredictable and curtailed world.

We decided to find out using our Consumer Research platform. We looked at English-language social media mentions of relationship statuses, such as people saying they’re single, and of dating apps between Mar 1 2017 and Sep 30 2020.

Between March and September this year, we found 115m unique authors discussing relationships and dating apps on social media. Compared to 2019, this is an increase of 18%, an indication that in lockdown, people have become more open about their love lives.

What’s in the discussion?

We found that the relationship and dating app conversation between March and September has focused on “time”, in terms of how people had spent their time in lockdown, moving away from the more specific topics we found in previous years.

Ultimately the “time” topic (25m mentions) was driven by people re-evaluating their relationships, or committing to themselves that they would take the time to find someone perfect for them.

Meanwhile the “life” (11m mentions), “work” (10m mentions), and “home” (8m mentions) topics all clocked up mentions, as people aired their grievances about home working, unemployment, being alone or in a relationship they didn’t like, and how life wasn’t exactly what they wanted it to be.

Maybe social media is becoming the world’s agony aunt.

App dating isn’t dead

While it’s interesting to understand how people have talked about their relationships throughout lockdown, what does dating look like in a socially-distanced world?

In the last six months we found that conversations about the apps we studied increased 12% compared to the same period last year, an indication that, for better or worse, swiping right isn’t over yet.

Tinder was the most popular that we studied. While it did see conversation fall over the last six months, it is still the dominant app. Hinge is the only app we studied that has more mentions now than at the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, we attributed Grindr’s 2020 spike to its removal of their widely-criticized ethnicity filter rather than any increase in use.

For further evidence that dating apps are surviving the pandemic, we found 148k mentions between March and September referring to re-downloading said apps, or using them for the first time. Another 58k referenced both an app and a virtual first date.

Increasingly, we have found that throughout the pandemic, people are becoming more open about their lives on social media. Time in lockdown has had people reflecting on their lives and relationships, and clearly they want to share their findings.

With no end in sight to the pandemic, it will be interesting to see how this conversation evolves as we increasingly adapt to and accept the world around us.

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