In the online dating jungle, unverified by Twitter doesn’t mean undesirable | Sam Diss

You don’t need me to tell you that the world of online dating is fraught with complications. Even if you’ve been out of the game for a while, you’ve been hungover, you’ve watched double-bills of Catfish on MTV, too tired to move, lapping up the subterfuge, waiting out the lager shakes with a hefty dose of schadenfreude. You never knew there were that many people out there telling bald-faced lies just to get a shag.

That’s the world in which Blue, the new Twitter-verified-users-only offering from dating app Loveflutter, is claiming to operate in. “In an era of catfishing and fake identities, authenticity is key,” says the accompanying press release, “which is why we’re leveraging Twitter’s world-class verification system to make dating safer.”

But while they might claim to operate under the auspices of Doing a Good Thing To Keep You Horny But Safe, they know full well that’s not what they’re actually offering. This is Tinder for people whose opening line is: “So, how many impressions are you getting per week?” This is a Soho House-ing of the dating market so you’re only exposed to like minds and people with good follower ratios. You don’t want to waste your time with someone who’s not even Twitter-verified, do you? You don’t even know where they’ve been. They probably still follow Stephen Fry, use hashtags with sincerity, tweet song lyrics. Can you trust a person without a tick? Think how much better the engagement party’s hashtag and geo-location will be if both you and your partner had a small blue tick next to your names on Twitter, verification that you were both important and deserving of attention.

In Blue’s press release, you stumble across a cute girl. She’s 27 and called Taylor. She collects vintage baseballs, and you love that. So quirky. Were this a cute girl, 27, called Taylor, who collected vintage baseballs, who wasn’t on Blue, you might think twice: maybe she really, genuinely does collect vintage baseballs. Weird, right? Maybe one for each of the dates she’s murdered. But no, here, in the model world of Twitter verification, up in the rarefied atmosphere where the air (and your notifications) are as pure as you want them to be, Taylor is not only perfect, she is Taylor Swift. If you sign up to this app, it won’t just be junior staff writers at new media publishers filling up your feed, it will be Taylor Swift. If you download this app, your girlfriend will be Taylor Swift.

Another service Blue is offering is the Concierge: acting as your own personal annoying friend who’s worried you’ll die alone (even with your ace retweet/favourite averages on Twitter), Blue Concierge looks after your love life when you’re too busy to do so yourself. This could be a hit-and-miss process, but luckily everyone on the app is already verified on Twitter, so you’re a kid in a sweet shop. Good job nobody repugnant has ever been verified, innit?

The service offers “handpicked introductions and discreet dates at the most intimate and exclusive venues in your city”. Is there a place less suited to the already awkward concept of a random date than somewhere both extremely intimate and stuffy? People have booked their tables here months in advance, entering via some kind of lottery or elaborate tontine, and here you are with this verified stranger quietly picking at your food. What a night it promises to be.

To say Blue is a nadir for online dating is probably to give too much credit to the status-hungry #influencers who inhabit the cosy-nested middle in the Venn diagram of “Single, DTF” and “Verified On Twitter” – this is the “we met at the country club” of people whose major contributions to society are pithy eulogies for recently dead celebs released before the body is warm.

I happen to be in a relationship and also verified on Twitter, and can safely say that the blue check next to my name does nothing except make it easier to complain to brands. Which is indeed useful, as my girlfriend (and her unverified Twitter account) would attest, but probably not as useful as opening your social circle to include people who aren’t bang into Twitter. Have you ever met normal people, people who haven’t tweeted 86.1k times? Loads of them are really nice. Some of them are even fit and have good jobs, too. And none of them know who @PrisonPlanet is. Lucky them.

But for verified singles, there’s now no reason to date among the unchecked underclass any longer. The days of dating people who do nothing to improve your Klout scores are finally through. When we were cradled by our parents as children, they looked into our tiny, wet eyes and hoped only that we would find someone worthy of us to settle down with: little did they know that now there would be a little blue tick to make sure.