One of the ways to the heart may truly be through the stomach. Surveys conducted by several dating applications show that love often blooms over shared culinary tastes. Users seeking love are, metaphorically speaking, hungry for deeper connections and the prospect of being able to share a plate of food with one’s date is leading many to swipe right. Be it a piping hot bowl of Maggi or a plate of sushi, data show that food preferences are increasingly making and breaking matches — many a prospective couple has apparently gone their own way after disagreeing over the merits of, say, Calcutta’s biryani vis-à-vis its Hyderabadi cousin.

Food preferences, though, are seldom uncomplicated. They are often undergirded by the prevailing strains of cultural politics. Vegetaria­n­ism is, at times, associated with communal and casteist overtones and dating-app users say they are conscious of this. At the other end of the spectrum are those who say that they are hesitant to reveal their non-vegetarianism on dating apps for fear of being bullied in an India
increasingly squeamish about the consumption of meat. Other embedded prejudices also leave a bitter taste. In 2023, a man from the Northeast who had put up a picture with a dog on a dating app claimed that he had been grilled at length about whether he had eaten that mongrel afterwards.

But food is not the only Great Divide that star-crossed lovers have to cross on dating apps. Politics, like food, is a sticking point. A whopping 46% of people on Bumble said that they would not date someone with divergent political views. In fact, most dating apps these days allow people to list their political leanings at the outset so that those on the Left do not waste their time by swiping right for those on the Right and vice-versa. Incidentally, politics and food are not the only subjects that the modern lovebirds chatter about. A report published by Tinder found, much to the horror of the
anti-Woke brigade, that the talk among young people on dating apps usually centres on climate change, environment, and social justice.

When dating apps were first launched, they presented an alterna­tive to traditional match­making methods, one that was refreshingly liberated from the barbed wires of religion, class, caste and so on. Matching kundalis before marriage may have been replaced by searches for compatible zodiac signs on dating apps, but older, resilient fault lines, too, have found their way in — the rising popularity of vegetarian partners on Bumble and Hinge in India is proof of this. All this perhaps goes to reveal something elementary about the most magical of human emotions. Love is at once personal and political.