Dear Mark Zuckerberg,
Heard you want to hook us up with our ‘destined one’ through the yet-to-be-launched dating feature on Facebook? You seem to have the ambitious expectation of long-term relationships evolving through it.
Having set up the baap of all social networks, you may feel confident with your matchmaking skills, but let us tell you that dating is not as simple as socialising.
Here are a few things that you can use as reference when playing Cupid for us.
(PS: Facebook’s closer and (as has been proven) has more intel than Tinder will ever have. Thus, the concerns from an angsty millennial!)
Auto-Block Family?
The last thing we want is to bump into mummy, papa, and rishtedaar on a dating app! But with more and more family members joining and adding us as ‘Friends’ on Facebook, this is a disaster waiting to happen. So we suggest you add a feature that auto-blocks a rishtedaar for good or makes us invisible to them.
Please Don’t Celebrate ‘Match- Anniversary’
If your dating platform functions anything like the pioneers of the genre do (read: Tinder) , we will have ‘matches’, meaning potential dates. But sometimes, these dates end up as nothing but a missed/unanswered ‘Hi’ in the chat-box. So, to spare us the embarrassment, do NOT celebrate ‘match anniversary’!
Don’t Count Our ‘Likes’
Relationships are a complicated deals between two (or sometimes more) people. It’s also, never equal. So don’t bother keeping an account of how many times we ‘Liked’ someone, or didn’t. Equating number of likes especially when flirting is a deal breaker.
Sare Anniversaries Yaad Dilana...
The birthday prompts on Facebook have saved many a fragile friendship. It would be great if you extend that to the romantic ones too. Can you make a dating calendar that records ‘first date’, ‘first kiss’, ‘ first hundred days’, ‘first fight’ etc? Do remind us when is what.
You see, we tend to obsess over dates. Gift jo khareedna hota hai.
No #RelationshipGoals, Please!
If you have plans to keep a sort of ‘Trending List’ of the hottest couple on the platform, drop it. If friends and rishtedaars weren’t enough in crowding our FB timelines with picturesque pre-wedding snaps, Virushka nailed the coffin. We don’t need a constant reminder that we are failing at this dating business, while there are such ideals to live up to.
Please No ‘Active’ Status on FB Dating
We don’t need to broadcast if we have the application open or not, let’s keep that a secret for the users, shall we? We maybe just scrolling through profiles and not really in the mood to entertain the person we snubbed in the previous session.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)