Moving to a new city is hard. That, I can readily testify to.
Once you’re past college age and you’ve transitioned through the backpacking phase of travel, you begin to find that there are few communities left to take you into its bosom.
You find a job at an office, not a bar. You move into an apartment, not a dorm room. And between working nine to five and coming home to watch Netflix, you have little time to make meaningful connections.
So why not start dating? Platonically, of course. Hey! Vina is a dating app that launched this week to help women find new friends. Not friends with benefits. Just plain let’s hang out, grab a glass of wine, no strings attached friends.
By tapping into their extended network, women can make connections so they can network professionally, meet a girlfriend who has the same interests and shared passion, or just grab a coffee with a stranger.
The app makes contacts using your existing network on Facebook, so you’ll need to connect to social media so it can let you know who your friends know in your city.
Then it’ll match you with people based on your activities, interests and life stage. “Maybe you’re a new mom, or you’re trying out Paleo and training for a marathon, or you’re single and need a fantastic wing-lady,” it states.
Next, simply swipe through, a la Tinder, and once you find a match, Hey! Vina will send you both an introductory message to make the whole thing as seamless and supportive as possible (because girls are lovely like that).
The app will also release quizzes about lifestyle and personality to help match you with like-minded females.
This will of course reignite the classic conundrum: do we really need an app to make friends as well as partners?
It’s not that we can’t do it on our own, because we absolutely can. It’s simply that circumstances have changed and our lives no longer resemble that of generation X-ers or baby boomers. We change career paths, we travel a lot, we wait longer to have children and start families.
The two founders, Olivia June Poole and Jen Aprahamian, confessed to starting the app due to their own personal experience of moving for work, struggling to find females in their industry, and seeing their social circles shrink as friends got married and had children.
If we can swipe our way to a happy-ever-after in our love lives, then surely we can do the same thing for platonic ones.
We’re willing to risk awful dates and evenings spent with a stranger of the opposite sex in the name of love. Why not swipe right for what could actually might be a lasting friendship?
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