Singles less pressured to celebrate Valentine’s Day more than ever – dating app

MANILA, Philippines – If a recent survey by a dating app is to be believed, singles don’t care that much anymore about celebrating the annual day for love and everything romantic, Valentine’s Day.

A report from tech site The Next Web (TWB) details dating app Coffee Meets Bagel’s (CMB) survey results, in which 654 users participated. In one question, 235 people – representing the largest chunk – answered that they consider Valentine’s Day as “just another Hallmark holiday.” In another question, a whopping 474 of the 654 said they felt no pressure to date on Valentine’s Day.

Asked whether they plan to celebrate the day, 295 said they don’t even plan on celebrating at all – again, the majority response. 

The results are very different from the 2013 edition of the survey where majority of respondents said they felt pressured to do something on Valentine’s Day, especially men.

“I was really surprised by how much the perception of Valentine’s Day has shifted over time. [Both men and women] don’t feel like they have to do something just because there’s societal pressure to do things on certain days,” Dawoon Kang, co-founder of CMB told TWB in response to the results.

Kang believes society is becoming much more lax with its expectations of Valentine’s Day romance – which she attributes to dating apps that are constantly changing traditional norms.

She credits dating apps with helping people meet and reach dating partners potentially outside their social circles, making it that much easier to find that special someone – and potentially trivializing that one day of the year wherein society expects singles to partner up.

Coffee Meets Bagel is a less popular dating app than Tinder, with the former having 1 million downloads on Android and the latter having more than 100 million on the same platform. Coffee Meets Bagel uses up points to “like” a potential match, forcing people to be more selective on whom they give a like to, as opposed to Tinder where users can swipe right more liberally. – Rappler.com