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Hong Kong singles are one of the top markets for dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. Photo: Shutterstock

Hong Kong singles ‘world’s most desperate’, suggests data from dating app

Coffee Meets Bagel provides insight into Hongkongers’ quest for commitment, rather than one-night stands

Hong Kong’s lonely hearts are among the world’s most desperate to find love, according to data from a popular US dating app, showing that users in the city are using it more often than people in any other place in the world.

According to Coffee Meets Bagel, which claims to help singles look for meaningful relationships rather than one-night stands, 66 per cent of Hongkongers who have downloaded the app log on every day. That’s the highest rate of all the app’s markets.

The smartphone app, started four years ago and claiming to have made up to 2.5 billion introductions worldwide since then, expanded to Hong Kong in March last year.

Its San Francisco-based co-founder Dawoon Kang, who lived and dated in Hong Kong until a few years ago before returning to the US, said: “Hong Kong was the first market we targeted outside the US, with close to two million singles; that was a huge draw for us.”

It found that Hong Kong millennials were among the most avid users – a testament both to the high density of singles in the city and the lack of time they have to find love.

Kang attributed the app’s popularity to hook-up culture fatigue in a city where young, career-driven professionals struggle to find time to date.

She said Coffee Meets Bagel users were turning away from a culture of low commitment and easily-forgotten encounters on hook-up apps in pursuit of real love.

Positioning itself as an antidote to Tinder, which is based mostly on location and profile pictures, Coffee Meets Bagel helps singles find partners by filtering out unsuitable matches based on criteria including education, interests and religion.

In Hong Kong alone, it claims to enable more than 13,000 matches and 600 actual dates every week, and claims to have brought together 250 couples since launching in the city. Kang attributed that to the city’s dense population.

The company’s data also showed that Hong Kong women were more forward than their counterparts in the US, which could be linked to the city’s higher female-to-male ratio.

Hong Kong men valued looks above other criteria, while women paid attention to education, profession, and whether potential matches appeared serious about wanting to commit.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: City’s singles ‘world’s most desperate’
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