Dating apps without pictures

If you are looking for this, you have probably already worked out the problem with the alternative. A photo decides everything before anything else gets a chance. You are judged in a quarter of a second, and you do the same thing back, hundreds of times an evening.

So people search for a dating app without pictures. The trouble is that almost nothing genuinely is one.

What is actually out there

The apps that advertise this usually do one of three things.

• They blur the photo until you talk. Send a few messages and the picture appears. The photo still decides, it just decides on message four instead of message one.
• They hide photos for new accounts only. A trial setting. Everyone turns it off, because everyone else has.
• They let you leave your photo blank. Which is technically true and practically useless. A profile with no picture on an app built around pictures gets skipped.

The pattern is the same every time. The photo is still the thing the product is built on, and hiding it is a feature bolted to the side.

What we did instead

Sunday is not a dating app. It is a matchmaker.

That is not a slogan, it is the actual difference. On a dating app you are given a pile of people and left to sort through it. A matchmaker does the opposite. It learns about you, decides who is right for you, and introduces you to that one person.

There is nothing to download, no feed to scroll, no inbox, and nothing to swipe. There is no pile. There is one person a week, chosen for you.

Which means there is no reason for a photo to exist. Photos are for sorting through a pile. When the sorting is already done, and done on what you actually want from someone, the picture has no job left to do.

How it works

1. 1

   You answer questions once. About what you want, how you argue, whether you want children, how fast you move. It takes about fifteen minutes and it replaces the photo gallery entirely.

2. 2

   Every Sunday morning we ask if you are in. One question, by email and text. Say nothing and you sit the week out. Nothing happens unless you say yes.

3. 3

   At 8pm you meet one person. Not a list. The single most compatible person for you who also said yes that week.

4. 4

   Ten minutes, on video. The first five minutes are audio only. Then the cameras come on, so you hear who somebody is before you see them.

5. 5

   You each answer one question afterwards. Keep talking? Only if you both say yes do you get each other's numbers. Nobody is ever told they were turned down by name.

What you give up

This is worth saying plainly, because it is not for everybody.

You do not get to browse. You cannot line up five conversations. You get one evening a week, at a fixed time, with one person you did not choose. If you want volume and control, this is the wrong thing and one of the big apps is the right one.

What you get instead is ten minutes with somebody who was picked because they actually suit you, and a first impression built out of a conversation rather than a face.

Common questions