Faye Iosotaluno about how she’s changing the platform for relationships
I would swipe right on Faye Iosotaluno. Glossy-haired with red lipstick, she has a sleek image that befits her position as the new COO of an app that helped to fuel our “hot or not” culture, encouraging us to judge people by their looks. But there is far more to 43-year-old Iosotaluno than nice lipstick. A Harvard Business School MBA who has held senior roles at Match.com and Warner Bros, she is also a married mother of two daughters (aged seven and nine) who met her husband, a finance entrepreneur, long before dating-app culture arrived. “I went on my last first date when I was 19 years old, before Tinder was in the market, and I ended up marrying that person,” she says with a laugh from her office in West Hollywood.
Tinder emerged in 2012. In two years a billion people had swiped left or right on it, reinventing dating for my generation of millennials, who were fascinated by the ability to suddenly date anyone nearby using the GPS on our phones. Having been loaded 530 million times since, it remains the biggest dating app in the world, hosting some three billion swipes a day. I was an early Tinder adopter — it made internet dating cool, although I vividly remember my first Tinder match-up, which culminated in us pitifully sharing a six-pack of lager in Trafalgar Square. Undeterred, along with my friends I embraced Tinder’s possibilities, swiping through a decade of dates with builders, barristers, artists and tech boys on an app that led me on uncountable dates, a few one-night stands and trends like “Tinder tourism” (dating wherever you land).
So I am surprised to learn that Iosotaluno is already anticipating the day when her daughter signs up to the app. “She’s going to be 18 in nine years, and she’s going to be a Tinder member. I can’t wait for that,” Iosotaluno says. Her belief is that Tinder has moved on from the early days of alcohol-fuelled hook-up culture. When it comes to her daughter, Iosotaluno wants Tinder to be all about having fun. “The experience I want for her is one where she has a deep sense of belonging; it’s a place that is inclusive and where she meets all types of people she could love, and there is not a strict definition of what love looks like or how it works.”
Iosotaluno tells me that she is watching a sexual revolution unfold. Tinder is still the No 1 most downloaded app for 18 to 25-year-olds, but research from the company’s newly released Future of Dating Report has found that Gen Z are reinventing how they use it.
The dating modus operandi for my Tinder generation was to meet in a pub, then get drunk as quickly as possible to work out if a snog was on the cards. Gen Z users drink less — 88 per cent say they’d be comfortable going on a sober date. And they seem to date as chastely as was common in the 1950s: going for a picnic in the park (41 per cent), or for coffee or tea (39 per cent).
They are certainly more straightforward than us original Tinder users. They are 32 per cent less likely to ghost someone, and about 77 per cent of them reply to their crush within 30 minutes and 40 per cent within five minutes. “Gen Z wants to cut to the chase, they want to understand who it is they’re connecting with and that that person is aligned with the expectations they have. And if you’re not, they’re very happy to move on,” Iosotaluno explains. “Playing hard to get, sending mixed signals or playing the field, which was the norm — that is very much not the case now.”
Gen Z are also far more open-minded, she says. They’re comfortable with polyamory and open about seeking alternative styles of relationships: ENM (ethically non-monogamous, which means you’ve both agreed to an open relationship) and what they like to call “situation-ships”. The LGBTQ+ community is now one of the largest and fastest-growing segments on the platform. Since 2021 there has been a 30 per cent increase in users choosing gender identities other than male and female, Iosotaluno states. Non-binary is now the fastest-growing gender identity on the app, with people identifying as such increasing by 104 per cent in one year. “Tinder is not here to tell people who to love, how to love and what that looks like,” Iosotaluno says.
Perhaps the most profound shift for this new generation of users, she says, is how shame has disappeared around casual sex. “I don’t think it’s that it’s not happening. I think it’s just being reframed . . . people are getting together. They are spending time with each other one on one. Sometimes it’s sexual, sometimes it’s not. But they don’t want to put the label of hooking up on that.” Indeed, she adds: “The pejorative use of the term hook-up is quickly becoming outdated. Gen Z see hooking up as part of a relationship or self-discovery journey — because you have a generation that is more fluid than ever, more open-minded about who they’re meeting and who they’re connecting with. They don’t want labels put on them.”
Are these more fluid, out-there possibilities something that a married woman with two young children can relate to or understand? (Iosotaluno is very different from, say, the polyamorous couple behind the free-for-all dating app Feeld, who say they started it to explore threesomes.) “I think my story about how I met my husband is at the core of how this kind of love evolves and develops,” Iosotaluno counters.
The couple met through an accounting class and she admits that he was “someone I really wouldn’t have considered”, but mutual friends had begged her to go on a date with him. “On the surface it seemed we were quite different — he loved studying maths, while I loved the humanities; he had never been outside of the US, but I had travelled from Singapore to LA when I was five; we grew up on opposite sides of the US; he didn’t even know west coast hip-hop — I’m from LA! But it just worked because what Pete and I shared in common wasn’t the neighbourhoods that we grew up in or what we were studying. We connected on a different level: the way we thought about family, our motivations and drivers, self-discovery. Those underlying values were what mattered most.”
This is the role she sees Tinder playing. “It’s giving people you otherwise wouldn’t meet a shot, right? Just like I gave my husband a shot. And that can be a shot for a fun night. Or it could be a shot for that first date that turns into something way more.”
Thanks to her new job she still has friends begging her to improve their profiles. “Usually, when I go to a wedding and someone finds out that I work at Tinder, I’m swarmed by people who say, ‘Help me! What do I need to do?!’ I saw an old friend, he’s amazing, and he shows me his profile and I’m like, ‘OK, we can spruce this up — let’s make sure you have five great photos and at least three interests. And let’s make sure your bio actually shows how unique and amazing you are.’”
Her tips for a great Tinder profile include: those five great photos, avoiding group shots and showing your full face. “Photos with puppies actually do really well,” she says. Doesn’t Tinder’s focus on photos mean it will always be a superficial-feeling app? Not at all, she says. “People think of photos as being superficial, however I think they can tell quite a lot about a person. What you choose to show, and the environment you’re in, says something about you.”
Source: The Times
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