The Weirdest Shit Out of Silicon Valley
“The Weirdest Shit Out of Silicon Valley” is a series from The Bold Italic documenting the bizarre news, gadgets, and developments in the tech world.
I get it—online dating is hard right now (and all the time). You can swipe right only so many times on “You can’t spell quarantine without U R A QT” without wanting to pack the whole thing in. Social-distanced IRL dates mean you can at least see the person you’re thinking about mashing bits with, but it’s hard to gauge chemistry through a mask, and Covid-19 cuffing is a real thing, yo.
Enter the vaxxed date that offers none of that pesky pandemic stress from the past year.
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People are officially making it a flex to put “Covid vaccinated” in their bios on Tinder and other apps. And I don’t blame them. It is a real, valid flex.
Dominique Sisley at Mel Magazine recently reported on this trend of those lucky enough to have Covid-19 antibodies proudly announcing it while looking for love. Basically, if you’ve had the shot, now you’re hot.
This is across all the apps — think Grindr, OkCupid, and Bumble. Some users flex their antibodies in their screen name: Vaccinated Top, Vax4Vax, and so on. Other put it right after their age at the top of their bios. Some are more subtle, mentioning it in their actual bio.
Guess what? It works. OkCupid says “vaccinated” users get double the likes.
Again, it makes sense. If you want to bone, and you want to do it safely, you’ll be looking someone with this tag.
But a vaccine isn’t guaranteed to mean you can’t transmit Covid-19 — that appears to still be unclear. (I wish there was better science on that, but much scanning of the interwebs ends up with the “sort of, not really, we don’t know for sure” answer.) And then there’s the trust issue: Are they lying? Vaccine cards are incredibly easy to fake, after all, and trust and online dating is a big issue.
I wouldn’t trust a sheet of paper or a pin they got off Etsy as proof. Just saying.
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