This past Friday, professional social media platform LinkedIn released an exciting new addition to their site. Alongside the “about me” section on individual user profiles, users will now be able to add their relationship status.
While this move has been controversial, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky stated that the feature is necessary given the recent failures in dating markets. “Based on extensive research, we’ve found that the vast majority of our users are single and/or struggling to maintain romantic relationships,” Roslansky stated. “This will make finding available partners more efficient.”
Roslansky is right– study has shown that 65% of LinkedIn users have not gotten any play in the past 6 months. Alongside this, 52% of users have not been in serious relationships for over a year.
“It seems that as people become more avid LinkedIn users, they tend to become more isolated and undesirable in the dating market,” LinkedIn marketing representative Alma Singh proclaims. We’re trying to fix that to the best of our abilities by integrating the dating and career worlds. This way, people can find other like-minded individuals ready to date.”
LinkedIn added in their Friday announcement that users would have the option for artificial intelligence to both classify their relationship status and match them with similar profiles. For example, I personally tried this by inputting details about my extremely messy long-distance college situationship, and LinkedIn’s AI helpfully identified me as “emotionally unavailable”.
“In an age where AI is basically part of everything, why not have it run your dating life too!” Singh says.
The success of LinkedIn’s relationship status button is still up in the air– as despite users being matched with one another, we know that it’s difficult for many of them to respectfully talk to people they’re attracted to. At press time, LinkedIn is trying to find a way to fix this.