Five ideas the whole app is built on, each with a citation you can click. None of these are particularly novel on their own — but stacked together they add up to something the swipe apps, by design, can't do.
of people using dating apps in 2023 felt more frustrated than hopeful about the experience.
Pew Research Center (2023)the odds of psychological distress for swipe-app users compared with non-users, in an Australian sample of 437.
Holtzhausen et al., BMC Psychology (2020)higher premature-death risk from chronic loneliness — on the same order of magnitude as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory (2023)We didn't build Unswipe because dating is broken. We built it because connection is breaking — and swipe apps turned out to be part of the problem, not a fix for it.
Dating-app profiles optimise for the first three seconds — the bio, the best photo, the most photogenic holiday. Finkel et al. (2012), in the most-cited peer-reviewed critique of online dating, called this the "assessment mindset": the profile-browsing interface trains you to rank people like products. The twelve-minute interview sidesteps that entirely. It produces a written transcript that we distil into six short sections: about you, what you're into, what you're looking for, your values, your aspirations, a few fun facts. None of it is scored on appearance.
Finkel et al., Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2012)We compute four separate embedding vectors for every profile: the profile-text as a whole, your stated values, your interests, and your communication style. Each lives in a high-dimensional space where semantically similar things end up near each other — "I read at night" and "I want a quiet Sunday" land close, without either of you having ticked the same keyword. No dropdowns, no forced categories — just the shape of what you actually said.
Schroeder, Kardas and Epley's 2017 Psychological Science paper showed that when an opinion is spoken aloud rather than read as text, listeners judge the speaker as more thoughtful, warmer, and more human — even when the words are identical. Text flattens people; voice restores them. That's why Unswipe puts the voice call before the text chat, and the text chat before the photos. It's the sequence people actually evolved to trust.
Schroeder, Kardas & Epley, Psychological Science (2017)The first voice call is the trust signal — once you've had it, text chat opens automatically. Photos stay locked until three voice calls, seven days, and both of you opting in. Identity (real names) only opens after you both say so out loud. Rusbult's investment model has shown since 1980 that commitment grows from what two people put in, not what they pick out — twelve minutes of voice, three calls, seven days. Small, deliberate investments that compound into something real.
Rusbult, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (1980)Pronk and Denissen (2020) demonstrated that the more profiles people see in a row, the more likely they are to reject each one — the swipe itself trains a rejection mindset. D'Angelo and Toma (2017) ran the dating-app version of Iyengar's classic choice-overload study: online daters shown twenty-four profiles were less satisfied with their pick a week later than those shown six, and more likely to want to switch. More choice made people pickier, less committed. Unswipe makes one introduction at a time, full stop. You have to give the person in front of you your attention, because there isn't a next one until the next matching interval.
Pronk & Denissen, SPPS (2020); D'Angelo & Toma, Media Psychology (2017)Click through and read them yourself — we'd rather you know where the ideas come from than take our word for it.
Voice calls between matches are peer-to-peer — they never touch our servers and aren't recorded. Your interview audio is transcribed by Groq and discarded; the transcript is sent to Google's Gemini API to generate your profile and embeddings, and Google's API terms exclude that traffic from model training. Embeddings are derived from your own words and used only to rank candidates — never shown to other users, sold, or used for advertising. Delete your account and we remove your profile, transcript, embeddings, and match history.