New Dating App Says it Promotes Honesty

If you’re tired of swiping to find true love, a new app may be for you.

The L.O.V. app’s motto is “Honesty is Sexy,” and the CEO of the app, C.J. Carter, says his app has found the secret sauce for online dating.

Carter, who is a software engineer from Atlanta, GA, and not a relationship expert, says he was doing a bit of study to see why people were so dissatisfied with traditional dating apps. He and his business partner, another software engineer, met at a singles convention and discovered a mutual interest in online dating. Their specialty is technical writing, but Carter said their interest in the online dating world led to the L.O.V. app (L.O.V. doesn’t stand for anything, by the way).

“I kept seeing the same sort of stories,” Carter says. “(People would say) I don’t know if they’re talking to 500 other people when they talk to me. I sought to create a solution to that problem.”

L.O.V. works best if you let it roam your Facebook feed after you sign in through Twitter digits. Its proprietary algorithm works like some of those Facebook quizzes about whether you were Cleopatra in a previous life. The LOV app analyzes what you say, what your friends say, your bio, and it comes up with suggestions for a love match.

According to Carter, the LOV app is a combination of psychology and linguistics, with the app making matches based on your word choice. He points out that you often learn a lot about a person just from hearing them speak, whether or not you’ve met them.

The app will ask you for preferences – do you like people who are tall, who don’t smoke, who are a certain religion?

“We were surprised to find out that the height metric was something very important to a lot of women,” Carter says.

L.O.V. will screen for all of that. Once the app determines what kind of person would work for you, it shows you a vertical bunch of photos.

“You’ll be able to see all the people near you, just scroll up,” Carter says. “It scrolls vertically; we stepped away from swiping left or swiping right. Once you finally choose who you want to speak to, you send an intro that’s 140 characters that conveys your personality. You can’t send another message after that unless the person is interested, so it prevents harassment.”

Unlike other sites, Carter says you can only be interacting with five people at a time per month.

“It causes you to put greater weight of importance on the people who are there, unlike other sites where you collect hundreds of these,” Carter says.

Except, of course, that you can buy your way into being with more people. The revenue model for the free app is based on people wanting to have more than five choices at a time.

In the future, Carter says L.O.V. will work with a Yelp-like app to help you schedule dates. He also plans a game component, where frequency of communications helps you “earn” more access to the prospective date, such as sending a photo after three communications.

The app launched in June and Carter says it’s too early to have stats on whether it creates successful love matches. But he says the fact that the matches are curated before you see them is an improvement over most other dating apps.

“It forces you to create more serious bonds with people you’re speaking to. In one of our focus groups, someone said they had 127 people on Tinder. How can you choose between 127 people to find one or two who are interesting? With ours, you have a better chance of forming a connection,” Carter says.

You can download the free app here: http://lovapp.co