The internet was once a collection of neat little app silos. Now, it’s more like a giant, lukewarm bowl of connectivity soup in which everything is touching everything else. Popular websites and apps of all kinds have officially broken containment. Frankly, it’s getting weird out there—especially if you look at the bizarre identity swap happening between LinkedIn and your average dating platform.
Let’s begin with a look at LinkedIn. It used to be the digital equivalent of a stiff suit, a place to park your CV and hope that someone with a hiring budget would notice you. Now? It’s a chaotic mashup of hustle-culture fan fiction and boasts about pre-dawn green-juice routines. It’s gone so far off the rails that it’s even started to function like a stealth dating site. A 2024 study found that 52 percent of singles have managed to land a date on a networking platform, LinkedIn included.
Meanwhile, dating apps have pulled a reverse commute and turned into incidental networking hubs. You didn’t join Tinder to find a corporate headhunter or browse the latest job openings on Bay Street. Still, you’ll inevitably stumble across the polished headshot of that guy from your litigation group. And guess what? He sees you, too. Your user profile—and whatever questionable bio you wrote at 11:00 p.m.—is now part of your professional brand, hanging in the air the next time you’re sitting across from him in a meeting. Awkward doesn’t begin to cover it.
Networking by accident on Bumble
The harsh truth is that, by this point, the mind-meld between LinkedIn and dating apps is almost complete. Both demand the same thing of you: an idealized digital version of yourself, complete with a flattering photo, a snappy bio and just enough personal trivia to seem human but not too human.
The parallels don’t stop there. As one recent paper pointed out, LinkedIn and Bumble follow the same internal “matchmaking logic.” Basically, the algorithms that power each platform play digital Cupid, linking us with users who have similar attributes—which is code for saying they serve up people who are very much like us in various demographic categories. If you’re a Big Law associate, you’re going to see a whole lot of other Big Law associates. Whether you’re looking for a career pivot or a soulmate, the online experience is starting to feel pretty homogenous.
Finding your next date on LinkedIn
In the digital age, anything with a direct messaging function can be weaponized as a dating tool. Who hasn’t heard about adorable meet-cutes of couples who hooked up after trading witticisms on Twitter or when they were both part of a neighbourhood Facebook group?
But while it’s one thing to send flirty emojis to someone in your run club on Strava or chat with your favourite single dadfluencer on Instagram about where, pray tell, he signed his kid up for baseball this year (even though your kid hates baseball), the lines are murkier when it comes to using a networking site for your personal life. Because do you know what’s cringier than spotting another lawyer on a dating app, reaching out, getting rejected and then running into that person in court or at your next workplace? Spotting another lawyer on LinkedIn, reaching out for perhaps not completely above-board reasons, getting rejected and then running into that person in court or at your next workplace.
And yet there’s also an argument that trying to meet someone on LinkedIn could, maybe, be kind of good. With the potential for catfishing—dishonest or even completely fake profiles—on dating apps, at least LinkedIn is a place where you can vet that someone is an actual human, get a sense of that person’s career and, like the good old days of original-recipe Facebook, carefully inspect the personal or business connections that you have in common. With the rise of remote work, one could reasonably argue that this is the modern-day equivalent of meeting someone at the office or at a conference. It’s also an environment where the grosser aspects of online hookup culture (two words: Dick. Pic.) would, blessedly, be wildly out of place.
The LinkedIn problem
When someone joins Tinder, Bumble or Hinge, they’re volunteering to be hit on. Putting aside for the moment the issue of liars and cheats, people on those apps are theoretically romantically available and open to reach-outs. Users who end up hating their time on Tinder can also leave and delete their profiles, with very little consequence.
But lawyers, whether they want to or not, essentially must sign up for and remain on LinkedIn. Given the legal community’s robust presence on the site, it’s almost a career necessity. Which brings us to the most treacherous aspect of LinkedIn as a dating platform: most people create an account to advance in the workplace, not to dodge inappropriate messages. LinkedIn’s community policies contain a stern warning against “unwanted expressions of attraction, desire, requests for romantic relationship, marriage proposals, sexual advances or innuendo, or lewd remarks.” Anyone who violates those rules can be removed. Yet one study showed that 91 percent of women on LinkedIn “have received romantic advances or inappropriate messages at least once.” Examples include unwanted compliments or flattery, direct propositions for sex or dates, and requests for personal or intimate information.
Some lawyers may have found true love on LinkedIn. It’s also possible that a lawyer once impressed a member of the partnership committee with a brilliantly crafted Bumble profile. But far more lawyers, after logging on to LinkedIn, have had to fend off unwanted advances from professional acquaintances. Others have likely worried that their innocent presence on a dating app has ruined their reputation. No matter where you go online, it can be hard to tell whether you’re working or whether you’re dating. It’s a never-ending professional nightmare.
Leah Rumack is an award-winning writer, editor and TV producer based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and Toronto Life.
Illustration by Jacqui Oakley.