Poll reveals 66% of US singles would “swipe right” on someone who claims to be multilingual, but nearly half of users admit to lying about fluency
Being bilingual can make you more attractive to others on dating apps, according to a new study by Lingoda, an online language school. In a poll of 1,000 single and actively dating adults in the US, 66% of participants stated that they are more likely to “swipe right” on someone if they speak more than one language.
More surprisingly, nearly half of poll respondents (45%) admit that they have lied about speaking another language fluently on their dating profile.
Among 25-34 year olds, bilingual singles may fare even better. In this group, 77% stated that they are more likely to “swipe right” on someone if they speak more than one language. But beware: a majority of the respondents in this group (54%) say they’ve lied about speaking a language fluently on their dating profile.
So does this mean that being bilingual makes you more attractive? And should you lie about your language skills to improve your romantic prospects?
“In our recent survey we did not ask the participants why being bilingual was an attractive or desirable characteristic for potential partners to have,” says Philippa Wentzel, Lingoda’s Curriculum team lead. “But research shows that speaking more than one language enables you to navigate more than one culture and you model the values and attitudes of the cultures of the languages you speak. Language skills allow you to view and experience the world in more than one way,” she says.
“In dating, we may perceive someone who is bilingual as more interesting, or more ‘deep,’ along with other benefits of bilingualism. At Lingoda, we believe in a communicative approach to language learning: mastering a language means being able to speak it with confidence, which is also often something that we look for in a prospective partner. Our language lessons also focus on real-life language and cultural context, which means that you can impress your potential date with conversations in another language without even having to lie about it”, says Wentzel.
