CladdaghRing, the newest dating app on the market, is quickly gaining traction for revolutionizing dating for young singles who are me. With just a swipe, rugged men from County Cork to County Donegal are able to make connections for love, friendship, or odd sexual encounters with only me.
CladdaghRing uses the familiar swipe right, swipe left choosing mechanism of Tinder and Hinge. However, unlike other apps, male users may match with only me and are not permitted to have shirts on or be from parts of the world other than Ireland in order to be able to use the app. Women (i.e. me) are able to sort through strapping Irish lads based on criteria such as Gaelic or non-Gaelic speaking, horse ownership, the type of shirt they’ve torn off their overheated body, and whether or not they’re Colin Farrell.
“I like Irish men because they are sexy and I would like to meet more of them,” says app creator, me. “It can be hard to meet Irish men because I do not live in Ireland. That’s why I made this app.”
The user experience of CladdaghRing has been compared to walking into a pub in Galway filled entirely of inexplicably topless men who are all willing to get into a whiskey-fueled fight over you—in this case, “you” means “me”.
The dating app has created an even playing field for women who are myself and have had a disadvantage in the past. “Before CladdaghRing, I was struggling to meet shirtless swains who all possess that fiery, repressed Irish passion,” says me, a freelance writer from Los Angeles. “In my area, there’s just not a lot of Gaelic men who plow the fields in their bare chests before plowing me.”
By reducing the competition to literally no one, CladdaghRing has greatly improved the match rate between just myself and every single Irish man on the app. Reportedly, CladdaghRing has already produced four verified matches between myself and men such as Eamonn O’Carroll, a farmer from Killarney who owns several wool sweaters but no shirts at all.
Additionally, the bare torso criteria has been lauded for providing a greater transparency, allowing users comprised of myself to verify if the men are actually peppered with freckles as they claim and to make a realistic judgment on if they could probably lift me over their shoulders.
“I was a little bit nervous about getting on CladdaghRing at first because of the stigma of online dating,” I say, grinning broadly. “But once the app had been out for a few months, I thought that I should try it. I’m glad I did! It’s completely changed my dating life!”
Like other dating apps, CladdaghRing’s existence has been marred by some controversy. Allegedly, some of the Irish men on the app originally did have shirts, but their accounts were quickly suspended by the developers of the app in order to make it more appealing to their female user base that is, once again, me, just me, and only me.
