Great news for those still trying desperately to find that special someone: the new app, Stagnnt, promises to be the first to let your dating life go absolutely nowhere.
Here’s how it works: Like Tinder and Bumble, you swipe left if you don’t like a person’s profile, and swipe right if you do. Then, if you both swipe right on each other: Awesome—it’s a match! From there you can click on the match, head back to their profile, and then literally cannot in any way message the person or have them message you.
“We wanted to create new pathways in the dating world by destroying the pathways altogether,” says Stagnnt founder Geoffrey Ridel.
The app follows the trajectory carved out by its predecessors, which—with each consecutive app—have made it harder and harder to facilitate two willing people struggling in the dating world to actually meet each other in person, all the while carrying with them the assumed inevitability that it will fail miserably regardless.
Stagnnt’s matching system also enables you never to match again with the person you were never allowed to contact, because honestly you know how it would all end anyway so what’s the point.
“You know that scene in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland where the mop creature sweeps away Alice’s footprints as she walks, thereby making her even more lost? That’s the feeling we want to incite in our users,” says Ridel. “Because that’s what dating feels like.”
When a match is about to expire, Stagnnt superimposes a Michael Bay-style explosion over your match’s profile picture, dissolving the user’s profile from view forever.
After your match disappears, the app deletes itself from your phone, but leaves your profile available so people can still swipe you. So if you do eventually find an exclusive significant other, they can search for you on Stagnnt, see that your profile is still there, and break up with you.
“We don’t have an option for you to remove yourself from the Stagnnt dating pool,” says Ridel. “Honestly we’re only doing this to remind you that this is all pretty hopeless.”
The app’s slogan is: “Dating is hard. Why not make it impossible? Give up now.”
