"Sapiosexual" is defined as a "a person who finds intelligence to be a sexually attractive quality in others." A new dating app has taken that in stride.
Though it's oft-considered as pretentious and brow-raising when the word is plastered on someone's online dating profile, the creators of Sapio seem to think otherwise.
A Dating App For The Sapiosexual
Couple Kristin Tynski and Kelsey Libert, along with Dan Tysnki, her twin brother, and Nick Santillo, her brother-in-law, all wanted to expound on the implication of the word within their app and how it can factor in in terms of matching people.
One of the creators told the Huffington Post that the word "sapiosexual" simply can't stand as a pigeonhole definition, a catch-all word for people who are only attracted with those who possess high IQs. The definition also entails attraction to those with a similar level of intelligence, sense of humor, and interests, among others, meaning sapiosexual attraction are founded on concepts of similarity.
"For many, defining oneself as sapiosexual has become statement against the current status quo of hookup culture and superficiality, where looks are prized above all else."
How Sapio Finds Matches
So how does Sapio, a dating app meant to take all this into account, work?
Of course, like most dating apps available today, Sapio asks its users permission to mine their Facebook profiles for information or to manually input their own.
Most notably, Sapio has a thing called Question Explorer, which is brimmed with 300 open-ended questions in a host of categories ranging from "Hopes and Dreams," "Hypotheticals," or even "Inside My Head." The whole affair seems very gargantuan and tall, and it'll most likely take a lot of time to process, but the creators said that the more questions users answer, the more they'll be visible to other people who hold similar interests.
Like the usual dating app fare, there are metrics one can look to aid in deciding if one likes a particular individual or not. Photos are a given, of course, but there's also height, ethnicity, education, even smoking preferences, and a handful more. Additionally, Sapio is also LGBTQ-friendly — there are orientation preferences available to adjust future matches accordingly.
After answering the behemoth questionnaire, Sapio starts finding matches based on similar interests, intelligence level, and personality types. If both people mutually like each other, Sapio opens a chat room to continue the conversation, which is similar to how Tinder works. Sapio also mimics another Tinder staple: the "swipe left or right" feature, so users can easily filter through profiles they like or dislike.
Dating Apps And Modern Romance
Dating apps are the one of the most organic outcomes when modern-day technology is fused with the ever-changing concept of romance. Past dating apps have made intimacy virtual. Tinder has made it rapid, seamless, and often dispiriting. Now, Sapio is at least offering a way for people to connect based on similarities far more complex and profound than a profile photo, doing it by going deeper than what's visible on the surface. With questions like "If you were the supreme ruler of the world, what laws would you pass?" there's bound to be an interesting response, assuming people start being honest.
