Reading Books Makes You Hotter (At Least According to a Dating App)

The UK-based student-matching app MyBae has declared with (relative) confidence: “The more you read, the more attractive you are to potential partners.” The app — which has sought to rid itself of the stranger danger risks of dating apps like Tinder — matches young people based on a cross section of personality traits and interests. These factors take the shape of hashtags, allowing the app to pool and track data. Essentially, MyBae has analyzed the aggregated tags and matches to reveal something potentially intriguing: 21% of all matches on the app had the tag #reading in common. Even more, 11% of the app’s users try to match with someone whose tags imply avid reading. Comparatively, music is the second highest interest with 7%.

Beyond the broad hashtag #reading, “Romance” was shockingly (or not?) the most matched book tag. It is hard to believe, however, that MyBae users weren’t flocking toward #thevictoriannovel. It doesn’t get much sexier than the moors and metaphysical longings of a Jane Eyre or the delirium and omnipresent decay of something like Confessions of an English Opium Eater, now does it? Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but at the very least #modernist(fore)wordplay should have made a top-three tags appearance.

Regardless, it is reassuring to have hard, statistical proof (from one British student-matching app) that the many hours spent reading on couches, beds, beaches and the like have done wonders for my “attractive[ness] to potential partners” and not what I thought they’d done, which was transform me into a lonely vampire (shout-out Bram Stoker).