The maths is bad everywhere. In a city this spread out it is worse, and it is also fixable.
A couple friendship needs four people to like each other and four diaries to agree. That is hard in any city. In Toronto you can add a ninety minute round trip and five months of weather that makes anybody want to stay home.
Two households coordinating across a city this size means every plan is expensive. A couple twenty minutes away becomes a monthly fixture. A couple across town becomes a Christmas card.
Patios and parks are how a lot of couple friendships get going, and they are gone from November to April. Without an indoor default, most new couple friendships here die in their first winter.
Four adults, all agreeable, nobody scheduling. This is how the overwhelming majority of promising couple friendships end: not in conflict, in drift.
Two of you click, one pairing is polite and flat. Common, survivable, and only if the strong pair does the organising and nobody pretends otherwise.
What works here. Near, indoors, recurring, and somebody names the date. All four, or it will not survive to spring.
Friends only, and enforced. Couple accounts here exist to make friends with other couples. Pushing for anything non platonic is a specific, named reason to report an account, and it gets accounts removed. That matters because searching for this normally returns a lot of things that are not this.
Both of you have to be real. You each sign up separately, with your own email and date of birth, then one of you shows a code and the other scans it, in person, on two phones. Until that happens your profile is not shown to anybody. One person cannot run a couple account alone.
You match on what you both actually like, with an approximate distance shown, no photos for the first three days, and a prompt on day 7 asking all four of you for a plan with a date on it.
More on the couples side on the couples page, and on the general problem in how to make friends as a couple.
By filtering hard on distance, starting with an activity rather than a dinner, keeping the first meeting short, and repeating within about three weeks. Distance matters more for couples than for individuals because two households have to coordinate, and in a city this size a crosstown plan rarely survives.
Kindred has a couples mode that is friends only and enforces it, and it is launching in Toronto first. Both partners must register separately and confirm each other by scanning a code in person before the couple profile becomes visible to anyone.
Something with an activity in it and a natural end point, kept to about two hours. A walk, a market, a board game cafe or a quiz works far better than dinner, because four strangers at a table have nothing to do but talk and no easy way to leave.
Both partners sign up separately and confirm in person, so a couple on Kindred is always actually a couple. Join the launch list for Kindred free for good, plus three months of Kindred+.
Kindred does not run background checks and does not verify that anyone is who they say they are. No app does, whatever it implies. Meet somewhere public the first few times, tell someone where you are going, sort out your own way home, and never send anyone money. The safety section is honest about exactly what we do and what we cannot do.