The largest dating pool in the country, and everyone in it is exhausted. Both of those facts have the same cause.
Toronto should be easy. It has more single adults than any other city in the country, an endless supply of places to go, and a population that skews young and mobile. In practice most people here describe dating as harder than it was anywhere else they have lived, and the reasons are structural rather than mysterious.
A date across town costs two hours of travel before anybody says hello. Which means people quietly filter by neighbourhood, and the giant dating pool you thought you had is actually the slice of it within about half an hour of you.
Toronto has some of the highest app usage in the country and correspondingly high burnout. You are frequently talking to somebody on their fourth year of this, which shows up as low investment and quick disappearance and is not personal.
When the pool looks infinite, nobody invests in a single conversation. This is the most reported complaint about dating here and it is a direct product of scale.
For four or five months, spontaneous meeting stops and everything has to be arranged indoors and on purpose. A lot of promising conversations die in February for no other reason.
What works here. Filter hard on distance, meet fast, and pick somewhere between the two of you. Almost every failure mode in this city is a scheduling and geography problem wearing the costume of a compatibility problem.
Kindred matches on interests and an approximate distance, so geography is part of the match rather than something you discover afterwards. Photos unlock on day 3 for both people at once, and on day 7 the app asks for a plan with a date, a place and a time, which is aimed squarely at the local habit of endless pleasant conversation that never becomes an evening.
There is a daily limit on how many people you can reach, on purpose, because the abundance is the problem rather than the solution. Kindred also runs separate friends and couples modes, and there is a page on making friends in Toronto as well.
Three structural reasons rather than anything about the people: the city is large enough that a cross town date costs two hours of travel, app usage and burnout are unusually high so many people are years into low investment dating, and an apparently infinite pool discourages committing to any one conversation.
Somewhere between the two of you, near transit, in daylight, for about an hour. Coffee near a subway station is the highest yield option in this city, and in winter galleries, markets, skating and board game cafes all work better than trying to wait out the season.
Very, which is both why the pool is large and why burnout is common. A practical consequence is that people move slowly and disappear often, so proposing a specific meeting early tends to work better here than a long messaging phase.
Kindred opens here before anywhere else. Join the launch list and you get 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.