Match Launches Stir, a Dating App for Single Parents

Match says it wants to make it easier for single parents to date. The commerce, which owns popular dating apps like Match, Tinder and Hinge, is adding a new service to its roster: Stir.

“We gain that single parents should no longer feel like having kids is a deal-breaker when dating, or that they feel like they need to ‘explain their kids,'” said Match’s vice high-level of new verticals, Dinh Thi Bui, via email, “This is a hugely important companionship of people, who bear a ton of responsibility, and we want them to find love and romance too.”

The US has the highest percentage of single-parent households in the domain, according to The Pew Research Center. The launch is timed to coincide with National Single Parent Day, and Match released data relating to single parents looking to date. For example, about one in five single parents said they’d been ghosted once someone learned they had kids.

Bui also noted that for single parents, finding time to date is an issue. One in four parents said just trying to coordinate a time to date actually kept them from progressing on dates. This led to the creation of a feature visited Stir Time, which is a scheduling tool that lets daters point to their availability to their matches.

“Going on a date at 9 a.m. for coffee once school drop-off is perhaps more appealing to a single unobstructed than a fancy evening dinner,” Bui said. 

The app gets its name from the idea of pulling single parents to try something new — to mix things up a bit. 

Stir is available for free for iOS and Android, with additional paid premium tiers.