Imagine going on a dating app and instead of just making a highlight reel of all of your virtues, you put all your skeletons and shpilkes out there for potential suitors to see.
Sure, you list your name, your love of tennis, the Lakers, and the last television show you binged. There’s a photo of you at Machu Picchu, another picture of you all dressed up at your best friend’s wedding, and one of you holding a puppy. But in the same profile, you also put up something that you may not be too proud of: “I’m terrified of flying in airplanes,” or, “I served 30 days at Men’s Central Jail for fighting at a Dodgers game,” or “I hate fancy restaurants,” or “I suffer from narcolepsy and never drive in L.A.,” or “nobody in my family talks to me anymore.”
FLAWED, as its name suggests, encourages users to embrace their flaws and be unapologetically themselves in their quest for love and companionship.
A new dating site is encouraging users not to hide those details but to feature them. The dating site is called FLAWED and is a bold departure from the world of Hinge, Bumble, Tinder and JSwipe. FLAWED, as its name suggests, encourages users to embrace their flaws and be unapologetically themselves in their quest for love and companionship.
The founder of FLAWED, Tanya Tsikanovsky, says that honesty early on in dating is at a premium.
“It’s important to normalize that when we go on traditional dating sites or when we’ve approached dating traditionally, it’s all ‘what a great job do you have’ and ‘how good of a relationship do you have with your family?’ and ‘what are the things that you like to do?’” Tsikanovsky told the Journal. “It showcases all of the beautiful things about ourselves, but we’re never showcasing our flaws because we’re so embarrassed … Why not let ourselves fall in love with people that are actually compatible and people that make our lives better and help us improve ourselves? As opposed to relationships that just trigger us or cause us to relive our traumas or that maybe are not equipped to show up for us in the way that we would need.”
The concept of a “don’t pretend to be perfect” dating app isn’t exactly new. There are dating communities that are safe spaces for people with health issues beyond their control. Gutsy, an app for those with digestive health problems, and Dateability, which bills itself as “the only dating app designed for the disabled and chronically ill communities.”
Tsikanovsky said that when you’re a new user on FLAWED, the site requires you to list where you’re located and other basics you would find on any other dating app. Then FLAWED gives users a selection of well over a hundred “flaws” or things which can be considered flaws, including anything from being a hoarder, always late, an overthinker, anxious, chronically ill, allergic to seemingly everything, have virulent distaste for something most people are okay with.
She made an important clarification, that “those aren’t necessarily ‘flaws,’ but to some people they can be considered flaws.” It’s quite a reflective process to put oneself into the dating pool only after figuring out the things you may be hiding from a potential first date which could be immediate disqualifiers.
“The concept when signing up is to make sure that you list at least five [flaws] of yourself that you can identify,” Tsikanovsky said. “It forces you to be honest. So if you’re going to look for other people’s flaws, you have to share yours first. It requires you to do five before you can continue setting up your profile.”
When searching for a match, Users can also select five flaws to that they cannot accept.
Of course, when it comes to loving flaws, it may be easier to continue to love someone once they admit one of their potentially disqualifying flaws — there’s already a connection. Still, there’s risk in bringing them up 10 years into a marriage or 10 seconds after someone reads the profile. Tsikanovsky’s philosophy is that there’s a risk to losing the relationship no matter what, so put your personal hangups out there right away.
Tsikanovsky is a Los Angeles native rooted in the Jewish community. As a kid, she went to Stephen S. Wise. After college, she worked as the Director of Jewish Student Life at Hartford Hillel for two years. She then worked in the cannabis tech industry for nearly a decade. While earning a Master’s Degree in Organizational Behavior Management at New York University, Tsikanovsky received a Masa Israel grant to study in Rishon LeZion. She’s a proud Jew, as evidenced by the bold Star of David tattoo on her chiseled right bicep.
As an alumnus of Brentwood School, she attended their first-ever “venture challenge” where school officials welcomed alumni to come in and present businesses that they’ve either already started or ones that they are thinking about starting, and present it to an audience.
She presented FLAWED as an app that helps singles to break free from the illusion of perfection in the early dating process. She said that society’s obsession with perfection is often perpetuated by filters and editing tools on social media platforms like Instagram. Tsikanovsky stressed that FLAWED aims to counter this trend and remind users that they are “okay the way that you are.”
And now, while currently seed funding and beta testing, Tsikanovsky and the FLAWED team are indeed finding that showcasing one’s flaws on a dating app may lead to fewer overall matches, but also lead to more compatible matches.
Tsikanovsky hopes that the special sauce of FLAWED sparks a movement that challenges conventional notions of online dating and perhaps revolutionizes the dating landscape.
“There’s a giant wave of people that care about authenticity, and especially the younger generations, they aren’t afraid to be themselves,” Tsikanovsky said. “I think that on a lot of moral levels, we agree with them in many ways. And I think that they’re helping us be more open and especially now that we’re still dating so much older in our lives than we used to, we’re not settling down at younger ages anymore. So I think we’re open to changing how we date all around because we never expected to be dating this long anyway.”
FLAWED is hosting their launch event in February, where users can meet each other and embrace their flaws in person.
“Being embarrassed is a choice,” Tsikanovsky said. “If you can own it and be fine, no one can make you feel bad about yourself. For people that are uptight or embarrassed about something, there is a place where you can check that off because that’s a normal thing. You can normalize that and know that there’s going to be people out there that find your ‘flaws’ attractive and you’ll match. It’s such an important thing to say to yourself, ‘no, you’re okay the way that you are. You’re flawed, but that’s okay’. Let’s just find you the person that is going to match you in that way. It’s going to make you feel good about yourself.”
You can get updates about the full release of FLAWED on its Instagram and join at https://dateflawed.com
