What Genie is
Genie is a reference network for dating. It is the dating equivalent of asking a friend of a friend what someone is actually like — except the answer is anonymous, structured and written down.
Every entry describes one relationship between two people: how long it lasted, what kind of dating it was, eight ratings, a written account of what happened, and whether the reviewer would recommend dating that person again. Profiles carry no photographs and no self-written bio. The only voice on a Genie profile is the voice of the people who dated them.
Name, age, and city help you find the right person — not someone with the same name.
Why we built it
Dating apps hand you a profile written by the person themselves and ask you to judge it. That is an odd way to make a decision that affects your safety, your time and your heart. Everyone else who has dated them already knows the things you want to know, and there has never been a place for that knowledge to go.
So we built one, with two constraints that shaped everything else. It had to be anonymous, because nobody tells the truth about an ex-partner with their name attached. And it had to be structured, because free-text reviews of human beings turn into a ratings war within a week.
The result is not a verdict on a person. It is a set of dated, firsthand accounts that let you arrive at your own.
How the eight rating dimensions were chosen
There is no shortage of things you could rate about a person. We chose eight, and we chose them by four rules:
- Observable. Anyone who dated them can answer it from what they saw, with no special knowledge.
- About the relationship, not the person’s worth. The question is “how did this go?”, not “how good are they?”
- Answerable at any length. Four dates or four years — the dimension still means something.
- Hard to weaponise in one line. Every rating has to be accompanied by a written account of at least 40 characters (up to 4,000), which makes drive-by reviews expensive to write.
The eight
- Communication. Did they reply, follow up, and say what they meant? The single most common reason a dating relationship ends badly.
- Honesty. Whether their words matched their actions — especially about exclusivity, other people, and the things they chose not to mention.
- Respect. How they treated you, your time, your boundaries, and the people around you when nobody was keeping score.
- Reliability. Whether plans happened. The most concrete, checkable behaviour there is, and the hardest to argue with.
- Affection. Whether you felt wanted rather than merely scheduled. Absence of affection is a reason people leave, so its presence belongs here too.
- Emotional maturity. How conflict went: whether it was repaired, whether it was met with defensiveness or silence, whether it was survivable.
- Consistency. Whether the person you met in week one was still the person in month three. This is the dimension that catches love-bombing.
- Relationship intentions. Whether what they wanted matched what they said they wanted. Most dating pain is a mismatch here, not a flaw.
Alongside the ratings, reviewers pick from fixed lists of 10 green flags and 9 concerns — “Good communicator”, “Cancels plans”, “Hot and cold” and the rest. Fixed lists are deliberate: they keep two reviews about the same person comparable, and they stop the vocabulary drifting into insult.
What we deliberately left out
The dimensions we rejected say more about Genie than the ones we kept. None of the following is a rating, and content that tries to smuggle them in is blocked or removed:
- Attractiveness and appearance. Taste is not a reference. Rating looks turns Genie into a scoreboard and tells a reader nothing useful.
- Income, job title and status. It invites status-seeking, it dates badly, and it says nothing about how someone treats a partner.
- Sexual performance. Intimate detail about a person who cannot consent to it being published. Not now, not ever.
- Diagnoses and psychiatric labels. No one reading a review can verify a diagnosis, and a label replaces a description with a verdict.
- Criminal history and arrests. We hold no records and cannot check any. Treating a review as a criminal-history search is a misuse of Genie.
- Family, immigration and health status. Private information about someone that has no bearing on how they dated you.
The test we apply is simple: could a reasonable reader use this to learn something true about how someone dates, or does it just give them a weapon?
What Genie is not
- Not a background check. Genie is a reference network, not a background-check or criminal-records service. We hold no government records, no identity documents, no credit data and no court data, and we do not verify anyone.
- Not a safety certificate. An empty profile means nobody has written anything yet. It is not a clean bill of health.
- Not a verdict. Reviews are one person’s account of their own experience. They are opinions. They can be wrong, unfair, or out of date.
- Not evidence. Nothing on Genie is a basis for decisions about housing, employment, credit, insurance, immigration or child custody, and it should never be used as one.
- Not for minors, and not for people you have not dated. Reviews must come from a real dating relationship with the person named.
How we keep reviews honest
- One review per person, per author. No pile-ons, no second accounts.
- A content gate. Private contact details and diagnoses or labels cannot be published at all.
- Structure. Eight ratings plus a written account makes a fake review a lot of work for very little payoff.
- Reporting and moderation. Any review can be reported for a specific reason; three independent reports hide it automatically until a human moderator decides.
- Accountability behind the anonymity. Reports are tied to accounts, and every moderation action is written to an audit log.
The full picture is in the Safety Centre.
Our commitments
- We will never sell a review, a message or an author identity, and we will never notify someone that they have been reviewed.
- We will never reveal a reviewer because a subject asked us to. Anonymity that bends under complaint is not anonymity.
- We will not remove a review because it is unflattering. We will remove it when it breaks the rules.
- We will keep saying, on every page that matters, that Genie is not a background check.
Genie is an independent product, built by a small team who wanted this to exist. If you think we are getting one of these wrong, tell us.