Published on May 4, 2024 at 8:14 p.m. / Modified on May 4, 2024 at 8:20 p.m.
Gather around a restaurant table six people who don’t know each other, but who have been deemed “compatible” by personality tests and an algorithm. This is the (d)astonishing concept launched by the Timeleft application, which, on February 7, opened for the first time to three Swiss cities, Lausanne, Geneva and Zurich. Its goal: to facilitate meetings – friendly, romantic, professional, sexual, whatever – and thus “fight against urban loneliness”. This arrival in Switzerland is part of Timeleft’s “expansion strategy” in Europe. The French company launched in 2023 quickly eyed Switzerland, in particular because “the feeling of urban solitude is growing a little more every day in the world”, indicates the company. Sharing a meal with five strangers? Enough to intimidate even the most extroverted thirty-something – the author of these lines –, who took part in the game to discover the experience from the inside.
In the restaurant, Matthieu, 32, is currently alone at the table. From the outset, we both laugh at the funny nature of the situation and the conversation sparks. He came to play “guinea pig” for a friend curious to know what was hidden behind Timeleft. The Freiburger is fond of meetings, but Tinder, Bumble and other “assassins of the meeting”, he says, tense him: “Timeleft offers this interesting possibility of not worrying about the minds of his interlocutors until the moment of the meal. These kinds of encounters are closer to those that would happen unexpectedly in the street.”
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