"It is very hard to find people who speak Catalan, it depends on the environment you move in –claims Martí Vila from Manresa–. And it is also a drag to hook up at parties, it is very superficial and there are people who are wasted". Faced with this double problem, this 20-year-old programmer and his friend Teo Garcia, a mathematics student, decided to seek a solution. This summer they shut themselves in a house in Rupit to devise, from the epicenter of our beloved Catalonia, an application for hooking up exclusively in Catalan.

Before separating, Raúl (a fictitious name to maintain his anonymity) saw a lot of potential in dating apps and was eager to try them out. Having had the opportunity, he hasn't used them and is "far from" doing so. He wants to stop spending so many hours in front of his phone and delving into this world is precisely going in the other direction. But the truth is, he hasn't missed them. "I've met people who have interested me and people who have interested me," he says when explaining how he's handled this new situation. He also confesses that being able to experiment has been a "healthy and good motivation" for him.

"I finally unsubscribed. I was tired of spending hours looking at profiles of unknown guys, making movies, imagining that everything would turn out well and in reality it never ended well." I don't meet many new guys, but I'm grateful for it, it's better. The apps gave me anxiety and in the end I found it very difficult to manage the frustration every time things didn't go well," she admits.

Tinder, Bumble, Happn, Grindr, Badoo, Meetic, AdoptaUnTio and many more. Dating and partner-finding apps have revolutionised the way humans interact in terms of sexual and emotional relationships in the West. These types of apps are so common that it even seems impossible to have other ways of getting along beyond trading images and chatting on the mobile phone screen. In this sense, the data is clarifying, because it is estimated that 40% of new couples formed in the State have met on Tinder. But although they may seem from another era, physical marriage agencies have not disappeared, quite the opposite. This sector, which was created in Catalonia in the sixties, exists and works as well as in past decades. There are far fewer of them and they do not compete head-to-head with the millions of users who use the digital environment, but they claim to offer an extra level of attention and personalisation that no machine can ever give you.