When You Need a Dating App For More Than Romance

You’re at a cozy Icelandic café, sharing a laugh over coffee with someone new, and the chemistry is undeniable. Sparks fly, your hearts flutter, and then things get awkward in a hurry. It turns out you have a lot more in common than a shared love of Broadway musicals; you also have the same set of aunts and uncles.

Welcome to Iceland. Not only does the country have the most authors and readers per capita, it’s also a place where you run the very real risk of dating a close relative.

Good news — Now, there’s an app for that.

The Iceland Incest Problem: When Everyone’s Practically Family

Iceland is home to just under 330,000 people, and about two-thirds of them live in or near Reykjavík. It’s a charming little country where everyone knows everyone—or at least, everyone’s great-great-grandparents. With such a small, closely-knit population, the odds of accidentally dating your cousin are a bit too high for comfort.

Necessity is the mother/sister/aunt/first-counsin of invention. In the technology world, that means if there’s a problem, there’s an app for that. Enter Íslendinga-App, a mobile app that helps Icelanders determine if their potential love interest is a little too closely related. Created by a company called Sad Engineers Studios, the app pulls data from a genealogy database that dates back over 1,000 years. That’s right—this app doesn’t just stop at “distant cousin.” It’s more like “We’re related through that one Viking who ate lutefisk and invaded England in 872.”

How It Works: Research The Family Tree Before You Become One of Its Branches

The app makes it ridiculously easy to uncover family ties. If you’re face-to-face, simply bump your phones together (assuming both of you have the app), and voilà! Results appear faster than you can say Sifjaspellsspillir—which, by the way, is the app’s signature feature. It translates to “Incest Spoiler,” because Icelandic engineers don’t mess around with subtlety.

The app’s tagline? “Bump the app before you bump in bed.” A bit graphic for our delicate sensibilities, to be sure, but it is unquestionably practical and direct.

If you’re wondering if this is really necessary, Icelanders will tell you it absolutely is. As Einar Magnusson put it, “Everyone has heard the story of going to a family event and running into a girl you hooked up with some time ago.” Oh, the awkward holiday dinners that could’ve been avoided!

A Naming Convention That Adds to the Confusion

If the small population weren’t tricky enough, Iceland’s unique naming system makes things even more complicated. Icelanders don’t use family surnames like most of the world. Instead, children’s last names are created from their parent’s first name.

Take Björk Guðmundsdóttir, Iceland’s most famous musical celebrity. Her last name simply means “daughter of Guðmundur.” If she’d been a boy, her last name would be Guðmundsson. Some kids even combine names from both parents, like Dagur Bergþóruson Eggertsson, whose name translates to “Dagur, son of Bergþóra, son of Eggert.”

So while Americans can avoid accidental family reunions with a quick “Wait, you’re a Jingleheimer-Schmidt? Of the Boston Jingleheimer-Schmidts?” Icelanders don’t have that luxury. Instead, everyone is playing six degrees of separation—except it’s more like two degrees. Avoiding inbreeding takes a bit more than checking on last names.

More Than Just an Incest Alarm

Avoiding awkward family entanglements might be Íslendinga-App’s claim to fame, but it has some other handy features, too. It lists popular Icelandic names (because maybe you want to see if your crush’s name is trending?), compiles fascinating statistics, and even keeps track of relatives’ birthdays.

If you happen to be in Iceland and sparks are flying, remember: bump the dating app before planning that second date. While some people might find the idea of “kissing cousins” romantic, Icelanders would really prefer to leave that plot twist to old-timey novels.

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