Alex, Peter and Adie von Gontard, Hunter Coffey: Photos by Scott Mitchell

In a world where love letters have been replaced by text messages, and meeting someone new means scrolling through a seemingly endless supply of internet profiles, four East Dallas men are asking the question: Whatever happened to romance and good old-fashioned chivalry?

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We can’t go back, obviously. The digital age is here to stay, so these young entrepreneurs — brothers Alex, Peter and Adie von Gontard, along with Hunter Coffey, who are roommates as well as colleagues at APAA Sports Group — want to find a way to teleport the good ol’ days of courting to the future.

Their solution? A new dating app called Courtem, born of their frustration with the phone app Tinder, which has garnered a reputation as “the hook-up app.” Their goal was to create something that reveals more dimension than so many of the looks-focused apps on the market.

“We narrowed it down to what we thought made sense from a dating perspective, and allowed people to actually put themselves out there, so it wasn’t just based on appearances alone,” explains Peter von Gontard.

To do this, the Courtem experience centers around “date proposals.”

After scrolling through the profiles (there’s pretty much no way around this on any dating site), a user can propose a date to another user based on common interests. The receiver can then reject the proposal, request the sender improve his or her offer using preselected responses, accept the proposal, or ask to bring along a wingman/wingwoman for a double date instead.

The hope is that the date proposal interaction allows users to gauge various characteristics of the other person. Is he or she romantic, funny, clever?

Once a date proposal is accepted, the chat feature between the two users is engaged. Dates can be canceled at any time. After each date, Courtem invites users to rate other users to ensure they are being courteous during their dates.

Chivalry is not dead, at least in the digital realm.