The Failure of Dating Apps

Dating apps aren't to blame for all of today's dating market troubles, but they surely play a role in them

It’s common knowledge that the relationship between young men and women has been heading the wrong direction. Marriage rates are falling, the sexes are becoming politically polarized, there are movements among both men and women to swear off relationships.

And everybody seems unhappy with dating apps. A few recent pieces highlight some of this.

Daniel Cox wrote a piece about why nobody likes dating now.

Social media is awash in stories of awful dating experiences. I cannot think of any of them that would be solved by artificial intelligence doing more of the actual dating. Singles are largely pessimistic about the way things are going in dating life. Dating apps are increasingly accused of being part of the problem. Yet, despite the steady stream of negative feedback, most dating app companies have been slow to recognize how much their users hate using them. It’s not entirely their fault. Dating has become more difficult for a host of different reasons, including the rising distrust between men and women.

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Bumble seems to be doubling down on technology-focused solutions while ignoring the growing gender divide emerging in American culture. The company’s recent billboard campaign aimed at encouraging women not to give up on dating has been widely condemned on social media. One billboard message, “A Vow of Celibacy is Not the Answer,” provoked considerable blowback. On her YouTube channel, Valerie Emanuel called the billboard message “pathetic and desperate” and “offensive to women.” TikTok user Chey suggested that the ad campaign was “incredibly tone-deaf” and should have targeted men. She asked why the ad team at Bumble ignored the “cultural tensions” between men and women: “Why should women even want to date men?”

Over at City Journal, Kay Hymowitz wrote a piece about Gen Z’s gender stalemate.

Still, the trends described by The Economist, which have been replicated in other surveys, reveal a deep and ominous mistrust between the sexes. Figuring out dating and marriage norms that acknowledge contemporary women’s interests and achievements while also respecting men’s has proved immensely thorny; we’re probably not going to discover answers for such a problem soon. That Gen Z is coming of age at a time of intense political polarization only further complicates the mating game. Fewer young people, particularly women and those identifying as Democrats, are willing to date someone who doesn’t share their politics. “No Republicans” warnings have become a common sight on dating apps; there are even apps explicitly designed to keep out undesirables from the other party. You can’t just blame the kids; their parents often are not interested in a future son- or daughter-in-law from across the aisle.

With the share of never-married and childless adults already near all-time highs, the growing gender political divide is bad news—not only for Gen Z but also for an America that badly needs more strong families.

One thing I’d add to this is that while there’s a lot of talk about women’s changed expectations for men, there’s been very little about men’s expectations for women.

The very idea that men might have expectations in a relationship, or that men might have standards for women that some fall short of, is treated as essentially illegitimate.

While there’s a lot of talk about the declining “marriageability” of young men, virtually every writer simply assumes basically all women are marriageable or datable. This is not the case, something I plan to write about in the future.

Nicholas Kristoff at the Times also weighed in with his thoughts.

“Marriage is generally GREAT for men,” declared a woman reader from North Carolina whose comment on the column was the single most liked, with more than 2,000 people recommending it. Wives get stuck with the caregiving, she added, and “the sex that receives the care is gonna be happier than the sex that doesn’t receive the care.”

The second most recommended reader comment came from a woman who said that when she and her women friends get together, “We all say, ‘Never again.’ Men require a lot of care. They can be such babies.”

Like most mainstream commentators, Kristoff thinks that it is men who need to adapt.

I wonder if he’d tell women who are unhappy with certain aspects of today’s culture that they simply need to “adapt.”

It’s not likely that the rise of online dating is the only cause of these trends, but clearly there is widespread dissatisfaction with dating apps. The “economy” of the online dating market is not good for most people. I noted some of the ways it functions back in newsletter #50.

Katelyn Beaty recently posted a first-person account of what she’s learned from ten years on dating apps. One of the things that I appreciate about Beaty is that she is honest about her life in ways that make her vulnerable to online blowback from manosphere types, but without oversharing.

Millennials were the first adopters of dating apps; Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are the big three. That means my generation has been the guinea pig for a purported technological hack to romantic pairing that in any other time happened via families and local, embodied community.

We’re a decade into the dating app experiment, and by many accounts, it has failed. According to Pew, only one in ten “partnered adults,” whether married or in a committed relationship, met their significant other through a dating app. (The success rate is higher for LGBT users and users under 30.)

I have been on and off the dating apps — Hinge and Bumble, mostly — for a decade. Off for long stretches, because I was in dating relationships. Off too, because dating apps are, on the whole, terrible. I don’t know anyone who wants to be on the apps. Shouldn’t dating be fun?

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What the apps give us in options — which late-modern capitalism presents to us as an ultimate good — they arguably take away in our ability to risk in-person connection. Most app matches never lead to a date, because a “better” match might be one more swipe away. Risk is essential for all the best things in life, including intimacy. Watching Friends and Sex and the City (theoretically of course!!), it’s hard not feel nostalgic for a time when men approached women in a coffee shop or a bar and asked them on a date. This is part of why Gen Zers are writing off the apps as cringe.

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Like I said, I’ve been on and off Hinge and Bumble for a decade. On the whole, I have been spared the worst experiences a straight woman can have there. Yes, I’ve been on bad dates — like with the one guy who negged me, then told me explicitly that he was negging me. Or the guy who never made eye contact or asked me a question except in this faux-deep tone, “So what’s your story?” after he was done rambling. Or the guy who asked me out on the app even though we had already been on a date a few years before, lol. (We didn’t go out again.)

But I’ve also been out on plenty of fine dates. In fact, and especially as I’ve gotten older and more discerning, the majority of dates from the apps haven’t been especially bad, especially good, especially anything. They’ve been with men who seem generally kind and well-adjusted, but who I simply didn’t want to go on a second date with. I wonder if the apps have conditioned users to overemphasize immediate spark that would otherwise have developed over time, or would have been tempered by more lasting considerations of character, like steadfastness and wisdom and generosity.

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It’s only been in the past year that it’s dawned on me: I can pull my chips off the table. If the apps have not only not made good on their promise to deliver, but have also brought so frustration and exhaustion, leading me to forgo other life-giving activities and relationships, I don’t have to accept their supposed monopoly. I don’t have to pay to play just because it worked for other people. We have the freedom to reject tech CEOs’ dehumanizing solutions for the most tender human longings.

It’s a very good piece and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing. Note: No personal comments about Beaty are allowed on this post.

I made a decision over a decade ago to stay off dating apps. I met my wife at a church I only visited two or three times when a mutual acquaintance introduced us. I will give myself credit for taking the initiative to move things forward from there.

I won’t argue that everyone should make an absolute pledge to stay off dating apps. But given their dominance in dating today, and the poor results coming out of them, diversifying your strategies is a wise move.

The social rules today still say that men are expected to initiate in asking a woman on a date. So for men, it’s easier to go into the real world to find dates. There’s no doubt that this is higher risk than simply swiping. But taking on risk is part of what it means to be a man. And in a world where so many young men won’t do this, asking a woman out in the real world is an easy way to set yourself apart.

Women can do the same, of course, but some may prefer not to be the initiator in these situations. In those cases, it definitely complicates finding a date in the real world, because men aren’t doing as much asking these days.

In any case, trying to find someone to date and marry today is more difficult than it was in the past, and the pursuit of that often requires going against and triumphing over the trends in today’s society.

Cover image credit: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0