In some circles, people are slowly becoming used to a certain pattern. A smart, successful, and well-connected woman downloads a dating app. She spends a few weeks going through matches that don’t lead anywhere, and she ends up deleting the app because she feels like it was a waste of her time. She tries again after a few months. The same results. She finally gives up and stops trying at all. If not, she finds a whole new way to walk.
More and more, that different path is a matchmaker. It sounds really old-fashioned. The word itself makes me think of annoying aunts and awkward family dinners. Modern matchmaking, on the other hand, doesn’t look much like that, and the women who use it aren’t so much desperate as they are worn out. It’s not hard for them to find dates. The platforms that were supposed to help them do that don’t seem to be giving them anything worthwhile to do.
For a while now, the numbers behind the apps have been bad. In the past two years, Bumble has lost almost all of its market value. Tinder has been having trouble keeping users. There are always new features, CEOs, and rebranding campaigns coming out from companies, but users still leave. Last year, Bumble tried to win back younger women with bold billboard ads, but they failed miserably. The ads were criticized by the public and did more harm to the brand than good.
Structure is part of what went wrong. Dating apps make money while their users aren’t using them. There doesn’t seem to be any clear financial reason to get someone off the platform quickly, into a good relationship, and out of the picture for good. So the experience often feels like it’s designed to keep you interested rather than get you to the end goal—more notifications, more paid features, and more reasons to keep scrolling. Women who have actually used these sites often say the same thing: they feel like they are being kept busy instead of being helped.
A marketer in the U.K. named Louise Mason quit Bumble and Tinder when she realized that most of the men she matched with weren’t really interested in meeting her in person. It felt like the conversations were for show. It felt like a transactional dynamic. She wasn’t choosing to be single; she just decided that the apps weren’t worth the time and self-respect they were taking away from her.
A lot of people feel that way. Studies have linked heavy use of dating apps to higher rates of anxiety, loneliness, and what researchers are now calling “burnout.” This isn’t the casual kind of burnout; this is a clinical pattern marked by emotional exhaustion and a deep doubt that anything good can happen. Liesel Sharabi, a relationship and technology researcher at Arizona State University, has said that the app ecosystem is fundamentally at odds with what most users want. People aren’t moving on and getting good matches. They keep cycling and cycling.
High-end matchmaking is not the same as regular matchmaking. Someone checks things out, thinks about them, and sorts them for you for a fee, which can be small or big. The person who is coming to dinner has already been checked out. Someone with good sense has decided that this has potential. In a way, it’s a return to the idea that finding a good partner takes work, not just a perfect profile and hours of waving your phone around.
Some services, like Lox Club, have tried to make this model more accessible to more people by charging monthly fees and providing matchmakers along with the usual app features. Standard high-end services still cost a lot more and are out of reach for most people. But it’s clear that there is a need, and that need is growing among women who have the money, the standards, and, well, the self-awareness to know when something isn’t working.
The apps seem to have missed a basic point, despite their efforts to use technology, raise money, and build their brands. People don’t want to shop. They don’t want an inbox full of messages they’ll never answer or a match queue that makes it look like there are lots of opportunities but doesn’t actually offer many. They want to meet a real person. And more and more of them are deciding that the algorithm isn’t going to help them get there.
