Dating apps want us to stay hooked on them rather than hooking up

The latest data, however, seems to suggest otherwise.

It appears we’ve given the apps themselves a left swipe — and our love affair with online dating may be drawing to a close.

This Valentine’s Day, young people are more likely than before to have met their date off-line — or not have one at all. Over three quarters of Gen Z have dating app “burn-out”, and in the UK alone, Ofcom has reported a 16% decline in use.

When dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and, for LGBTQ+ users, Grindr, popped up on our phones last decade, it felt like the historically laborious process of courtship — itself often entangled with family dynamics and social optics — was at our fingertips.

The online sexual revolution, however, failed to bear much fruit: Gen Z are more single than ever, and having even less sex than older generations.

This growing disenchantment is rooted in one ever-apparent fact: the algorithm doesn’t want us to find love. 

Indeed, the Match Group, which owns multiple popular dating services including Tinder and Hinge, is dishing out US $14 (£10.3) million over a lawsuit accusing it of deceptive subscription practices. Even the EU is aiming to tackle the apps’ “addictive algorithms” in its new Digital Fairness Act.

For a generation that has grown online, we can read through the paywalls and ever-higher subscriptions to realise that the apps want us to stay hooked on them rather than hooking up.

Over the years, this has fostered a fast dating culture which make us feeling like we’re juggling hundreds or thousands of matches before even getting the chance to know who we’re engaging with. Daily social norms get subverted behind screens, as people ghost, insult, block, or slide back in for a sleazy, low-stakes flirt with their ex that they’d think twice about doing in person. In the words of psychologist Barry Schwartz, it’s ultimately this “paradox of choice” which leaves us feeling disoriented.

This isn’t even to get into the various issues regarding often overlooked online harassment, catfishing and safety concerns, which app developers have been slow to address.

Many friends I speak to feel the same. “The apps are just a waste of time,” is an oft-repeated sentiment. On a personal level, dating apps were initially instrumental in helping me develop my confidence as a gay man, who had never dated until my early 20s.

However, I soon realised that the compulsion to swipe as much as possible and accumulate matches, even just for the ego boost, had started outweighing my desire to meet in person. It took me getting accidentally banned from Tinder when I tried to reset my account that I ditched it altogether, and haven’t looked back since.

This isn’t to say dating apps can’t still serve a purpose. For queer people especially, they can be a stepping stone towards meeting people in a safer way, and they can provide opportunities to those limited by family or location constraints.

Dating app developers should ultimately take heed of the evolving preferences of their biggest cohort. Rather than putting up paywalls and desperately raising subscriptions, they ought to implement stronger security checks and move beyond the “endless swipe” model. Our attention isn’t to be taken for granted, and — just as the old breakup trope goes — “it’s not you, it’s me (but it’s actually you)”.

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Andrea Carlo is a British-Italian journalist and researcher based in Rome.

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