What Bumble’s Bumble Tells Us about Dating Apps
“Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun.”
Does that new commandment make you want to pull out your phone and start swiping for love? Bumble, the erstwhile “feminist” dating app, certainly hoped so. Amid flagging revenue, the company laid off 30 percent of its staff this year and binned its main gimmick—requiring female users to reach out to matches first. And then, a new marketing campaign rolled out, aimed at rebooting the brand by trashing sexlessness. “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer,” Bumble billboards scolded women in Los Angeles, while a cringeworthy commercial for the app went fully anti-nun.
Everyone hated it. The asexual and aromantic communities tagged Bumble with the dreaded scarlet B for Bad Ally, a cruel fate for a smugly progressive company. Women announced that they felt judged. Catholic vocation directors found it irresistible bait. Amid the blowback, Bumble issued a groveling apology and canceled the ad campaign. But the incident underlines a new trend taking shape in the mating game: dating apps themselves may be dying.
Full disclosure: I met my husband online in 2009, just six months after Apple’s App Store opened, in one of the final years before smartphones made digital dating widespread. Today, online is the most common place to meet a partner. I had a great experience, because the fledgling technology helped me bypass the in-person dating culture I despised. I was looking for someone serious, and a niche algorithm helped me locate him with lightning speed, after only a couple misfires.
But with few exceptions, that’s not the experience apps are designed for today. As smartphones became ubiquitous, matchmaking companies like Bumble brought the dating culture of the masses into their business model. They recognized that hook-ups can be a source of profit, because the churn represents ongoing business. Instead of an efficient way to meet one person you could grow old with—or at least, older with—apps presented an endless, all-you-can-eat buffet of people you could sleep with.
The public liked it, but only at first. For women, the alleged glories of the sexual revolution have never lived up to the hype. Cheap, disposable relationships have been part of a relentless media glamor campaign, but they are rarely physically pleasurable for women, and they’re frequently unsafe. Nowhere is that clearer than online, where unsolicited explicit pictures fill women’s direct messages. These messages are typically from men playing the numbers game, taking full advantage of the private, low-accountability space offered by apps. Men far outnumber women on most dating sites, so the effort to sort through the inappropriate onslaught to find serious partners can be demoralizing. One study of Tinder users found most of them were already in a relationship while using the app. Twenty percent were married.
Of course, for well-meaning men, the hyper-competitive experience is often futile—and not very much fun, either. “I go on the apps,” the Washington Post’s Christine Emba quotes one lovelorn young man in her book, Rethinking Sex. “But every time I go on them, I feel this sense of loneliness and emptiness descend upon me. It’s terrible. It’s gotten worse over the years.”
The miserable user experience is sending Gen Z running, despite their cohort being prime dating age. Only about a quarter of app users in the United States are adults under age thirty, data show. Other research has found that almost 80 percent of college and graduate students don’t bother logging in to a dating app, even once a month. Bumble isn’t alone in its floundering; even mighty Match Group, which also owns Tinder and Hinge, has seen slowing revenue.
Worryingly, young people haven’t necessarily substituted other forms of getting together in “meatspace.” Many are forgoing romantic relationships entirely, at much higher rates than previous generations. Celibacy itself, often defined as a temporary fast from dating or sex, as opposed to a lifetime decision, is having a pop culture moment. Celebrities from Julia Fox to Amber Rose to Lenny Kravitz have spoken about dating abstinence, and #celibacyjourney is a hashtag on TikTok. “2.5 years of celibacy and never been better tbh,” Fox commented below a post on the Bumble controversy. The smorgasbord in modern dating has given the culture indigestion.
To continue the metaphor, a traumatic incident with one’s stomach can be a useful signal, teaching the forever lesson that gorging on junk has painful consequences. But the wrong lesson, entirely, is learned when greed-driven overeating brings on fear-driven starvation. The current movement toward celibacy isn’t powered by the healthy notion of sacrificing sex for the sake of something better and higher. Instead, it’s the latest symptom of a lonely, anxious generation getting lonelier.
Given that the private tech sector is flailing in its attempts to serve the dating public, perhaps it’s inevitable that political leaders would try to answer a question no one is asking: can government do better?
The potential answer has its origins in a romance-related threat to civilization, namely, a lack of babies. Almost all developed countries are facing a birth dearth, but some are in worse shape than others. In Japan, which has a catastrophically low birthrate of only 1.3 children per woman, the aging population is destabilizing. Its decline is small, but accelerating; math shows Japan’s headcount could fall by half by 2100, upending the economy and society.
In Tokyo, officials observed that traditional Japanese culture doesn’t accommodate out-of-wedlock births. They concluded that the first necessary step is to boost the marriage rate, which has also collapsed by more than half since the 1970s. Their solution: a dating app, run by the city, to encourage pair-ups. Authorities have already invested more than $2 million in technology development, and the app is scheduled to debut as early as this summer. Initial feedback to the idea itself is positive; one poll by major daily Asahi Shimbun found 54 percent of the public in support, compared to 36 percent opposed. Among women in their thirties, more than 80 percent were fans of the concept.
The rules do have an odd attraction to them, at least for weary refugees from the likes of OKCupid. Users reportedly must pay a fee, submit legal documentation to prove they are single, and sign a letter declaring their interest in getting married. They also have to complete an interview to further verify their identity as a safe, serious, and dateable person. Needless to say, this new platform is unlikely to be overrun by unwanted pornography, under the watchful eye of the city fathers. But does having the government so involved in one’s love life simply add a different, unexpected discomfort factor? It seems highly unlikely that love will flourish under such circumstances.
You can’t blame Japanese officials for at least trying. I can imagine the next decade of dating will be defined by similar attempts to fix the app apocalypse, though more probably by cultural communities and entrepreneurs instead of civil servants. Would-be disrupters should take note of the root causes of the problem: Tinder and its sisters have made dating an arms-length consumer process, complete with product catalogues to swipe through in the privacy of your home. But love is a bad fit for the consumer world, where the customer is always right and you can get exactly what you ordered, with free shipping and easy returns. People are the missing ingredient in most dating apps today, and I’m not referencing the bots that have flooded them (although they don’t help).
Not for nothing do I sometimes hear my peers comment wistfully on the very unambiguous marriage market depicted in shows like Netflix’s Bridgerton. Though such systems historically had obvious horrors of their own, there’s also an element of intentionality, safety, and potential success in a courtship process that the larger community is aware of, and to some extent, involved in.
Women have tried to recreate similar accountability in the dating app era with “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” city-specific groups on Facebook, where they share intelligence and try to protect each other by identifying the local cads of the twenty-first century. But those efforts clearly aren’t functioning as a deterrent to bad behavior in a context where most potential matches are strangers to each other, their networks, and the platform playing host. Still less can they improve the overall success rate of matches; research shows that marriages that start online tend to be less happy and even end in earlier divorce, compared to couples introduced by friends and loved ones.
Perhaps the first step requires listening to frustrated daters who have embraced celibacy, instead of using Bumble’s approach of shaming them into logging on. Business Insider quotes one young woman who discovered that taking sex off the table is an effective way to find a partner who respects her as a whole person. “That is a superpower that I think more and more women are beginning to realize,” she said. “I didn’t have to give up my body to somebody to find out how they really feel about me.”
One thing’s for sure: don’t count on current players in the dating app world to make the right moves. In May, Bumble’s founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, told the Bloomberg Tech conference that she sees a future where your personal artificial intelligence dating concierge could “go” on hundreds of awkward first dates with your matches’ own AIs, ranking the options and whittling down the list to the two or three people whom the computer thinks could be worth your time to meet. “And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people and it will scan all of San Francisco for you,” she said, according to Forbes.
This is definitely a different approach from the time-consuming sex buffet of the present, and reminds me of my own ethos in finding Mr. Right. But Wolfe Herd misses the point completely. A “thinking computer” can crunch data about compatibility, but it can’t truly understand the romantic chemistry or values of a fundamentally feeling part of creation. We can’t simply outsource our love stories to algorithms, as the current dating app experience has proved. Nor should we. Potential partners deserve to be encountered with dignity as whole people, not as reproductive data points with scores that may be higher or lower based on our checklists. True love, the kind that’s truly human, cannot be “added to cart.”
The tech team that figures out how to add the human element back to human courtship will make a mint . . . and lots of happy new families.
Image by oatawa and licensed via Adobe Stock.