Daters need a rebrand not the dating apps.
Yes, Bumble fumbled but why are we putting all the blame on them?
Topical is the only word I can think of for this post, topical topical topical. This Bumble drama is all over my social media feed and if it’s not on yours I’m bringing it to ya now.
For months, Bumble was teasing something new coming to the app. Bumble, the dating app founded in 2014 by Whitney Wolfe Herd, promoted a “women-first” platform; wherein when a man and woman match, the woman is the one who starts the chat. The man cannot message first. In terms of feminist movements, this is a drop in the bucket. Maybe even the wrong bucket, I don’t know, it always seemed to me as internalized misogyny cloaked in feminist garb.
I’ve never used Bumble, but I think that’s because it felt too “soft”, like the “nice guy’s” dating app. They say the “power” is in women’s hands because she has the “power” AKA the responsibility of messaging first, but that just doubles down on male circumvention of rejection. & Don’t we think women bear enough responsibility in doing the nitty gritty emotional work that upholds a relationship?
Anyway, 2 weeks ago Bumble unveiled the much-anticipated rebrand. It included a change to the app’s skin (a redesign of the visual layout of the app) and some obtuse ad campaigns. That’s it.
The ads are what sparked a major backlash.
It seems as if after a simple skin change and some posters above NYC and L.A. Bumble thought there would be some sort of sublime reconciliation, some mass pilgrimage back to the apps. But that was not the case. These ads have been ridiculed tirelessly for about a week now & I didn’t want to add to the discourse but I was encouraged to share my thoughts.
This Bumble upset is the result of trying to hold sway over a refractory dating world. I do not want to admonish Bumble in hopes that they’ll learn from this because they won’t. As long as Bumble is an app and as long as their goal is to make money instead of facilitating a space to find love, they will never be in touch with what lovers & daters want.
What I haven't seen as a part of the discourse, that I’d like to add, is that it’s not Bumble and the other dating apps that need an overhaul, it’s the mindset of the daters that needs a complete overhaul.
Bumble’s layout change will not change what’s really affecting single people: situationship culture, hookup culture, and the complete disregard for interpersonal connection, traditional courtship, intimacy, and vulnerability.
What Bumble, Hinge, Tinder, and the dating apps did that shot themselves in the foot, when it came to being a productive product in the capitalist-innovation-machine, was creating an app that’s “designed to be deleted” (Hinge’s slogan). You can't make money off an app that’s been deleted. When online dating services came on the web, like Match.com in 1995, you had to pay to use the service. The present-day dating apps skipped that part.1 They had options users could pay for, e.g. paying to send “super likes” or “roses” but that’s optional. & When the apps’ CEOs realized they fucked up and shareholder value was at stake, they retroactively introduced ads and subscription services. (Raya —the dating app you have to be referred to, Instagram checked, and approved for— however, does not have this issue, charging $20 a month for their services.)
What I hate is the unfortunate truth regarding the “dating market”: women are the value of these apps. Women are the shiny trophy and without us, these apps would be nothing. There was that conservative dating app that totally failed because women didn’t sign up. If women do not participate there is no product, plain and simple. Women have retreated from the dating front lines and chosen celibacy because of how bad it is. You’re lucky to make it out alive (and unfortunately I almost mean that literally). Bumble’s ad campaign was a futile response to that retreat.
More and more American women have been adopting the burgeoning 4B movement that started in South Korea. 4B or the “four no’s” is a feminist movement that, instead of challenging the misogyny that comes with dating heterosexual men, simply boycotts any relationship with men altogether. The 4 “B’s” refers to 4 Korean words that all start with “B”: bihon, bichulasn, biyeonae, and bisekseu; no to heterosexual marriage, no to childbirth, no to dating, and no to heterosexual sex. Some Korean women have taken the movement as far as even removing male friends from their lives. So as American women adopt this boycott, it’s clear that the celibacy ads Bumble erected seem to be targeted toward women.
But this specific ad from Bumble...I don't know who it’s targeted to.
Because everyone needs to change, the dating arena is completely shot.
Online dating was destigmatized with the popularization of the dating app in the early to mid twenty 10s. We decided, at this time, to give single people an electronic game beginning with Tinder and the dating apps that followed. We gave men a game whose prize was/is something very real and already devalued: women. But for men the prize isn’t even us women, in our entirety —as a human being with feelings and emotions and all that good stuff— that’s not the prize men want, it’s our energy and sexual energy that is the prize.
For those who decided to partake, the dating app became a get-fucked-quick scheme.
I think approaching dating as a game, even more than it already was, significantly hurt men in the long run —as we’re seeing now. They took advantage of the access to hundreds of beautiful REAL women at their fingertips (and not those fake women in the ads on the side of porn videos). Men got to swipe swipe swipe swipe, on profiles displayed like a deck of cards, like an arcade game, and many of them treated it as such. I knew a boy who, when on tour with his band around the Midwest and East Coast, swiped “yes” on every girl in every town & city just to see how many matches he could get.
(Okay I’m going to admit that I do not know my lefts and rights and therefore cannot understand if swiping left means “yes, I like this person” or “no I do not like this person” so I just say “swipe yes or no”.)
We —and I say we because I've been in this mindset before— think that the people in the phone are not real until we match. Until then it’s just a fun game of cards. It feels unreal because of the levels of removal the online dating process exists at. I’ve talked about this before but I think Shawn Blue’s 2019 book “The Psychology of Modern Dating: Websites, Apps, and Relationships” can help me reiterate it: the gamification of it all has created a “cognitive exhaustion that occurs after viewing multiple dating profiles [this] leads to decreased interest during the profile viewing process but also to reduced satisfaction and commitment when offline dating begins.”2
It also feels unreal because dating apps allow us to circumvent rejection. If you send a like and they don’t like you back the app doesn’t track that, the person just sort of ceases to exist. We’ve had almost 30 years of online dating and the decade-long popularization of dating apps and thus have created a culture unfamiliar with rejection, specifically rejection IRL, and interpersonal connection.
Dating, like any social concept/activity, is palimpsest; dating has diverse levels of complexities in different cultures and the definition has evolved over recent centuries. But I fear we may have lost our grasp on dating entirely. Men have been spoiled with years of patriarchy, women are fed up with it, and it’s reflected in our modern dating culture. It’s not all men —I hate the phrase “not all men” because connotes sympathy with the “men’s rights movement” (which I don’t have), but in this case, it's true. Some men on these apps want to find love, & some women just want to hook up.
I had my first committed relationship with a boy I met off a dating app, I was a bridesmaid in a wedding where the couple met off a dating app, and success stories reign true amongst my friends. But clearly, for Bumble et al, this is not about the success stories —it’s about making money. & What we constantly hear from users, and therefore are constantly talking about, are the failures. All these fucked up situations, men’s entilement, and women’s despondence are what lead women to choose decentering men over dating them.
Corporate greed wasn't always reflected within the platforms, so I don’t think it's fair to say that it’s the dating apps’ fault that it seems like nothing works and that nothing leads to love. The apps used to work, I think in part because the single folk weren’t so jaded, entitled, and dysfunctional —men and women alike. There was a moment when the apps were a space to nurture a potential relationship until a comfortable symbiosis led to a date. And for many people, this was the way to break into the scary world of dating.
As for the dating app HQ profits.. for months I've heard talks about how Hinge and Bumble keep attractive people in “hot people jail”, unaccessible behind a subscription paywall. Once you pay, you get to see better profiles.
I think that sentiment is completely insensitive, as if “Ugly” people don’t deserve love.
And
There is always going to be some “payment” involved in dating. I don’t think it’s right for Hinge to lock people behind a paywall but at some point, a social interaction —a date— will cost you something. Whether that’s, time, energy, or cold hard cash.
(Now that I think about this might only be an issue for the straight women’s side of the apps..? I’m not sure what’s going on on the straight male side of the apps, but I refuse to believe all the hot women are behind a paywall. All women are beautiful & hot so I’m not sure how they ALL could be locked away.)
But before the hot people were in jail, when the dating apps were at their nascent, there was still hope. To get back to my point: it wasn't always this bad. But years of playing this game for attention has turned people cold, insensitive, unaffectionate, and isolated.
I met a girl in the bathroom recently and we talked about dating apps. I told her of my substack and we had an impromptu interview in the bathroom, unbeknownst to me she had to pee the whole time. I thought she had already gone, but that’s beside the point.
She said she likes dating apps because she “doesn’t go for guys for looks”. That is both a win for ugly men (because she was beautiful) and a sly diss at them. Dating app users who prioritize looks become distracted by physicality and attraction and lose focus of other characteristics. Hottness does not directly equate to a good relationship. She went on to say that she goes for guys based on personality and you can get a better sense of that off a dating app profile, as opposed to just seeing someone at a bar and hoping you’re interested in the same things.
“Sure sure, fair,” I told her. She makes a good point. I think what she was getting at was the idea of the concept of self. When I saw the person I went on a semi-successful dating app date with, I hit the brakes on my high-speed swiping after being caught by his attractiveness and “swiped yes” because of his interests & portrayal of self. On the apps, the viewer of the profile gets a glimpse into how the other person understands their self. “The online dating environment can be conceptualized as an extension of the dater’s intrapsychic world...where individuals can present different components of themselves online possibly more easily than in offline environments.”3
For me, this was always the issue I had with dating apps, not because I don't know my self, but because I know my self too well. How am I expected to boil down the entirety of my being into 6 photos and a couple of prompts??
For her, the woman in the bathroom, the dating apps worked. She was on a date that night. So why hasn’t Bumble focused its ads on that aspect of the app?? They could market the apps as an opportunity to share yourself on a hyperpersonal level, for better or for worse —and for the uggos , conventionally unattractive, it might be for the better. I’d even suggest that the apps start by showing you the person’s interests before you see a picture. (Unfortunately for me this wouldn’t work, I’d get no likes because my interests are either too asinine or too sophisticated or the layperson but I am extremely beautiful and hot.)
We think we have the freedom of choice, and we believe we’ll be able to choose the right partner based on their looks or the parameters we set on the apps: “no moderates, no smokers, 26-31, doesn’t want kids”, etc, etc. But the apps can’t filter out the man whores who hate their mothers and do coke every weekend!
People say they use the apps because they don’t want to waste their time, and want to narrow things down to find exactly what they’re looking for, but nothing is certain. Even if all the filters match you with the “perfect” someone, it might not work out. When I was asked out in real life, and put the fella through a week's worth of phone calls to get to know each other before our date, it still turned out that there was no connection and I was back to the drawing board. There will always be a risk in dating, but finding a connection, and falling in love, is always worth it.
Unfortunately, on the surface, it seems that the intentions of men and women on dating apps do not align; men are on the apps to fuck and women are looking for a relationship, (please someone prove me wrong). & When that has been the mindset for almost a decade, it’s going to have consequences. Those consequences are women retreating from dating and sex altogether. And as we see with Bumble’s “rebrand”, those consequences are taking effect.
I’ve downloaded, deleted, and re-downloaded the dating apps multiple times. I’ve had hundreds of likes, only 3 dates that came out of it, and only 1 of those guys I actually liked. I’ve been asked out IRL and gone on dates with those askers. None of it worked out. I hold out hope for the ones I meet IRL, and maybe I’ll make space for the dating apps once again (one successful match within a year is good odds....right?) The world of online dating is constantly changing. Match.com started it all off in 1995, not even 30 years ago and the concept has taken a whole new shape. But it’s not just the apps that need to change, we —the people, the users— need to reestablish value in traditional courtship, romance, intention, and vulnerability.
Call me a trad wife I guess….
not positive on this, jut info off the top of my head. google it if you’re so inclined.
Shawn Blue. 2019. The Psychology of Modern Dating : Websites, Apps, and Relationships. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Shawn Blue