And while online dating platforms can’t control many of the circumstances contributing to women’s mass disenchantment with romance, a string of recent marketing snafus have compounded these feelings, highlighting the evergreen importance of social listening with nuance.
For example, The League, a dating app catering to high-achieving professionals, faced backlash to its “Be a GoalDigger” brand campaign launched in late 2023. Women criticized the promotion — which encouraged female users to “date someone with a 5-year plan that makes you want to ovulate” — across several socail media platforms, calling it “cringy” and “ick-inducing.”
A category-wide trend toward paywalling basic features is also regularly panned by female users.
Brands outside of the dating space, meanwhile, are having better luck navigating today’s complicated dynamic with offerings that acknowledge the many differences in the lived experiences of all genders, but without mocking or disparaging any specific one.
Lyft just expanded its Women Plus Connect feature, allowing women and nonbinary riders to match with women and nonbinary drivers nationwide. It originally introduced the initiative in select cities late last year after an investigation revealed that non-male rideshare drivers face frequent sexual harassment from customers, and has since been activated by more than 2 million users.
Other brands have found success by spotlighting and uplifting women in ways relevant to the current cultural moment. After a year dominated by Barbie and Taylor Swift and general girlhood, Lulus and Amazon each produced major ad campaigns celebrating female friendships.
Supporting women in sports — whether as fans or players — is an increasingly popular strategy, too.
The throughline present in these more successful initiatives is the brands’ ability to not only understand the contours of a prevailing discourse, but then to act quickly to validate — and in some instances, amplify — consumers’ concerns about it.
Let’s just be friends
There are some signs that the online dating industry may be getting serious about more comprehensively addressing women's attitudinal shifts on dating by branching out into offering services that aren’t explicitly tied to romance.
Bumble recently announced it is acquiring Geneva, a chat app designed to foster in-real-life friendships based on common interests. Tinder now lets users share details of their dates with family and friends directly from the app thanks to a new feature called “Share My Date.” The League introduced a “flakiness score” which tracks users’ communications habits and deprioritizes profiles that don’t respond to messages from matches. And for its part, Hinge created a $1 million fund to help young people find community in their areas.
An emphasis on facilitating highly engaged, in-person relationships (including platonic ones) could be a saving grace for the category, as vast majorities of most demographics report little to no desire to use dating apps to find romantic partners in the future.
This apathy is once again especially prevalent among women, less than 5% of whom said they are “very interested” in using dating apps going forward.
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