The best dating apps aren't even dating apps

TechCrunch

3 days ago

It's no longer taboo to meet your partner on the internet. The evidence is everywhere: it's on your refrigerator door, where you've hung up the wedding invitations of friends who met on Tinder. It's on your Instagram feed, where a friend shares a sappy post about her one-year anniversary with a woman she met on Hinge.
But when Zeke Rothfels tells people that she met her husband online, she's not talking about swiping left until she finally found the right guy. She's talking about cultivating a relationship across the U.S.-Canada border with a man she met in a Facebook meme group.
'I think we both felt kind of like, is this crazy?' Rothfels told TechCrunch. 'Do I acknowledge that this feels like something, or will that ruin it?'
It was crazy, but it was also real – six years later, Rothfels is reminiscing about meeting her husband after she's just put their two-year-old child to sleep.
'Do I acknowledge that this feels like something, or will that ruin it?'
Everyone is tired of dating apps. This mass disillusionment has sent the stocks of dating giants tumbling. The stock prices of Bumble and Match Group – the company behind 45 dating apps, including Tinder, Hinge, and Ok Cupid – have declined about 90% and 68% over the last 5 years, respectively. Together, these companies have shed $40 billion in market cap since 2021, struggling to capture the attention of Gen Z users.
But the internet's presence in our social lives won't just disappear. As singles grow weary of the slog of swiping, couples are getting to know each other on traditional social media sites — in the Tumblr 'Ask' box, in Reddit DMs, and even on newer platforms like Bluesky.
People may not turn to social media with the intent to find love, but these online spaces naturally forge connections, and sometimes, those connections grow beyond friendship. Here, people are no longer at the mercy of dating apps' mysterious algorithms and emphasis on physical appearance, nor do they have to face an inexplicable number of fish photos. It makes these unexpected digital 'meet-cutes' look more appealing than updating your Tinder profile again.
Swipe fatigue
Image Credits:Pew Research Center
By 2013, online dating had become the most popular way for heterosexual couples in America to meet, according to the longstanding 'How Couples Meet and Stay Together' study from Stanford. By 2019, about 40% of heterosexual couples had met online, doubling the number of couples who met through friends.
Today, about 30% of all American adults have used dating apps, a figure that increases to 52% among never-married adults.
With broader adoption, however, people were exposed to the darker sides of dating online. Seven out of ten online daters said it's common to encounter people lying on their profiles, and 66% of women ages 18-49 reported being harassed, according to Pew Research. Another 56% said they were sent sexually explicit images they didn't ask for.
Over time, people began to feel that their experiences on dating apps had become more frustrating than hopeful, and the future of the dating app giants was called into question.
Meanwhile, discouraged dating app users have begun to create online whisper networks where they can discover if others have had negative experiences with their date. The trend started on 'Are we dating the same guy?'-style Facebook Groups, where women would post screenshots of potential dates' profiles to find out if they were already seeing someone else.
Image Credits:Screenshot of Facebook by TechCrunch
The same concept also powers the newly viral dating advice app Tea, which claims to have 1.6 million users. Its sudden popularity has fueled online debate, where men accuse women of doxxing them, and women point to the necessity of sharing these warnings with others. After all, dating apps largely ignored serious safety concerns, like background checks, according to a 2019 investigative report by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations, which highlighted the presence of sexual predators on Match-owned dating apps.
Yet the solutions are often as bad as the problems they try to fix. Tea, for example, has seen its security breached twice, with users' selfies, private messages, and government IDs shared to 4chan, a notorious web forum.
It's not surprising, then, that some are giving up online dating altogether.
The new 'meeting online'
Rothfels didn't mean to fall in love with a guy from a Facebook meme group who lived in another country. The internet had other plans.
'I always thought he was hot,' Rothfels concedes. 'I liked his mustache.'
These absurdist communities, mostly populated with quick-witted, off-beat college students, often had thousands of members. Rothfels and her husband, Owen, had only interacted in passing, but she knew that they had similar senses of humor and political views – if not, they wouldn't have both spent so much time in these online spaces.
Owen lived in Minneapolis, and she lived in Toronto, so she never acted on her idle crush. Then, one morning in 2019, while she was hungover in bed after a party, she saw that Owen had posted on Instagram about the folk musician Woody Guthrie.
'I replied saying that I'm related to Woody Guthrie, which is true – distantly – and he replied saying 'marry me,'' she said. 'That exchange kind of kicked off us talking constantly for the next week… We basically never stopped messaging each other.'
Though their connection blossomed beyond their shared interest in 'elaborate dadaist memes,' the whimsical foundation of their relationship had proven to be the ultimate icebreaker.
'The knowledge that we had both spent a lot of time online making these dumb memes made it less daunting,' Rothfels said.
Elsewhere, demand for alternative ways to meet people is growing, like going to in-person speed dating events or mixers, turning to older methods like personal ads, trying apps for offline dating, or even joining running clubs, which have become a weirdly popular avenue for dating.
But like Rothfels, people are finding love in unexpected places – the forums and sites they use to pass idle time online, as opposed to those dedicated to online dating. There, they get to know each other in shared social settings, where the spectre of possible romance doesn't haunt each of their interactions from the first message.
Rudy, a 54-year-old who had never used traditional dating apps, met his wife by chance in an erotic pen pals forum on Reddit, where their identities were obscured by their personas of mythical creatures.
I think that Twitter has changed how we communicate and has definitely changed how we relate to other people… on Twitter, you could be dropping lore every five seconds.
'There's a great deal of safety thrown into those interactions, at least on Reddit,' Rudy (using a pseudonym), told TechCrunch. 'Throwaway Reddit accounts are effectively anonymous.'
Within their fantastical world, they wrote hundreds of thousands of words to each other, solely because they found it fun. Over the course of a year and a half, their fictional correspondence slowly became more real.
'We explained it as a creative writing forum,' Rudy said. 'My family is aware that I met her [online], they're just not aware that it was explicitly pornographic, 'Cthulu mythos' stuff.'
Explicit flirtations aside, their creative connection allowed them to get to know each other on a deeper level. Over time, they revealed details about their real lives, and they decided to meet in person. Soon, the woman who became Rudy's wife moved to the U.S. to be with him.
'My wife's wit and cleverness… She makes me laugh more than anybody, and I believe it's the same for her,' Rudy told TechCrunch. 'When we wrote, we wrote lots of poetry together and things like that. That just becomes a connection – we were locked in before we'd ever had any romantic encounter.'
Developing a connection with a friend – even an internet friend – can help speed up the 'getting to know you' process that typically comes with online dating, which users have begun to describe as 'admin work' or a second job. In contrast with dating apps, this way of meeting more naturally mimics the feel of meeting through friends.
James Cassar, a writer in their 30s, found a similar sense of common ground with their partner Nicole. The couple originally met on Twitter (which has since rebranded as X), where they followed each other because they posted about the same niche rock bands.
When they later matched on Tinder, they already recognized each other from the internet, allowing them to skip the small talk.
'When Nicole looked at my Tinder, she was like, 'You like Cheem? I don't know anyone that listens to Cheem,' and I was like, 'Then you must know that I'm that person [from Twitter],'' Cassar told TechCrunch. 'It's like a weird CAPTCHA – like, which underground indie band do you like?'
Though they had never spoken, they already knew a lot about each other, since they had been reading each other's posts for years. And often, people are more open about their thoughts and feelings when they're posting semi-anonymously to a crowd of internet strangers.
'I think that Twitter has changed how we communicate and has definitely changed how we relate to other people,' Cassar said. 'It bypasses a lot of the social contract of like, 'Oh, I'm gonna meet somebody in person, and we're gonna get a coffee or something, and then I'm not gonna tell them this embarrassing thing about me until seven or eight dates in.' Whereas on Twitter, you could be dropping lore every five seconds.'
With the internet permeating so much of our everyday lives, the separation between online and offline relationships can blur.
The internet provides beautiful connections of all sorts, all the time.
Recently, when a friendly stranger asked how I met my boyfriend, I was prepared to offer my canned version of the story: we were close friends for seven years, and after our friends pestered us about it long enough, we finally got together.
My boyfriend's answer was a bit more blunt.
'We met on a meme page,' he said.
With some surprise and amusement, I realized that his version of events was correct, too.
While we did start dating after many years of friendship, we first became friends because we were both moderators of a local Facebook meme group in 2017. We crossed paths in the irony-laden halls of 'weird Facebook,' the same collection of esoteric meme groups where Zeke and Owen met.
'There's always a responsible distance that people should put between their presence online and themselves,' Rudy said. 'But I think the internet provides beautiful connections of all sorts, all the time.'
It's a bit weirder than meeting on Hinge, but so far, it's working.