Casey-Leigh Jordan has been on and off dating app Tinder for the past four years but recently deleted it in a fit of frustration. She had been talking to a man on the app and scheduled a time to meet up that day, but when she messaged him to confirm, he disappeared.
“Dating sucks in New York,” says Ms. Jordan, a 31-year-old manager at a hair salon New York City. “There are so many options, and it can be really overwhelming.”
After struggling to meet people without apps, she downloaded the app Hinge, which seemed like a happy medium. The app’s incorporation of icebreaker questions and more detailed profiles made her connections feel more substantial. “I still wish there were more ways to meet people organically and in person,” she says. “People are different when they talk to you from behind a screen.”
Millennials like her who have spent years rapidly swiping through singles are looking to slow down dating. Zeroing in on fewer possible partners with more potential feels like a relief to them.
Ms. Jordan says she believes some dating apps encourage bad behavior. One guy drank a whole pitcher of margaritas on their weeknight date. Another turned out to be in a relationship already. Several others “ghosted” her—stopped communication without explanation. Eventually she put a disclaimer in her profile: no “pen pals,” or people just in town for one night, no hookups, and “no scrubs,” or freeloaders.
“It’s a constant theme in the history of dating that people are stressed out about it,” says Moira Weigel, dating historian and author of “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating.”
“But apps have created a fatigue that is qualitatively new because an app is never not there. There is something new about the intensity with which these apps wear people out.”
The $2.9 billion dating industry has seen a 140% increase in revenue since 2009, according to a report from market research firm IBISWorld. Mobile dating services have represented the fastest-growing segment of the industry and account for 31% of total industry revenue. A spokeswoman for Match Group says downloads of Tinder’s app remain consistent on a world-wide and domestic basis. She didn’t provide user numbers.
Darril George, a 39-year-old financial planner in Atlanta, had grown weary of online dating when his friend Dani Johnson invited him to join an experiment she was creating: a dating club called Black Gentry. “It feels very manufactured when you get onto Tinder or Bumble and you end up on an assembly line of dates,” he says.
Ms. Johnson set up a group chat and began to plan meetups for the 40 single members. There were a few core requirements to join: Participants were all in their late 20s to late 30s, African-American and vetted in person before attending.
The group met at bars and participated in activities like laser tag. One night they played a game of Jenga with questions or prompts on each wooden piece like “hold your partner’s hand until the next turn.” In the group chat, participants discussed their expectations and experiences with dating. The project led to more than a dozen successful dates and four couples within the group. Another 10 people found partners outside the group or rekindled romances with past partners.
“An unintended outcome was that by slowing dating down and talking about goals and values, people were able to think about how they were showing up in their relationships and engaging others,” Ms. Johnson says.
Slower options continue to gain popularity. Offline dating service Three Day Rule, which charges singles $4,500 for 6 months of dating coaching and handpicked partners, doubled its revenue last year and expanded to its 10th city in the U.S. in June. Once, a platform that sends users just one potential match each day, launched in October 2015 in France and expanded to the U.S. in April. The app hit 7 million downloads globally in May.
Match, which owns Tinder and OkCupid, is eyeing slow dating as well. In June, it acquired Hinge, which positions itself as a more deliberate alternative to gamelike dating services like Tinder.
Hinge saw its user base grow by more than 400% after redesigning the platform in 2017 to eliminate its swiping feature after learning 80% of its users had never found a long-term relationship on a dating app, according to Justin McLeod, Hinge’s CEO and co-founder. The changes were meant to foster more selectivity. Heterosexual men swipe right or “like” 70% of women on swiping apps but “like” just 20% on Hinge, he says.
“Some apps flatten people and objectify them, making them into a little card you can swipe through,” Mr. McLeod says. “Packaging people like fast-food items makes you forget there is a human on the other side of the app.”
For those who reject apps outright, there’s always the old-fashioned practice of meeting people in person, an experiment that Susan, a 34-year-old nonprofit director in Texas, began this year. She recently gave a man her number while shopping at Old Navy. She has handed business cards to men at the airport and in the park. She’s currently seeing a man she met at a swing-dancing night. A return to real-life dating feels revolutionary in this age, says Susan, who asked that her last name not be used.
“This is a more natural approach and it’s what we should have been doing all along,” she says. “It is a sad millennial age we live in when we are already addicted to our phones and we are relying on our phones to make our dating decisions.”