Match Group Doesn't Want You to Find Love

It was a Tuesday night, and I was, technically, meeting people.

I'd been on the dating apps for a while — including Hinge, Bumble, and a brief, ill-fated foray into Feeld — and by any measure, I was doing well. Hundreds of matches. Dozens of conversations. Multiple dates every week if my schedule allowed. I had access to more potential partners than any person living at a different point in history could have reasonably expected.

And yet I kept putting my phone down with a feeling I can only describe as loneliness, with extra steps.

Something about using these apps felt off — not just emotionally, but structurally. I wasn't encountering people. I was processing them. I'd clock a height, register a school, feel a flicker of something and swipe, or not. The person on the other side — their laugh, what makes them light up at dinner, what they're quietly afraid of — was nowhere in that interaction. I was optimizing. And I'd brought that consumer mindset, that endless-scroll logic, into one of the most fundamentally human pursuits there is.

I've spent most of my career thinking about exactly this kind of problem — both inside a major tech platform working on trust and safety policy, and outside, funding civil society organizations pushing to make technology more accountable. I know how these systems are built. I know what the incentives are. Based on a combination of my personal and professional experience, I believe we have barely begun to reckon with what the dating app industry is actually doing to change the experience of human intimacy.

There is something genuinely remarkable about what technology has made possible. For most of history, your romantic universe was bounded by geography and circumstance. You fell for people from your town, your school, your place of worship, your workplace — people who shared your context almost by definition. Apps cracked that open in important ways, especially for anyone whose truest self didn't fit the place they came from.

But there's a difference between expanding possibility and drowning in it. Today, a person in Los Angeles can filter potential partners in New York City by height, religion, whether they want kids, how many, and whether they have a graduate degree. She can sustain fifty conversations simultaneously. She can build, in essence, a Request for Proposal — a rigid specification for a human partner — and run it against hundreds of thousands of candidates ranked by an algorithm she didn't design and can't see. What she cannot filter for, it turns out, is whether any of it is true. I once matched with a surgeon listed as 5'10" and based in New York City. He was 5'5" and mostly based in Baltimore.

Here is the thing that should make you uncomfortable: fundamentally, dating apps are not actually in the business of helping you find love. They are in the business of keeping you on the app.

I know this not just as a user but as someone who has spent time inside the rooms where these decisions get made across the technology industry. Such conversations are remarkably consistent: how do we make this stickier, how do we bring people back when they've been gone too long, how do we design for the moment of maximum vulnerability. The language is never "how do we exploit our users." It's "how do we build something they can't put down." But compulsion and delight can look identical from inside a product meeting. Dating apps are running the same playbook the rest of the industry perfected. The endless queue of profiles is a variable reward schedule — the same mechanism as a slot machine. The "boost" is manufactured scarcity. The notification that tells you someone liked you at 11 p.m. is not a coincidence. These are deliberate design choices.

Lawyers and advocates have spent years building the legal and regulatory case that this kind of design preys on teenagers — just two weeks ago, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for exactly these mechanics. But the accountability conversation has only just begun — and dating apps aren't included in it yet.

Think about what these platforms know about their users. Their biases. Their patterns. How long they linger on a profile. Who they message and how quickly. How their behavior shifts after a bad date, or a good one. Their most intimate longings — for partnership, for belonging — are translated into data points and fed into algorithms optimized for one thing: engagement. A user who finds their person is a user who leaves. And the app is not designed for users to leave. So while the apps market themselves in the language of love and connection, the actual product incentive runs in precisely the opposite direction.

This preys most aggressively on the most vulnerable. Lonely men who struggle to get matches are upsold to premium subscriptions and "boosts" that promise better visibility. Romance scams — in which fraudsters pose as romantic interests to extract money from victims — are now the largest fraud category tracked by the Federal Trade Commission, generating billions annually, with dating apps as their primary hunting ground. And platforms have been documented repeatedly failing survivors of sexual assault, where the harm began with a match and the company's response was slow, inadequate, or outright nonexistent.

What makes all of this harder to fix is the market consolidation that has happened almost without public notice. Match Group — a single publicly traded company — owns Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, The League, and dozens of other apps, controlling roughly two-thirds of the dating app market. Bumble, founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd — a Tinder co-founder who sued the company for sexual harassment before building its biggest rival — remains the most significant app outside that umbrella. But make no mistake: one company has effectively monopolized love, and it has used that position not to improve the product for users, but to deepen its grip on a captive market.

In Europe, users have real rights over this data — they can request to see how their profile has surfaced, how their interactions have been processed, and what the platform actually knows about them. They can even request their ‘desirability’ score. Transparency alone isn't the solution — but you can't regulate what you can't see, and right now these platforms can see everything about you while you know nothing about how they're using it. In the United States, almost none of these accountability rights exist. This market has largely escaped the regulatory scrutiny applied to other forms of data extraction, perhaps because it touches something many prefer not to examine too closely: loneliness and longing.

We have spent years reckoning with what the attention economy did to us — to our focus, our mental health, our relationship to reality. We are only beginning to ask the same questions about what I'd call the intimacy economy: what happens when the same algorithmic logic that hijacked people’s attention now comes for something even more tender. The infrastructure of how millions find love is now owned by a handful of tech companies, run on engagement metrics, shaped by inferred data points no one actively consented to generate. We've accepted this state of affairs almost without noticing.

I'm not saying everyone that uses them should delete their dating apps. For many, including those whose truest selves never fit the place they came from, they offer something meaningful. I'm saying we should be as clear-eyed about them as we're finally becoming about social media — demanding better design, more accountability, and more honesty about what they're actually built to do. And perhaps we should also try to hold onto something the algorithm can't touch: the strange, unoptimized experience of meeting someone in person, knowing nothing about their school or their career or their five-year plan, and feeling something anyway.