Once heralded as a vast clearing house for unlimited hook ups and endless partner options, online dating apps have all but imploded compared the their peak from 2016-2021.  High traffic apps like Bumble have lost 90% of their market value.  Tinder has lost 40% of its users since 2022.  Match Group apps have lost around 50% of their engagement since 2019.  

The word on the street is, the apps are cancer and no one serious about dating actually uses them.  Why?  Female hypergamy is the clear culprit; the fantasy that the grass is always greener on another man's lawn.  Data from match apps indicates that the average woman will only "swipe right" on 6% of all men in any given dating pool.  Meanwhile, the average man will swipe right on around 60% of women.    

This means that the majority of American women suffer from delusions of grandeur and refuse to settle for men that are equal to them in terms of looks and career.  The end result is an increasingly desperate mob of mid-level women all fighting each other for access to the top 5% of men - Men who might sleep with such women, but also men who have no reason to settle down with them.  

Too many options for women result in no options at all.    

In response to the online drought and the explosion in female competition for a tiny portion of rich, successful, 6ft and fit men, Gen Z women are turning back to real world strategies to meet their potential partners.  In other words, they're trying to meet people in person like their parents did in the 1990s. 

TikTok is saturated with women following the "Home Depot" strategy - Looking for marriageable men with skills by dressing up and lurking the aisles of their nearest hardware stores.  The idea has met with mostly failed results.    

The apps are only part of the problem. In 2025, approximately 63% of men aged 18–29 in the U.S. were single, and 34% of women the same age range were single.  Women hit their "loneliness epidemic" later in life, with their chances of finding a partner quickly diminishing after age 30.  Projections indicate that 45% of women 25-44 will be single and never married by the year 2030. 

The media spins this trend as a "positive" consequence of women finding more satisfaction in pursuing career over marriage and family, but this is a fallacy.  Women's happiness and reported mental health has been in steady decline since the rise of Second Wave feminism in the 1970s.  Women consistently exhibit worse mental health than men despite reporting "greater satisfaction" with their economic prospects .  The trend tracks almost exactly with the increase in women choosing work over husbands and children.