Imagine scrolling through a dating app and coming across someone who catches your eye. You swipe, and … yes: It’s a match.
But instead of resuming swiping through other profiles, or even starting a chat that could last days, you bypass in-app messaging altogether. Rather, the platform asks you to confirm your availability for your upcoming date, at a bar or restaurant of the app’s choosing. Would you agree to those terms?
Several restrictive new dating apps promise meaningful connection by encouraging — make that requiring — slow-paced, intentional dating. If you want to find someone special using Cerca, which emphasizes mutual connection, you’ll first need to turn over your phone’s contact list. On Cuffed, an app that requires would-be users to be accepted, members are allowed only one match at a time to minimize superficial chats.
Legacy dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble took off in the 2010s thanks to the promise of almost limitless possibility; you, the dater, were in control. Now, is there an appetite for being dommed by your dating app?
That’s what the folks at Breeze, a European dating app that became available in New York City this year, are betting on.
Even down to the selection of the meeting place, Marco van der Woude, 30, the app’s co-founder, thinks what daters really want in 2025 is to surrender the reins. “We’ve vetted the venues, and we will make sure that you actually have a place where you meet where the staff keep an eye out.”
It wasn’t that long ago that fishing for matches on a dating app in a single afternoon was a well-trod path to an ego boost. Chatting with someone before meeting up in real life was seen as a necessary way to vet each other. Now, many find that the very act of sifting via swiping has become overwhelming, or simply exasperating.
“That’s the Big Bad Wolf behind the whole problem of dating-app fatigue, because those features make sure that these apps are optimizing on engagement,” Mr. van der Woude said. “The more time you spend online, the more subscriptions you’ll pay, the more ads you’ll see, the more premium features you buy.”
Breeze users are presented with only a handful of profiles each day, with the idea of precluding the feeling of “endless” swiping. The app is free to use, but once there’s a match, users in New York pay $13.50. (“Until you actually get value, that’s when you pay,” he said.) If a user doesn’t act on a match within three days, the date gets canceled. Do this too many times, and the user’s profile will be frozen.
Unlike Breeze, whose demographic is primarily made up of people in their late 20s and 30s, Cerca is aiming to capture Gen Z by creating a dating ecosystem filled entirely with friends of friends, by compelling users to invite their contacts to join.
For all of the seeming novelty, it’s fundamentally an old-school approach to vouching for and vetting prospective partners, holding users accountable to be on their best behavior while getting to know one another. And according to Myles Slayton, a co-founder of the app, getting friends and mutuals involved helps relieve the stigma of being on dating apps that everyone claims to feel.
“You’re no longer hiding under the table swiping through Hinge, lying to your friends, but you’re on Cerca with them, you’re going and texting your mutual, ‘Hey what do you think of Myles, is he normal?” Mr. Slayton, 23, said.
“And the truth of the matter is there isn’t that ghosting element because your reputation is on the line,” he added.
The app is averaging about 2,000 downloads per day, according to the company. To join, users must sync their phone contacts during the on-boarding process, allowing every profile a user encounters to be only one or two degrees removed from someone he or she already knows. Users are presented with about four profiles per day to swipe through, Mr. Slayton said.
Won’t people find that intrusive? Maybe, but according to Mr. Slayton, the app’s safety and privacy features — allowing users to withhold certain contacts, for instance, and prohibiting screen recording within the app — make it a worthwhile trade-off.
“To be able to see friends of friends, you need to share your phone book,” he said, adding, “There are apps that ask for your contacts to serve far less of a purpose.”
This isn’t the first time that dating apps set different constraints to encourage safer and intentional dating. When Bumble was introduced in 2014, only women could swipe first and initiate conversation with men on the network. This encouraged women to be active on the app and avoid unwanted messages from men online. (That restriction was dropped only last year, when Bumble announced that it would allow men to make the first move.)
Some might be unnerved by the idea of handing over the keys to an app, essentially letting it set you up on a blind date. But Mr. van der Woude said he saw nothing but positives in having the app do the vetting for you via its algorithm and staff moderation.
“We’re really betting on what we would call the post-chat dating economy,” he said. “We really see the consumer demand shifting from online to offline.”
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Gina Cherelus covers dating, relationships and culture for The Times and writes the weekly dating column Third Wheel.
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