Every dating app, formally or informally, has its thing. Hinge, with its earnest prompts, is wholesome. Tinder, with its quick swipes left or right, is horny. Feeld, with its 30-plus tags for communicating your romantic and sexual desires, is kinky. And Bumble, with its “women message first” rule, was meant from the start to be feminist.
In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, Wolfe Herd’s thinking went, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type—content waiting patiently to be chosen.
This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.
Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that when Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure. And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away. Bestowed with a very important responsibility, apparently, these women wanted to toss the hot potato right back to the men.
[Read: A dating-app nightmare]
This news didn’t surprise me, but it did feel like a tidy summation of how dating has evolved since 2014. When Wolfe Herd founded Bumble, the idea that an app could revolutionize romance and empower women didn’t seem quite so quaint. Online dating had already begun to transform courtship—and fast. If a lot of men were being overly forceful—sending an excess of innocent, excitable texts or of entitled, angry missives—that was partly an unfortunate by-product of their enthusiasm for the technology: They were logged on, present, and interested. Too interested.
Now America is in an era of dating listlessness. Deciding who should message whom first is difficult when no one seems eager to make a move. These days, a typical app experience might go something like: mindlessly open the platform while between tasks, maybe respond to a message or two, then forget to check back in until the next week. The apps have lost their novelty, and they don’t feel radically promising. They’re homework.
The gender dynamics have also changed. Bumble was built on the premise that men, by nature or nurture, are chasers—and that for too long women have simply been their reward. Yet in my reporting on singlehood, I don’t tend to hear women complain about getting bombarded with messages or vigorously hit on. More often, they say that they do want to feel sought after—but instead are constantly seeking, only to be met with a big, apathetic shrug.
If men seem less actively engaged in courtship, maybe it’s because a lot of them are isolated, scrolling social media or playing video games or gambling online rather than prioritizing romance. Maybe they lost social skills in the pandemic lockdown. Maybe they’re nervous about overstepping or watching screenshots of their blunders go viral. Or perhaps something more profound has shifted. The idea of men as pursuers was based on the assumption that they’re the ones with the power. But now many women, having gained a certain level of educational and professional might, aren’t so desperately reliant on men anymore. The rules regarding who leads and who follows are hazy, and in the absence of a clear mandate, a lot of people simply want the other person to do the work.
[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]
I’m not grieving the days of “women message first,” though. Bumble was always a Band-Aid for grislier wounds: an online-dating ecosystem that leaves users with little accountability for their behavior and little recourse when things go bad; a society marred by misogyny, in which many of the wrongs that women face are far worse than a noxious opening pitch. Bumble cut nearly a third of its staff roughly a year ago; since around then, the company’s share price has declined 57 percent. Now the app is launching new features, including one that will deliver a lightly chastising note to people who send perfunctory openers. But those are likely to be superficial fixes too. The age of app optimism is already over.
I’ll keep using dating apps anyway. A virtual conversation, no matter who initiates it, can swiftly go south. Or it can lead to some interesting and beautiful places. That’s the reason, after all, that Bumble’s old rule was never going to change everything: The first hello was always just the beginning.
The post Bumble Was Never Going to Fix Dating Anyway appeared first on The Atlantic.
