Cyrus Yongbanthom has the aura single moms seem to love.
A 29-year-old teacher and musician from Richmond, Virginia, Yongbanthom didn’t know much about Facebook Dating before creating a profile in 2023. Still, his matches sort of made sense. “It’s just a mom thing to be on Facebook, I guess,” he says of the perception around the social network. What Yongbanthom couldn’t figure out was why he also kept matching with people who were so far away. “No one is ever near me, which is interesting given there are so many users on Facebook Dating.”
Twenty-one million users, actually. In November, for the first time since its launch in 2019, Meta shared with WIRED user information about Facebook Dating, and the figures landed to the sound of collective astonishment. Suddenly, the platform was a secret hit—and bigger than Hinge, its closest rival. Even more bewildering was how Facebook Dating seems to be slowly catching on among young people, with 1.77 million daily active US users between ages 18 and 29, a stat that challenges the idea that only boomers use Facebook. According to a Pew survey from last year, 32 percent of teen respondents said they use Facebook compared to 71 percent in 2015, though Facebook Dating notes that daily conversations among its 18-to-29 demographic increased by 24 percent in 2024.
Facebook Dating is not like any other dating app on the market. It’s technically not even an app. Like Marketplace or Groups, it’s a service within the Facebook app. It also doesn’t depend on a subscription model like Bumble or Tinder, a major advantage when onboarding new users. That’s what Olivia Nwokoma, a 24-year-old hospitality worker in Maryland, likes about it the most. “It doesn’t block the better features behind a paywall,” she says. Nwokoma, who is always on the lookout for a good deal on Facebook Marketplace, prefers men over 6 feet, so when a dating app allows for it—and Facebook Dating does—she will often filter by height.
AI-Based Vibe Checks
What Facebook Dating lacks in cool, it more than makes up for in efficiency. Like every other dating app this year, Facebook went all in on AI. Unlike every other dating app, it has the most complete dating assistant I’ve seen. Which is to say it very much resembles ChatGPT in its speed, functionality, and reasoning.
The goal is to build functionality that helps you “skip the swipe,” says Facebook Dating product manager Neha Kumar. “You can say ‘I want to find someone who loves going to music festivals and would be down to explore the Brooklyn food scene with me,’ and it will find a match for you.” It also has preselected prompts—from “find me someone who loves baking” to “show me the top match in my city.” “We’re first to market with a full-fledged assistant that you can chat with that gives you advice and recommendations across your entire journey,” Kumar says. There will be no paywalls or tiered services, she adds, reasoning, “I think people are just fed up with their core human desire of finding connection and finding love being monetized.”
During Kumar’s demo over Zoom, she asks the assistant to find someone her mom might like for her, and after a brief glitch, it recommends Dwight, a 39-year-old New York City–based entrepreneur who “values loyalty and trust” and is a “big foodie.”
“So this is someone the assistant thinks I should bring home to my mom,” Kumar says.
“Is it correct?” I ask.
“Um, I guess,” she says, somewhat caught off guard. She pauses for a beat, then laughs. “I’ve always been a hopeless romantic.”
Kumar tells WIRED that Facebook Dating will soon launch Vibe Check, a “kind of fun, kind of spicy” weekly questionnaire that pairs people based on identical responses. The feature is being tested but is expected to roll out in December. Vibe Check is part of Kumar’s mission to “find more meaningful and interesting ways” for compatibility. This year the platform also launched Meet Cute, an AI-selected recommendation of someone that is personalized to your interests; it’s similar to Standouts on Hinge, except Hinge requires users to buy “roses” to show interest if they are sending more than one a week.
When it comes to looking for something serious, says Ethan Sanders, a bartender in Los Angeles, Facebook Dating has been one of the more successful platforms he has used. “The mindset is different. I’ve come across profiles saying things like, ‘I’m not here for games.’ I saw one recently that said, ‘This isn’t Tinder, y’all. Let’s be nice.’”
But even Sanders, 32, admits that he hasn’t fully shaken the Tinder effect. “There was this really cute profile and I swiped left so quickly. I haven’t seen him since. That was almost a year ago,” he says. “That’s the only thing I will say that I don’t like about Facebook Dating is once you swipe left, you’ll never come across that profile again. It’s game over.”
Sanders met his last boyfriend on the platform. After exchanging DMs, Sanders suggested they take things offline. “He’s a singer, so I was like, hey, you wanna come over and sing for me? And it took off from there.”
Clout Chasing
The perception around Facebook Dating—that it’s mainly for old people—is another big problem for the social network.
“It kind of has the same connotation as eHarmony or Match.com, dating apps that are associated with an older crowd,” Nwokoma says. But after joining in October, she was surprised by its considerable selection of single men. “I was like, oh, wow, it’s not a bunch of 40-year-olds like I was expecting.”
Clarissa Colondo, a publicist who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, stumbled on Facebook Dating after the end of a three-year relationship. Colondo, who is 27 and bisexual, ran into the same problem with the platform recommending matches that lived “across the country,” she says. She wasn’t a believer at first, but the more she used it the more accurate it got. “I do feel like the algorithm got a little bit better over time, and it kind of almost picked up the type of person who I was swiping on.”
But a more compelling, and more surprising, figure is how Gen Z is using the platform.
Yongbanthom has yet to meet any matches in person but has found other uses for the service. “I don’t know if this sounds bad, but right now I use it to promote my music and link to my Instagram.” And he’s not the only one. “I see a lot of like e-girls promoting their Twitch streams and other stuff. It seems like the hub for e-girls for some reason. Maybe because a lot of random men go on there.”
In trying to understand what Facebook Dating is all about, and who it’s actually reaching, I noticed that its unintentional uses were an equally compelling component of its identity. Across TikTok, it’s common to see Facebook Dating users review potential daters for sport or testimonials from couples about finding their soulmate. Some users even recount how they got duped, like in November 2024, when a young woman posted a 44-part TikTok series about getting scammed out of $4,000 by someone she met on the platform. Meta periodically releases public service announcements around fraud and other scams that happen across its suite of products, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Kumar says safety is a top priority. In 2024, the company removed more than 400,000 accounts from Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Ghana of people impersonating military personnel or businessmen trying to swindle people out of money.
Breaking Through Culturally
If Facebook Dating is a top player in the dating market, why has it struggled to break through culturally? One answer may be that it hasn’t even tried. “We’ve reached this number without any traditional marketing behind it. We usually do our marketing for Facebook at the app level. This is a good pilot to see if it works within a specific area,” says Meta spokesperson Mari Melguizo.
That makes Facebook Dating the rare service among Meta’s suite of products that can now organically create conversation around the company in a way it has struggled to do since boomers invaded Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg loosened the controls around political speech, doing away with fact checking. If Facebook Dating can position itself as the new social center of Meta—and I think it can—the platform has a remarkable opportunity to build a meaningful infrastructure that could reinvigorate the exhaustion people have around online dating.
For many people, “it’s the last place you would think to go,” Yongbanthom says. “Maybe it would help if they had their own app and it wasn’t part of the Facebook app. But I don’t even know how you would pitch a dating app nowadays. The market is so saturated.”
To create that new narrative, Facebook Dating will launch its first-ever marketing campaign in 2026, beginning in Austin and Dallas.
It feels wrong to think of Meta, or any of its products, as an underdog—the company is worth an estimated $1.5 trillion—but that’s exactly what it is when it comes to Facebook Dating. They’ve got a seemingly infinite war chest, and profit, for now, is not a major concern. They are all in on AI, with features that actually seem helpful. But dating, more than anything, is a human project; it’s a lesson several dating companies are wrestling with this year as scale becomes less of a key industry priority. Nearly 22 million users is great, but it’s not the whole story. Facebook Dating has a lot of room to grow—how it chooses to grow will be the real test.
The post Who the Hell Is Actually Using Facebook Dating? appeared first on Wired.
