May 31st - Dating trends this week
- Diana Be
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Bumble killed the swipe. Limerence got a scientific name. And Gen Z men are apparently gagging for depth...
What's new in dating...
Dating apps have had a weird week. Bumble announced the single biggest structural change to online dating in a decade. The Gottman Institute gave a name to that unhinged obsessive feeling you've mistaken for love at least once. And a Hinge stat from late last year keeps resurfacing because it's too bleak to ignore.
Let's get into it.
CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed it this week. The swipe — the thing that's defined online dating since 2012, the motion so automatic you've done it half-asleep on a bus — is gone.
The reason: Gen Z is burnt out. Declining paying users. And apparently a decade of rapid-fire judgement based on someone's second-best holiday photo was not, in fact, solving loneliness.
Replacing it: an AI assistant called Dates, which has a private conversation with you about your values, goals, and what you actually want — then notifies two compatible people with a written explanation of WHY they fit. No swiping. No catalogue. Just: here's someone, here's the reasoning.
A second tool called Bee helps you build a profile that actually reflects who you are, on the basis that if the matching is going to be substantive, yours probably shouldn't still be three gym photos and a quote from The Office... If Bumble pulls this off, every other app follows.
The Gottman Institute published a piece on limerence this week and it should be required reading for anyone who has ever sent a follow-up text at 11pm and immediately regretted it.
That all-consuming, can't-eat, checking-their-Instagram-at-2am state? It's PEA, dopamine, and norepinephrine hitting simultaneously. A neurochemical cocktail designed to get you to pursue someone long enough to actually build something. It is, by design, TEMPORARY.
It's not love. It's the ignition.
When the intensity fades — and it will — that's not the relationship ending. That's the actual work beginning. The uncomfortable bit: limerence attaches with the same ferocity to completely the wrong person as it does to the right one. Intensity is not compatibility.
65% of heterosexual Gen Z men say they want meaningful conversations on early dates. 42% of heterosexual Gen Z women feel the men they date don't want that.
Everyone is waiting for the other person to go first. Both groups have clocked that the other seems uninterested in depth and quietly adjusted — pulling back, keeping it light. And so here we are: a generation of people who apparently all want the same thing, successfully convincing each other that nobody does.
Their new Reflections tool — built with the University of Michigan — asks you to understand your own desires and limits before you start matching. The logic: the bottleneck might not be other people. It might be that you don't know what you want clearly enough to recognise it when it shows up. For a dating app to say go inward first is a notable move in a space optimised almost entirely for output.
The week's theme: less volume, more signal. Less performance, more honesty. Whether the apps — and the people using them — can actually catch up is the more interesting question.