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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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“If I make a Bumble profile, I am more likely to get a boyfriend”

I do wonder about that. How many people who are now on Bumble are looking for proper relationships, versus at the beginning? Dating apps may also be seen as the last refuge of the hopeless, or that men are using them to hook up/cheat while in relationships:

Shares in Bumble crashed 30% this month [August 2024] after a bad earnings report. Match Group, the Dallas-based owner of Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and others, has reported a decline in its total number of paying users, for seven straight quarters. According to Pew research, nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative.

The same study found that 52% of online daters said they had come across someone they thought was trying to scam them; 57% of women said online dating is not too or not at all safe; and 85% said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interested.

...Allie Volpe, Vox writer and author of a recent article advocating for finding romance offline, says her single friends in Philadelphia are burned out by online dating.

“People are sensing that it has become so impersonal, and such a numbers game, that people feel there are infinite options out there, we’re not really that nice to people on the apps any more,” Volpe says.

“People are looking for organic ways to meet each other,” she adds. Running clubs and sewing circles, for example. “At least in person you can tell them, ‘hey, I’m not interested’, but online you feel like you have no control on the other side, and they have the means to contact you, that’s kind of scary.

“It can be kind of weird on the apps to go from stranger to being potentially romantically involved immediately,” Volpe adds. “It can be jarring, and that doesn’t happen when you’re meeting somebody face to face.”

But Volpe volunteers that the situation is confusing. “The pandemic normalized the dating app experience because you couldn’t go places or meet them in a bar because they weren’t open. For gen Z, maybe their first dating experience was during the pandemic. So they’ve never dated except online, and don’t know where to go where there are people they don’t know.”

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