‘Bumble fumble’: online dating apps struggle as people swear off swiping

In May, the dating app Bumble, launched as the feminist Tinder in 2014, ran what it called an anti-celibacy advertising campaign. It featured a woman attempting to “swear off dating” and become a nun – only to find herself lusting after a hunky convent gardener.

The backlash to the “Bumble fumble” was swift. Lainey Molnar, a celibacy-forward Instagram personality, said the company was “gaslighting women who refuse to participate in hook-up culture”.

“It seems like women’s boundaries over our bodily autonomy are so threatening to the entire concept of dating that they need to put up billboards to stop us,” she said.

The ads came down and the company apologized. But the episode outlined a deeper issue: dating apps – those social media businesses that were supposed to improve, preview or supplant all manner of personal human interactions – are in crisis.

Related: ‘It’s quite soul-destroying’: how we fell out of love with dating apps

Shares in Bumble crashed 30% this month 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.

The Bumble episode caused a bit of a chain reaction. Celebrities outed themselves as celibate, euphemistically calling for a “dry season”, among them Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson and Tiffany Haddish.

New York magazine’s The Cut confirmed that the trend for celibacy – a “Great Abstaining” – has come “amid any number of moral panics about sex, mainly related to young people … that is, confusingly, entering the discourse just on the heels of peak polyamory”.

Laurie Mintz, a University of Florida psychology professor, told the outlet that this was in essence a case of try one, try the other, and rather than detecting a gen Z, neo-Puritan upswing, both were related “to an underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo of sex in relationships for women and a rejection of rigid rules and boundaries around what should occur”.

Either way, it was full of bad outcomes for the overtly transactional online dating business. 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.”

Related: Gen Z yearns for the pre-digital dating era – but don’t ask them out in person

For all its visibility, the online dating industry is relatively small, at $3.4bn in annual revenues, compared with multitrillion-dollar social media tech giants, says Mark Brooks, an industry consultant and co-editor of Online Personals Watch, a database of dating services running since the 1990s.

Outside of the big players, dating apps have become fragmented in terms of focus in much the same way that audiences for news and entertainment have specialized – whether that’s lifestyle, religion, preferences around sexuality and, of course, money.

“People are getting wise to swiping,” Brooks says. “It was deadly to old-school dating apps, like eHarmony, that took a high-integrity approach by saying, ‘If you’re really serious you can answer 200 questions, and then we can do a semi-decent job of matching you with someone.’”

When paid online dating services moved to free mobile apps with instant notifications, the enterprise started to come apart, he says. “Mobile completely disrupted online, and it created this addictive behavior because you’re waiting for the next message to hit. People got hooked, and kept others in play – on the dangle – because they know they’ve got more choice.”

Nor did the development of swipe-based dating apps replace the missed connections classified ads section of a local newspaper. “It’s not ‘missed connections’ because these are connections that were never even missed,” Brooks says.

The French app Happn is the closest you’ll get to serendipity, he adds, because it matches you with people in the vicinity, or perhaps Sniffies, a gay cruising app. At heart, Brooks says, online dating needs to get back to basics, and overcome the paradox of choice.

But the pure utility of online dating is not in terminal decline, he thinks, because it allows people to get the tough questions out of the way right up front.

“For people looking for long-term relationships, there will always be certain show-stopping questions, among them: Do you want to get married? Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you smoke?” he says.

The goal is, as ever, what Brooks calls a BLR: a “beautiful loving relationship”. If the dating game were one long romantic Kool & the Gang track and not a lecherous Lucas Cranach the Elder painting, so much the better – but it isn’t, and until then meeting will still have its uses.

“Chemistry is key – but looking for a long- or short-term partner, it’s wise to know their sexual preferences, lifestyle, location and religion right up front.”