It Was a Record Year for Dating Apps. They Still Don’t Have It Figured Out

To fix that, several startups launched niche dating apps—some puzzling, others entirely predictable—designed to satisfy unique needs, with many of them built around the promise of AI. Volar, created by a former product director at Snap, uses a chatbot to message back and forth with potential daters on your behalf. There’s also Rizz, Iris, and Elate, all of which leverage AI to find your soulmate by helping users maneuver first impressions and awkward conversations. For singles interested in other, let’s say, avant-garde forms of companionship, ones that completely remove humans from the equation, there are apps like EVA AI and Luna, who act as your AI girlfriend.

It’s still too soon to say how effective any of these AI-powered apps are in lessening the possibility of people being ghosted, but a recent report from Hopelab found that 40 percent of young people rely on chatbots to have ongoing conversations. Dating’s future, the report concluded, promises to be chattier, and stranger, than ever.

Still, the exhaustion of swiping right remains a major concern among singles of every demographic. In the dating wilds, app fatigue is contagious. No one knows that better than JB, the power dater from New York I spoke with in September. At the time, he’d been on 200 dates following a breakup—the majority sourced from Hinge and Raya—and expressed a feeling of burnout, even as he couldn’t fully pull himself away from its addictive thrill.

I heard from JB in December. He reached out to let me know that he’d somehow forgotten to share the “most unhinged” dating story from our initial series of conversations. “I can’t believe I only thought of it recently,” he wrote via text message. “A girl on our third date saying, ‘If you fuck me really good tonight I’ll cancel my other dates this week.’”

Did she? I shot back.

“I was pissed. I almost ended the date,” he said. “She was winning until she hit me with that toxic shit.”

JB told me he is still exhausted by the apps but hasn’t stopped using them. The week we talk, he is fresh off another breakup. A recent courtship in Philadelphia, he said, fizzled after the woman lied about talking to other people. She made the first move on Raya and they later established more of a bond trading DMs on Instagram. She had pursued him, which was rare and a refreshing change of pace. “I was smitten,” he says. Which made it all the more difficult when the relationship ended. “She sought me out, only to lie about it?”

JB is currently on the rebound, or what he describes to me as a period of “side quests”—pet-sitting his neighbor’s cat, surfing TikTok, trying new restaurants. “I was down bad but we back up,” he told me. He wonders if dating apps will ever have a solution for singles like him. “It’s truly rotten out here.”