Firstly, I'd like to say how much I appreciate your work Jennie - I've learned SO much from reading your guides and I can't tell you how much I look forward to your lessons on Insta (and now here!).
Yesterday, I showed friends (a married couple) around my new home, and they teased me because I had just rescued two kittens a few days before — to add to the two kittens I rescued about eight weeks ago. Are you the crazy cat lady, they joked.
And my thoughts were, I now do the things that give me joy. If a potential partner thinks I'm a crazy cat lady, they've helped me. I am so happy to block to burn!
I've been fortunate to have a lot of therapy after a leaving highly abusive relationship, and your guidance in working out these boundaries has helped me enormously.
So thank you, and please know I truly believe you're changing - vastly improving - people's lives with this work.
Yes, yes, yesity yes! I would absolutely pay for an app that actually showed me good matches.
A couple of years ago my friend and I came up with the idea of an app where you couldn't see the photo until you read the profile. We were gonna call it Readr
We laughed when they featured the exact same thing on Ted Lasso! They called it Bantr.
I'd also love an app that is exclusively for serious relationships. Like, don't come here if you want casual or hookups, you won't find them.
I think some have tried to do that -- Hinge and eHarmony both started out that way, but there's no way to legitimately vet whether people are being honest about that.
Yeah, liars gonna lie. Curious if you have any thoughts as to why? There *are* sites for hookups and short-term fun. I don't go lookin' for long-term on Feeld or FetLife.
Is it the thrill of conning a woman into sleeping with you under false pretenses?
Just generic arrogance and poor character?
Delusional belief they are so attractive a woman will abandon her standards and values?
In my experience the disrespectful way many men behave towards women on the dating apps stems from patrichial arrogance, personally I don't think it's entirely about conning a woman to get sex. Many of these men are broken or damaged and think its up to the woman to "fix them" and re-build their self-esteem, it hasn't occurred to them they alone, just like every woman, is responsible for their own happiness within themselves.
I believe many men ghost straight after meeting a woman & sleeping with her because they expected to feel something "magical" like her "fixing" them. When it didn't happen, they think, "she can't be the one", they then move onto other women looking for the same "fix" because?
1) they don't get that he is the only one that can "fix" himself!
2) women have to learn to stop instantly nurturing these men! .. slow it down, go at your own pace and become aware of the lovebombing,(manipulating) behaviour many men entertain and don't allow men to push you into sleeping with them too soon, make that your decision.
I am relatively new to your method of dating but not new to the apps. You make many great points here but I would add one more: under the category of bad actors: the rapidly increasing amount of bots, scammers and AI-fraudsters.
I am highly concerned that AI generated images and responses make it even harder to ascertain if the person you connect with is a real human being. Catfishing is certainly not new but the rise in these fake accounts has been highly disturbing as AI tools go mainstream. The apps need to do a better job of vetting and validating their members profile details.
Yes! I've often thought that after two exchanges I was not communicating with a real person in dating app messages - that replies were generalities or non-sequitors and possibly bots. The rhetorical question is - are these spambot accounts places there by bad actors? Or do dating apps put them there themselves, to make it look as if they have more profiles than they really do? I've wondered if the apps put up shill profiles to fill up the site.
I've heard the apps actually hire people to interact under the pretense of being real potential matches so we may be chatting with employees that have no intention of dating. It's sick and twisted to hire/pay catfishers to play with their customers!
I wrote in the FB group that I would add some sort of identity verification to the wish list. That would relate not only to the scammers, but to the cheaters on the apps. However, this is part of their business model.
The FTC estimated that 25-30% of the profiles on Match (which is the near-monopoly that owns many dating apps) are scammers. Match turns around and uses these fake profiles to lure people to pay for the apps.
These rates probably vary depending on the app, but I would estimate that more than half of the male profiles are married or otherwise partnered. A study of Tinder users indicated that about two-thirds of its users are married or otherwise partnered.
Wow. Yes. Dating apps should require identity verification. Although I’ve caught a couple of scammers whose profiles were “selfie verified” on POF so they’re getting more sophisticated!
They need to hire you sister. Would be a game changer! I have been online dating now for 24 years (YUP!!) and what’s made it much worse is the swiping, fake profiles, shitty algorithms that don’t make sense, and all of the things you mention like allowing blank profiles. But none of that will change what’s happening in society where there is a shortage of available, mature, conscious men with their shit together to meet all of the thousands of women who have worked on themselves and are showing up and have so much more to offer. It’s an epidemic and in the US our birth rates will continue to drop as women like myself opt out of marriage and children due to lack of options. Gone are the days where women needed a man to survive. We have evolved. Sadly - men haven’t had to do that just yet but their time will come. Too late for us but that’s ok. I am happy with my cats. 🐈 🐈
"'turning users into ‘addicts’ who do not find true love and instead keep purchasing subscriptions and other paid perks to keep the publicly traded company's revenue flowing.'"
Dating, another American capitalist-driven product profiting the one percent, causing the 98 percent rats to tap-tap-tap the bar.
I'm curious about the issue of liberal women not having enough liberal men in the dating pool. I think that's why the algorithms don't work, in part. Woman ask for liberal men and get sent MAGA matches because there is an abundance of MAGA a-holes out there, and not enough good liberal men.
Brilliant article Jenny! You should be the new Match group consultant, instead of the fake monk.
Anyhoo, I see a problem right away with ONLY showing women matches that meet our preferences: there wouldn’t BE any.
The core challenge is that 95% of men are not meeting the bare minimum standard of most women. The apps have very little decent product on the shelves.
Dating apps are like walking into a store with shelves full of dusty, defective items, and the store owner following you around saying, “What about this one? I know you came in for a gorgeous new throw pillow, but wouldn’t you like this saggy dirty couch instead?”
Until men evolve, I don’t think there’s a real solution.
So, in the meantime, the apps make money by showing crusty, dusty men all the wonderful women who will never talk to them. They sell men a fantasy, and manipulate men into paying money for a chance at meeting us.
Men pay for porn, so they’re happy being a forever looky-loo anyway. The apps know this, and leverage it. Why not keep men paying for the apps, endlessly swiping and fantasizing?
They also need to weed out the fake accounts and scammers. I can tell almost immediately from a profile if it’s fake or not. Why can’t they develop an algorithm to do the same??
I think what is so egregious about all of this is that the dating pool is infinite. There will always be newcomers. It is a renewable resource. So the deliberate denial of authenticity, care, safety, and genuine effort by the app companies is *infuriating*. You *should* want people to be wildly successful in finding congruent, happy relationships, and to therefore exit the pool. There is no reasonable reason not to. It’s simply corporate greed, preying on the hearts and minds of the real lives of people.
Dating apps are a trainwreck. The best luck I've had is on the spiritualsingles.com family of websites which deliberately try to harken back to the early days of dating sites before everything became a miasma of swiping and bots. But really, I think apps in their current form are swimming upstream against human nature. We aren't meant to evaluate potential partners one at a time as strangers. We're not built to go from zero to sex over a few hours of interaction time. Humans throughout history have always met potential partners in a community setting, where our friends and family are likely to have ties to the acquaintances we're introduced to. It provides a buffer against bad behavior as well as a built in vetting system more reliable than algorithms. Dating sites could revolutionize their success simply by offering a moderated, ongoing community setting like a discord server with each ID tied to a dating profile, where people could naturally filter themselves and conversation could evolve organically.
They can also stop making fake profiles and sending fake messages. We All know how if you are not paying on an app they will entice you with messages that you can only see if you pay and they are Always BS!!!
The apps will only adopt these or any other suggestions if it benefits their bottom line, and I suspect they may not. Hinge’s Nobel prize winning algorithm, for example, favors men. Someone needs to develop a women-centered algorithm and show that it’s better for business than the status quo. Maybe Jennie could partner with some researchers on this?
I'll add to your list: stop telling me my problem is my parameters/limits. If I loosen that I get young or very old men who live 200 miles away and dropped out of high school.
I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off of me. I deleted every single dating app today except FB dating. That is the only one which has provided decent dates for me. Not my needle yet, but I didn’t know the method when I agreed to go out with the people I met on there.
An interesting thing happened today though. I’ve been torching the stack in FB dating. I quit doubting my initial gut feeling and just B2B when something feels off. FB dating has a different category called “friendship”. I keep turning it off and it keeps coming back with suggestions. I change it to be that I’m only interested in men and it keeps suggesting women. That has all been a little annoying, but today it started showing me “likes” from men that I B2B in the “dating profile” category. Sneaky little algorithm is finding a way around my preferences.
I was wondering about this! I did the exact same thing, got rid of Match and Tinder after the bumble fumble and then eventually decided to try Facebook dating because it is the only one I know of that isn’t owned by that company. But I have noticed that when you block people they can still come back! So that’s frustrating because I’m doing the BHDM. And I have also gotten women likes as well which I am not looking for. But I don’t think I’ve noticed if these blocks were on the “friends” side or not, I’ll have to pay more attention to that part.
Firstly, I'd like to say how much I appreciate your work Jennie - I've learned SO much from reading your guides and I can't tell you how much I look forward to your lessons on Insta (and now here!).
Yesterday, I showed friends (a married couple) around my new home, and they teased me because I had just rescued two kittens a few days before — to add to the two kittens I rescued about eight weeks ago. Are you the crazy cat lady, they joked.
And my thoughts were, I now do the things that give me joy. If a potential partner thinks I'm a crazy cat lady, they've helped me. I am so happy to block to burn!
I've been fortunate to have a lot of therapy after a leaving highly abusive relationship, and your guidance in working out these boundaries has helped me enormously.
So thank you, and please know I truly believe you're changing - vastly improving - people's lives with this work.
Thank you for these very kind words, Nadene, and most importantly: Congratulations on your new kittens!! :) <3
Yes, yes, yesity yes! I would absolutely pay for an app that actually showed me good matches.
A couple of years ago my friend and I came up with the idea of an app where you couldn't see the photo until you read the profile. We were gonna call it Readr
We laughed when they featured the exact same thing on Ted Lasso! They called it Bantr.
I'd also love an app that is exclusively for serious relationships. Like, don't come here if you want casual or hookups, you won't find them.
I think some have tried to do that -- Hinge and eHarmony both started out that way, but there's no way to legitimately vet whether people are being honest about that.
Yeah, liars gonna lie. Curious if you have any thoughts as to why? There *are* sites for hookups and short-term fun. I don't go lookin' for long-term on Feeld or FetLife.
Is it the thrill of conning a woman into sleeping with you under false pretenses?
Just generic arrogance and poor character?
Delusional belief they are so attractive a woman will abandon her standards and values?
It's so demoralizing.
In my experience the disrespectful way many men behave towards women on the dating apps stems from patrichial arrogance, personally I don't think it's entirely about conning a woman to get sex. Many of these men are broken or damaged and think its up to the woman to "fix them" and re-build their self-esteem, it hasn't occurred to them they alone, just like every woman, is responsible for their own happiness within themselves.
I believe many men ghost straight after meeting a woman & sleeping with her because they expected to feel something "magical" like her "fixing" them. When it didn't happen, they think, "she can't be the one", they then move onto other women looking for the same "fix" because?
1) they don't get that he is the only one that can "fix" himself!
2) women have to learn to stop instantly nurturing these men! .. slow it down, go at your own pace and become aware of the lovebombing,(manipulating) behaviour many men entertain and don't allow men to push you into sleeping with them too soon, make that your decision.
You are soooo right!!
I am relatively new to your method of dating but not new to the apps. You make many great points here but I would add one more: under the category of bad actors: the rapidly increasing amount of bots, scammers and AI-fraudsters.
I am highly concerned that AI generated images and responses make it even harder to ascertain if the person you connect with is a real human being. Catfishing is certainly not new but the rise in these fake accounts has been highly disturbing as AI tools go mainstream. The apps need to do a better job of vetting and validating their members profile details.
Yes! I've often thought that after two exchanges I was not communicating with a real person in dating app messages - that replies were generalities or non-sequitors and possibly bots. The rhetorical question is - are these spambot accounts places there by bad actors? Or do dating apps put them there themselves, to make it look as if they have more profiles than they really do? I've wondered if the apps put up shill profiles to fill up the site.
I've heard the apps actually hire people to interact under the pretense of being real potential matches so we may be chatting with employees that have no intention of dating. It's sick and twisted to hire/pay catfishers to play with their customers!
I wrote in the FB group that I would add some sort of identity verification to the wish list. That would relate not only to the scammers, but to the cheaters on the apps. However, this is part of their business model.
The FTC estimated that 25-30% of the profiles on Match (which is the near-monopoly that owns many dating apps) are scammers. Match turns around and uses these fake profiles to lure people to pay for the apps.
These rates probably vary depending on the app, but I would estimate that more than half of the male profiles are married or otherwise partnered. A study of Tinder users indicated that about two-thirds of its users are married or otherwise partnered.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-sues-owner-online-dating-service-matchcom-using-fake-love-interest-ads-trick-consumers-paying
https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2023/07/06/satisfaction-with-tinder-depends-on-what-youre-looking-for/
Wow. Yes. Dating apps should require identity verification. Although I’ve caught a couple of scammers whose profiles were “selfie verified” on POF so they’re getting more sophisticated!
They need to hire you sister. Would be a game changer! I have been online dating now for 24 years (YUP!!) and what’s made it much worse is the swiping, fake profiles, shitty algorithms that don’t make sense, and all of the things you mention like allowing blank profiles. But none of that will change what’s happening in society where there is a shortage of available, mature, conscious men with their shit together to meet all of the thousands of women who have worked on themselves and are showing up and have so much more to offer. It’s an epidemic and in the US our birth rates will continue to drop as women like myself opt out of marriage and children due to lack of options. Gone are the days where women needed a man to survive. We have evolved. Sadly - men haven’t had to do that just yet but their time will come. Too late for us but that’s ok. I am happy with my cats. 🐈 🐈
"'turning users into ‘addicts’ who do not find true love and instead keep purchasing subscriptions and other paid perks to keep the publicly traded company's revenue flowing.'"
Dating, another American capitalist-driven product profiting the one percent, causing the 98 percent rats to tap-tap-tap the bar.
I'm curious about the issue of liberal women not having enough liberal men in the dating pool. I think that's why the algorithms don't work, in part. Woman ask for liberal men and get sent MAGA matches because there is an abundance of MAGA a-holes out there, and not enough good liberal men.
Brilliant article Jenny! You should be the new Match group consultant, instead of the fake monk.
Anyhoo, I see a problem right away with ONLY showing women matches that meet our preferences: there wouldn’t BE any.
The core challenge is that 95% of men are not meeting the bare minimum standard of most women. The apps have very little decent product on the shelves.
Dating apps are like walking into a store with shelves full of dusty, defective items, and the store owner following you around saying, “What about this one? I know you came in for a gorgeous new throw pillow, but wouldn’t you like this saggy dirty couch instead?”
Until men evolve, I don’t think there’s a real solution.
So, in the meantime, the apps make money by showing crusty, dusty men all the wonderful women who will never talk to them. They sell men a fantasy, and manipulate men into paying money for a chance at meeting us.
Men pay for porn, so they’re happy being a forever looky-loo anyway. The apps know this, and leverage it. Why not keep men paying for the apps, endlessly swiping and fantasizing?
They also need to weed out the fake accounts and scammers. I can tell almost immediately from a profile if it’s fake or not. Why can’t they develop an algorithm to do the same??
I think what is so egregious about all of this is that the dating pool is infinite. There will always be newcomers. It is a renewable resource. So the deliberate denial of authenticity, care, safety, and genuine effort by the app companies is *infuriating*. You *should* want people to be wildly successful in finding congruent, happy relationships, and to therefore exit the pool. There is no reasonable reason not to. It’s simply corporate greed, preying on the hearts and minds of the real lives of people.
Also, guys wearing Oakleys. Always a bad sign.
Word.
Dating apps are a trainwreck. The best luck I've had is on the spiritualsingles.com family of websites which deliberately try to harken back to the early days of dating sites before everything became a miasma of swiping and bots. But really, I think apps in their current form are swimming upstream against human nature. We aren't meant to evaluate potential partners one at a time as strangers. We're not built to go from zero to sex over a few hours of interaction time. Humans throughout history have always met potential partners in a community setting, where our friends and family are likely to have ties to the acquaintances we're introduced to. It provides a buffer against bad behavior as well as a built in vetting system more reliable than algorithms. Dating sites could revolutionize their success simply by offering a moderated, ongoing community setting like a discord server with each ID tied to a dating profile, where people could naturally filter themselves and conversation could evolve organically.
One of the biggest problems is that MATCH IS A HUGE MONOPOLY, they do what makes their owners happy, not to help you find love.
And if someone out of REVENGE denounces you, you are blocked for a LIFE.
they are doing a lot of emotional damage to people but KARMA COMES TO BITE THEIR ASS.
They can also stop making fake profiles and sending fake messages. We All know how if you are not paying on an app they will entice you with messages that you can only see if you pay and they are Always BS!!!
The apps will only adopt these or any other suggestions if it benefits their bottom line, and I suspect they may not. Hinge’s Nobel prize winning algorithm, for example, favors men. Someone needs to develop a women-centered algorithm and show that it’s better for business than the status quo. Maybe Jennie could partner with some researchers on this?
I'll add to your list: stop telling me my problem is my parameters/limits. If I loosen that I get young or very old men who live 200 miles away and dropped out of high school.
I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off of me. I deleted every single dating app today except FB dating. That is the only one which has provided decent dates for me. Not my needle yet, but I didn’t know the method when I agreed to go out with the people I met on there.
An interesting thing happened today though. I’ve been torching the stack in FB dating. I quit doubting my initial gut feeling and just B2B when something feels off. FB dating has a different category called “friendship”. I keep turning it off and it keeps coming back with suggestions. I change it to be that I’m only interested in men and it keeps suggesting women. That has all been a little annoying, but today it started showing me “likes” from men that I B2B in the “dating profile” category. Sneaky little algorithm is finding a way around my preferences.
I was wondering about this! I did the exact same thing, got rid of Match and Tinder after the bumble fumble and then eventually decided to try Facebook dating because it is the only one I know of that isn’t owned by that company. But I have noticed that when you block people they can still come back! So that’s frustrating because I’m doing the BHDM. And I have also gotten women likes as well which I am not looking for. But I don’t think I’ve noticed if these blocks were on the “friends” side or not, I’ll have to pay more attention to that part.