In mid-2025, Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to the company she had left fourteen months earlier and offered a blunt assessment of the industry she helped build. Today’s dating apps, she told Fortune, “are rooted in rejection and judgment [and] these are not healthy dynamics.” The stock market agrees. Bumble’s share price has collapsed more than ninety percent from its 2021 peak, erasing most of its US$13 billion valuation. As of 25 July 2025, the share price was US$8.62 with a market cap near US$880 million, but it has since declined over fifty percent to US$4.21, with the market cap now at around US$549–640 million. Match Group, owner of Tinder and Hinge, has shed tens of billions in market capitalisation and cut thirteen percent of its workforce. A 2024 Ofcom report found that Tinder lost 600,000 UK users in a single year; Hinge and Bumble also recorded significant declines. According to a Forbes Health survey, 79 percent of Gen Z users reported dating app fatigue. A 2025 Hims study found that 77 percent of Gen Z adults in relationships met their partner in person, not through an app. Evolutionary psychology offers a possible explanation of what has gone wrong.

In 1975, Amotz Zahavi proposed what became known as the handicap principle: that reliable signals of quality must be costly to produce because cheap signals can be faked. The peacock’s extravagant tail works as an honest advertisement of genetic fitness precisely because it is expensive and dangerous to maintain. Any bird can grow a few feathers, but only a genuinely fit bird can sustain a spectacular display. Zahavi’s insight seems to invert the logic of natural selection, which favours efficiency, not waste. But the logic holds up: only a signal that is difficult to fake can carry reliable information about the sender.

In his book The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000), Geoffrey Miller argues that language, along with wit and storytelling, evolved under sexual selection, partly as a costly signal of cognitive fitness. Fluent, real-time verbal performance advertises mental abilities that are hard to fake. While both sexes value intelligence and verbal skill, research shows that women often value humour, creativity, and emotional nuance more heavily when evaluating mates, whereas men prioritise physical attractiveness to a greater degree. These patterns suggest that mental traits are partially shaped by mate choice. Dating apps short-circuit this entirely: the swipe evaluates a photograph and a bio, instead of the kind of sustained verbal interactions that our mate-choice psychology evolved to assess.

Approaching someone in a bar, workplace, or community event carries a potential cost: public rejection. That cost is the signal. The act of crossing the room to make an in-person approach therefore conveys important information about the approacher’s confidence and interest in a way that a swipe cannot. A rightward swipe communicates almost nothing about the sincerity of the person making it.

Research published by Gareth Tyson and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London confirms what signalling theory would predict. Analysing the behaviour of nearly half a million Tinder users, they found that men liked a large proportion of the profiles they viewed but received a match only 0.6 percent of the time, while women were far more selective in their swipes but matched at a rate of ten percent. The explanation is straightforward: when swiping costs nothing, men swipe indiscriminately. The researchers noted that many male users appeared to like profiles in a “relatively non-selective way” and filter them out only after a match (by failing to message or reply to messages).