Technology

Can Matchmaking Platforms Save Us From Dating App Fatigue?

EMEA Tribune

09 Mar 2025 — 5 min read

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One might assume, with good reason, that a romantic recession is underway.

That’s the story the numbers tell, at least. Forty-seven percent of US adults say dating is more difficult today than it was a decade ago, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Even as singledom is on a downward slope—in 2023, 42 percent of adults were unpartnered compared to 44 percent in 2019, a different Pew survey found—it doesn’t feel that way.

The dating landscape is in the throes of another tectonic shift. People still crave love but are increasingly distrustful of apps that have failed to deliver on the promise of partnership, burned out by the gamification of romance. App fatigue is at an all-time high, and a growing segment of young daters no longer want to leave the future of their love life to chance. That, more than anything, has changed where people look for love these days: offline, in curated spaces.

“Dating apps aren’t the enemy,” says Stephanie Scheele, cofounder of Singles Only Social Club. “However, more and more people are craving real-life connections, and while we aren’t the only in-person singles event, we feel that we are at the forefront of this movement.”

Scheele, along with her business partner Mackenzie Zoppi, launched Singles Only Social Club in 2023 as an analog alternative to dating apps. The idea started as a spontaneous park hang. They gathered friends—“plus friends of friends who were roped in last-minute”—for a casual happy hour in a Santa Monica–area park. It has since expanded to more formal settings in Los Angeles and New York. Last year, the platform hosted 40 events between the two cities; their largest one maxed out at more than 300 attendees. The draw, Scheele believes, is like-minded folks of similar ages and interests—the IRL mixers bring together professionals and creatives ranging in age from 25 to 45, on average. Zoppi describes the vibe as “natural, pressure-free, and actually enjoyable.”

Where so much of the AI revolution aims to remove the human element from how people communicate and connect, a handful of matchmaking platforms have found success via a human-centric approach. In-person dating and singles events increased by 51 percent in 2024, with attendance to those events improving by 71 percent, according to Eventbrite data shared with WIRED. A new class of daters have decided that they no longer want to leave the fate of their romantic life to the calculations of an algorithm.

David Moss wants to capitalize on that growing shift. Moss is cofounder and CEO of My TruBond, a “white-glove dating service” that aims to curb loneliness through in-person mixers. The platform launched in Houston this year. Like Singles Only Social Club, My TruBond leverages a curated group model as a form of matchmaking. “You are better off going to Vegas and playing craps—and winning—than you are finding significant love on a dating app,” Moss says of the current landscape, telling me that he believes dating app companies aren’t actually invested in human outcomes, only profit. “And it’s not hard. We have cracked that code.”

Unlike Singles Only Social Club, however, My TruBond is also an app (it’s free to sign up). Moss, whose background is in IT management, says that the app is primarily designed for people to meet offline. There are no robust texting features, and the dating radius only allows users to search up to 100 miles. Users are required to pass a background check before being verified (submitted profile data is cross-referenced with a national criminal database), and later take a personality assessment test to help determine prospective matches. First dates confirmed through the app, he says, happen over video call.

For years, Big Dating got singles hooked on the booze of convenience culture. Apps were like junk food—fast, easy, but ultimately unhealthy when used for long periods of time, causing problems like depression, anxiety, and body-image issues. The next frontier of dating, it seems, is a return to the old ways of courtship that require a lot more intentionality and investment. “What we are building is an experience—the journey of getting you to a second date,” Moss says.

Talk of app fatigue is trendy but it overlooks the root problem, says Brie Temple, who holds the position of “chief matchmaker” at Tawkify. She believes the real issues around dating run deeper. “We now have a whole generation of eligible singles who have been introduced to romantic partners through a screen. A lot of wasted time, energy, and emotion gets invested into that process—all of that leads to burnout,” she says. “We talk about instant gratification; it’s the age of convenience. But you can’t DoorDash a partner into your life. Through matchmaking we do things like remind people how to flirt and have a connection.”

Tawkify is a veteran player in the evolving matchmaking market. Launched over a decade ago, the company bills itself as an antidote to the chaos of dating apps. It is one of the many platforms that wants to remove some of the risk factors of finding love online through personalized, one-on-one matchmaking. Through the service, singles are assigned an expert (human) matchmaker who does everything on your behalf, from prescreening to date planning.

Tawkify offers two pathways to love. In the first option, prospects sign up for a lifetime membership ($9.99) and their profile is uploaded into the database in hopes that it will eventually get paired with that of another single. In option two, daters select from “client packages”—you pick from three, six, or 12 matches, ranging from $4,900 to $15,000—and are paired with expert matchmakers tasked with all sorts of detective work. They do background checks and compatibility testing.

When I asked Temple how many people were currently taking advantage of the company’s signature services, she declined to comment. “I can’t say, but at any given time we have hundreds of active clients.” Even though Tawkify claims to have the largest private database of singles outside of dating apps, Temple declined to share the extent of that database beyond saying it was “in the seven-figure range.”

And while that considerable sample size is a boon for many singles thirsty for connection—who doesn’t love options?—not everyone is a believer in Tawkify’s pay-to-date model. Last year, in a 2,000-word-long post on Reddit, a former client who lives in Philadelphia and forked over $10,000 detailed his experience. “Tawkify was a huge waste of money,” he wrote, “because it can’t control for the worst part of dating—the ghosting and flaking of daters.”

Nia Freeman, a 32-year-old entrepreneur in Los Angeles, shares the same frustrations. “I deleted every single dating app that I have,” she says. “It’s a big pool, yes, but it’s the bottom of the barrel.” Freeman says conversations rarely materialized off the apps. She refuses to waste her time on them anymore. “Removing the energy part of the entire process—it’s a big factor,” she says. “You know how you feel with someone when you are around them. You can’t get that through DMs.”

This month’s Singles Only Social Club meetup in Los Angeles will be Freeman’s first. “And yeah, this could also be a gimmick just to get us to buy tickets,” she says of the event, which charges $15 to attend. “But if everybody comes with the right intention, it works. We’re all single, we all want to be in lasting relationships. We are not there to bullshit.” She flashes a smirk. “Well, maybe a little.”

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