America’s Biggest Dating Company Is Betting on Trad Values
· The Atlantic
If a dating app existed in the 1950s, you might expect it to look like Upward. On “chivalry mode,” users can establish that the man in a straight pairing will message the woman first. With “marriage timeline,” they can specify how soon they’d like to marry. In one promotional image, a man leans against a car; below him is the caption “Known to change a tire, not his feelings for you.” In another, a man smiles, coffee cup in hand: “Known to cover the reservation and the check.” A woman in a cowboy hat is “often described as wifey material.”
This is not, in fact, a glitch in the time-space continuum, the 20th century folding in on the 21st. It’s the newest big project for Match Group, the company that owns an abundance of dating apps, including Hinge and Tinder. Today, Match relaunched Upward, formerly a Christian dating app but now a home for anybody who wants to settle down—the old-fashioned way. “This is modern courtship in action,” the company’s press release reads. “Women are clear about their standards, men pursue with purpose, and both move toward marriage together.”
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Any number of other platforms let you date with the purpose of getting hitched, of course. On Hinge or Tinder or Bumble, you can indicate what type of relationship you’re looking for and whether you want children. I see plenty of people on dating apps openly calling for a soulmate, a spouse, a co-parent—and I’m in New York City, not Tuscaloosa. What Match is capitalizing on, though, isn’t simply a yearning for matrimony or parenthood. It’s leveraging what’s arguably a regressive streak in the culture: a tendency to romanticize the scripts that more Americans used to follow, which told them how men and women should behave and what they should value. Internally, Match calls Upward’s audience the “next-gen traditionalists.” Now the company is betting on them.
About 10 months ago, Match pulled together some data on its apps’ audiences. The one that stood out, surprisingly, was Upward.
The singles using Upward, though they sometimes talked about faith, didn’t overall seem keen to discuss the details of their religious practice. Profile prompts such as “What’s your favorite Bible verse?” weren’t widely used. Match’s chief marketing officer, Stephanie Danzi, told me that instead, the unifying factor appeared to be a specific vision of the future. These people wanted to get married and have kids—not probably or eventually, but seriously and soon. When Match surveyed couples who had met on Upward, they found that the average time from match to marriage was less than a year.
Upward, in other words, looked like an opportunity. Marriage rates have been falling for years, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t hoping to tie the knot. In the Kinsey Institute’s recent 2026 “Singles in America” study, funded by Match, 72 percent of Gen Z participants—more than any other generation—said they want to get married. I’ve seen this in my own reporting: For plenty of people, marriage seems like both a far-off goal and an essential one.
[Read: The unglamorous truth about the average tradwife]
Desiring marriage doesn’t necessarily mean you want to follow strict gender norms. But young people today are veering toward traditionalism; tradwife influencers and manosphere podcasters aren’t the only ones who think that men and women ought to stay in separate lanes. In a global Ipsos poll from last year, about a third of Gen Z men agreed that “a wife should always obey her husband”—more than double the share of Baby Boomer men who said the same. Although only 6 percent of Baby Boomer women affirmed the statement, nearly 20 percent of Gen Z women did. And in that “Singles in America” survey, more than half of respondents—and 70 percent of Gen Z men—said that women should be their children’s primary caregiver, up from 34 percent of respondents in 2013.
Upward is leaning into that shift. In promo videos, a couple who met on the app practices “chivalrymaxxing”: the husband opens a car door for his wife, gives her his jacket, picks her up, and carries her around. (In an especially unsubtle bit of conservative coding, Match mentions that the couple’s first date involved Chick-fil-A.) The press release announcing the relaunch notes that the app’s new design draws from “Americana” and that the tone is “nostalgic.” A quintessential Upward member, Danzi said, might be a young woman looking for a “ring by spring”: She hopes to be engaged by the time she graduates. I thought of the 2003 movie Mona Lisa Smile, which is set in the 1950s. Julia Roberts plays a Wellesley art-history professor who tries to show her students that they can pursue dreams other than marriage. When I watched that as a girl, the idea that women would need this kind of convincing seemed disturbing but blessedly buried in history.
Danzi didn’t describe Upward as an anti-feminist app—far from it. She explained that many Zoomers find romance confusing and intimidating; sometimes, they know what they want but not how to convey it. With Upward, “the rules of courtship are really clear; the end goal is really clear,” she said. “So you don’t have to deal with the ambiguity of like, I don’t want to come on too strong by saying I want to have four kids or whatever it may be.” And if women say they want to be pursued, if they want to be homemakers, if they want a ring by spring—well, Match is helping them achieve their goals. Upward, Danzi said, is giving people “the agency to go after what’s really important to them.”
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Match isn’t the only dating titan to make this argument. The app Bumble, when it launched in 2014, branded itself as a feminist app with the premise that the woman messages the man first. But then the company announced last month that many women no longer want the duty of initiating; men are now allowed to start the conversation. “You have to move with culture, or you get left behind,” the platform’s founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, said at The Atlantic Festival last week. “You have to listen to data.” Bumble read the winds—and the winds, apparently, were trad.
Modern dating can be complicated in some ways it didn’t used to be. Women have to decide what they want to do with the agency that comes from greater financial power. Men have to consider what they’ll bring to a relationship besides just money in the bank. The cost of choice is responsibility: to comprehend your own complex desires and also to communicate them, which, as Danzi noted, many young adults struggle with. Perhaps that’s partly because dating apps have allowed them to sidestep tricky in-person conversations, to avoid approaching anyone who might not be interested, or to interact without trying very hard at all. Danzi said that Upward is “making effort easy”—but I don’t think that’s how effort works. Now Match and Bumble are justifying their products by pointing to a problem that they helped create.
*Image Sources: Hulton Archive / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty; Camerique / Getty; Timon Schneider / SOPA Images / Getty.