What Two Studies Published This Week Tell Us About Dating Apps (And What Actually Works Instead)
By Eryn | Meet Cute Club
Two pieces of research dropped this week that I think are worth reading together.
The first was a TIME Ideas essay by journalist Meehika Barua, published September 9, 2026, titled “Dating Apps Are Dying.” The second was a study published in BMC Psychology finding that problematic dating app use is linked to a weaker sense of meaning in romantic love — that compulsive swipers are more likely to fall in and out of love quickly, but with less depth.
I’m a matchmaker. I watch this play out with real people. Neither of these findings surprised me. But together, they say something important.
What the TIME piece gets right
Barua cites a 2026 Harris Poll finding that two-thirds of singles weren’t using dating apps, while 80% of Americans viewed meeting someone in real life as “cute” or “cool.” She also references a longitudinal study that followed dating app users for 12 weeks and found that emotional exhaustion and feelings of inefficacy increased over time.
Her central argument: dating apps have gamified the process of finding a partner. The goal can quietly shift from forming a relationship to accumulating matches. Matches offer a clear metric of success and an immediate burst of validation — even when neither person intends to begin a conversation.
She’s right about this. I’ve had clients who came to me after years on the apps not because they hadn’t met anyone — they’d met plenty of people — but because none of it had gone anywhere. The volume was high. The depth was nonexistent. At some point the app had stopped feeling like a path to something and started feeling like the thing itself.
What she doesn’t fully address is why some people have this experience and others don’t.
What the BMC Psychology study adds
The research found that problematic dating app use — compulsive, hard-to-stop, increasingly mindless swiping — is associated with viewing romantic love as less meaningful and more transactional. People who use apps compulsively are more likely to fall in love quickly and repeatedly, but with less depth and less staying power.
The more interesting finding: mindful social media use is strongly protective. People who stay intentional about their app use — who know why they’re there and when to stop — are significantly less likely to develop problematic patterns.
The researcher’s own framing: “The way you use these apps matters more than whether you use them.”
That shifts the conversation from “apps are bad” to “mindless use of anything is bad.”
What these two studies say together
The TIME essay describes what happens to dating at scale when abundance replaces intention. The BMC study describes what happens to a person’s relationship to love when they lose the intentionality that makes dating meaningful.
The thread connecting them: mindlessness.
When we swipe mindlessly, we’re not actually looking for a person. We’re looking for a signal that we’re desirable. The match becomes the reward. The person behind the match becomes secondary. And over time, the goal shifts so quietly that we barely notice.
This isn’t an indictment of the apps themselves. It’s an indictment of what happens when we bring our most distracted, least curious selves to the process of finding a partner.
What actually works instead
Both studies, read together, point toward the same antidote: intentionality.
Use the apps as a tool, not a pastime. Log on with a purpose. Have the conversation. Arrange the date. Log off. The app is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Treat first impressions as a starting point, not a verdict. The research on attraction is clear: familiarity builds connection. The person who doesn’t give you a spark in the first five minutes might give you something much more significant on the third date. That’s not settling. That’s how attraction actually works.
Meet people in real life when you can. The Harris Poll cited by TIME found that 80% of Americans view meeting someone in real life as “cute” or “cool.” That’s not nostalgia. That’s a recognition that something real happens when you encounter a person in three dimensions that a profile can never replicate.
Get help if the approach isn’t working. Most of the people I work with had been dating for years before they came to me. The patterns that weren’t serving them weren’t going to change on their own. Sometimes an outside perspective is the most useful thing you can add to the process.
The apps aren’t dying because they’re bad. They’re dying because the way most of us have been using them isn’t working. And a growing number of people have figured that out and are ready to try something different.
That’s actually good news.
Eryn is a certified matchmaker and the founder of Meet Cute Club, a Richmond, VA-based matchmaking, dating strategy and singles events company. As seen in Richmond Magazine.
