‘I’m Sick of Dating Losers’: Are Single Americans Looking for Love Online—Or Money? It’s Hard to Tell the Difference

By Quentin Fottrell

Tinder, Hinge, The League and Raya are marketing tools for status-conscious Americans, but it’s a crowded space

You might have missed the news. Score, a dating app aimed at people with good or excellent credit scores, quietly shut down last month. It came and went without much fanfare. It didn’t make the splash that Tinder did, even though 70% of Americans have “good” credit scores or better. On paper, it’s not an insignificant target market. So what went wrong? I have a theory: Dating apps are marketing tools for mobile people, so it’s already a crowded space.

Online daters don’t have to choose between love and money: they can swipe until they get both. Facetune, fancy holidays, high-profile jobs and cultural references are all advertising the lifestyle of the “haves” and helping to commodify our dating lives—creating a relatively seamless technological “modernization” from the days when young, ambitious middle-class singles met at university or the country club.

Consider this Moneyist letter from a reader who met a woman on Hinge. “She said she was looking for a man who believed in ‘chivalry,’” he wrote. “The more I talked to her, the more I began to suspect that chivalry was code for ‘I want my date to pay for dinner.’” When he listened to her audio prompt — a funny gimmick that gives Hinge an extra kick — she said her ideal date was someone who would give her a choice of three restaurants and take the initiative.

The feature, introduced in 2021, lets users add audio files to prompts like “Green flags I’m looking for…” or “A date with me is like…” They also make it easier to screen out people based on their socioeconomic status. Numerous studies show that accents are a key indicator of class and can still be a barrier to social mobility in the workplace and elsewhere. Hinge researchers found that responding to these audio prompts increases your chances of a match by 80%.

Dating apps are a relatively seamless technological “modernization” from the days when young, ambitious, middle-class singles met at university or the country club.

In their 2018 paper, “Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets,” University of Michigan professors Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman analyzed heterosexual dating markets in four U.S. cities using data from a free dating app. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, found that people use these apps to date someone who is out of their league. They will swipe right on people who are more physically or financially desirable than themselves, but within reason.

“Men and women pursue partners who are, on average, 25 percent more desirable than they are,” they wrote. “We also found that the likelihood of receiving a response to advances declines significantly as the difference in desirability between the pursuer and the pursued increases,” the researchers wrote. (The most brutal aspect of their study: Desire was measured by the number of messages sent versus received.)

Some are looking for a finance guy, a mutual fund guy, 6’1”, blue eyes, including an online dater who wrote to Moneyist: “I want to meet someone rich. Is that such a bad thing? My friend was upset when I told her, but I see wealth as a sign that someone is ambitious and has their sights set on high. I’m tired of dating losers. The last person I dated lived in the same rent-controlled apartment for almost 20 years. It’s the size of my dining room.”

The letter suggests why you need an app like Score when online dating is primarily about wealth and looks? OkCupid, one of Match Group’s 15 core brands, even has questions for users related to financial status and debt, such as, “Would you date someone with significant debt?” They know their audience. To be fair, you can choose whether the question itself is very important to you or not at all. Match Group declined to comment.

Related: ‘I Feel Like an Idiot’: I Loaned My Friend and Ex-Lover $50K to Help Her Buy a House — Now She Treats It Like a Gift

Hinge’s audio suggestions make it easy to filter out people based on their socioeconomic status. Accents continue to be a barrier to social mobility and are seen as a sign of social class.

Is it an exaggeration to say that dating apps are a toxic breeding ground for status-conscious singles? After all, many people are genuinely looking for love. Americans are more likely to meet their partners online than in real life. What’s more, according to Pew Research, one in 10 people met their partner online, so it works, despite the gamification of romance in Silicon Valley. (And that doesn’t include all the time spent trying to avoid scammers.)

All the rich people, where do they all come from? Failing Score, check out The League, another Match Group service that is a members-only singles club for the “career-oriented.” Or Raya, a private app favored by those with boldface names that is designed for “dating, networking, and friendship.” The rich and famous probably want someone with one or the other. Raya did not respond to a request for comment.

You can find A-list stars online. Ben Affleck, before his last marriage, reportedly used Raya. Andy Cohen, the host and executive at Bravo TV, revealed on his late-night entertainment show that he uses Tinder. Where else can you meet an A-list star? Homer Simpson once said he wanted to go to rehab and marry Elizabeth Taylor, referring to her meeting Larry Fortensky, her seventh husband, at the Betty Ford Center. Now? Apply for a Raya membership.

What happens when the tables are turned? It’s a shame for famous people to want to meet a mere mortal. Last summer, I met a college roommate who’s a relatively well-known actor with considerable talent. He told me he thought he’d been banned from Tinder because someone had reported his profile as fake. “You should get a Raya account,” I said, half-jokingly. “I did,” he replied. (That put me right.) If Tinder is your local bar, Raya is the online equivalent of the bar at the Chateau Marmont.

All the rich people, where do they all come from? Check out The League, another Match Group property, which is a members-only singles club for the “career-minded.”

Luke Bailey, co-founder and CEO of Neon Money Club, which ran Score, told MarketWatch that he wanted the app to be a short-term “catalyst” for change. “When we launched Score, our intention was to create something temporary—a pop-up app that would spark conversation around credit health and financial wellness. Score was never intended to be a long-term fixture in the dating app landscape; it was a social experiment with a purpose.”

No one ever said it would be easy. Anyone who believes that New York attracts the best and brightest has never been on Tinder. A man, supposedly a wealthy finance guy, told his friend that he wanted her to sign a document stating that she was fertile. She was a mouse that roared and told him exactly what she thought of him. They never met again. Dating sites simply reflect the values of society and those who live within a 5-mile radius.

This woman wrote to me about a date gone wrong with a man in his 50s who owned two houses. “Everything was fine on paper,” she wrote, but he treated the waitress like she was nothing. “He talked to her like the characters in the soap opera treat the servants at Downton Abbey. In reality, he treated her worse than the servants at Downton Abbey.” He tipped 10 percent of our $170 meal. “It left a bad taste in my mouth,” she said.

Singles are also looking for signs of class, and of course, they want to date someone financially stable. People make snap judgments based on jobs and college. Why else would they be considered on Tinder and many other dating and social media apps? Other socioeconomic indicators include grammar, location, and even hobbies. Horseback riding in Saratoga Springs or sailing off the coast of Cape Cod will tell a completely different story than a photo of you smiling at the local bowling alley.

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Raya is a private app that popular people love, designed for “dating, hooking up, and making friends.” If Tinder is your local bar, Raya is the bar at Chateau Marmont.

Online dating is rife with social cues and hints, sociologist Marie Bergström wrote in her book “The New Laws of Love: Online Dating and the Privatization of Intimacy.” Bergström, a researcher at the French Institute of Demographic Studies, added: “Confident in their writing skills, the upper classes have fun and enjoy showing off their cultural capital, creating descriptions that in many cases are simply impossible to decipher without the requisite cultural keys.” “On the other hand, users from less privileged backgrounds often provide much more modest biographies—or none at all. Creating a written self-presentation is considered not only difficult but also pretentious,” she added. That seems like a bit of a generalization, but Bergström was probably right about one hypothesis: Sociologists have shown that, in general, people from the same socioeconomic class tend to stick together and/or aspire to date above their pay scale.

Tinder’s “Photo Selector,” launched in July, uses AI to help you choose the photos from your camera roll that best represent your true self, giving you the best chance of finding a match. Hopefully, it won’t pick the ones with COVID-era sunglasses or face masks (yes, people are posting those). Tinder’s advice: “Find your light: Think of yourself as the star of a glamorous photoshoot.” The takeaway: If you can’t date a celebrity, you can at least market yourself as one.

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