‘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, and it’s a crowded space

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

Online daters don’t have to choose between love and money: they can keep swiping until they get both. Facetune, swanky vacations, high-powered jobs and cultural references all advertise the lifestyles of the “haves” and help to commoditize our dating lives – creating a relatively frictionless technological “upgrade” from a time when young, aspirational middle-class singletons met through their university or 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 chatted with her, the more I began to suspect that chivalry was a code word for ‘I want my date to pay for dinner.'” When he listened to her audio prompt – a fun gimmick that gives Hinge an extra kick – she said her ideal date was a man who would give her a choice of three restaurants and take charge.

This feature, introduced in 2021, allows users to add audio files to prompts like “Green flags I look for…” or “Dating me is like…” They also make it easier to weed people out based on their socioeconomic status . A large body of research shows 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 answering these audio prompts increased the odds of matching by 80%.

Dating apps create a relatively frictionless technological ‘upgrade’ from a time when young, aspirational middle-class singletons met through their university or 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 US cities, using data from a free dating app. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, found that people use these apps to date out of their league. They will swipe right on people who are more physically or financially desirable than they are, but within reason.

“Men and women pursue partners who are on average about 25% more desirable than themselves,” they wrote. “We also find that the probability of receiving a response to an advance drops markedly with increasing difference in desirability between the pursuer and the pursued,” the researchers wrote. (The most brutal aspect of their study: Desirability was measured by the number of messages sent versus the number received.)

Some people are looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5″, blue eyes, including an online dater who wrote to the Moneyist: “I want to meet someone rich. Is that so wrong? My friend expressed dismay when I told her that, but I see wealth as a sign that someone is ambitious and aims high. I’m sick of dating losers. The last person I dated had been living in the same rent-controlled apartment for nearly 20 years. It’s the size of my dining room.”

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

Related: ‘I feel like a fool’: I loaned my friend and former lover $50,000 to help her buy a home – now she’s treating it as a gift

Hinge audio prompts make it easier to weed people out based on their socioeconomic status. Accents are still a barrier to social mobility and seen as a sign of social class.

Is it going too far to say dating apps are a toxic hotbed of status-conscious singletons? Afterall, many people are genuinely looking for love. Americans are now more likely to meet their partner through the internet than in real life. Plus, one in 10 people have met their partner online, according to Pew Research, so they do work, notwithstanding Silicon Valley’s gamification of romance. (And that doesn’t include all the time spent trying to avoid scammers.)

All the wealthy people, where do they all come from? In the absence of Score, check out The League, another Match Group property, which is a members-only singles club for “career-oriented” people. Or Raya, a privately owned app favored by boldface names, which is designed for “dating, networking and friendship.” People with fame and fortune probably want someone with one or the other. Raya did not respond to a request for comment.

You may find A-listers online. Ben Affleck, before his most recent marriage, reportedly used Raya. Andy Cohen, the Bravo TV host and executive, has revealed on his late-night chat show that he uses Tinder. Where else would you go to meet an A-lister? Homer Simpson once said he’d like to go to rehab and marry Elizabeth Taylor, a reference to her meeting Larry Fortensky, her seventh husband, at the Betty Ford Center. And now? Apply for a Raya membership.

What happens when the roles are reversed? Pity the famous people who would like to meet an ordinary mortal. Last summer, I met a college friend who is a relatively well-known actor of considerable talent. He told me he believed he was kicked off Tinder because someone reported his profile as fake. “You should get an account on Raya,” I said, partly in jest. “I have,” he replied. (That put me back in my place.) If Tinder is your local dive bar, Raya is the online equivalent of the bar at Chateau Marmont.

All the wealthy people, where do they all come from? Check out The League, another Match Group property, which is a members-only singles club for ‘career-oriented’ people.

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

Nobody ever said it would be easy. Whoever believes New York City attracts the greatest and the brightest has never been on Tinder. One man, a supposedly wealthy guy in finance, told a friend that he wanted her to sign a document attesting to the fact that she was fertile. She was the mouse that roared and told him exactly what she thought of him. They never met again. Dating sites merely reflect the values of society and of those who inhabit a 5-mile radius.

This woman wrote to me about a bad date she had with a man in his 50s who owned two homes. “Everything was good on paper,” she wrote, but he treated the waitress like she was a nobody. “He spoke to her like a character would treat a servant on ‘Downton Abbey.’ In fact, he treated her worse than they treat their servants on ‘Downton Abbey.’ ” He tipped 10% on our $170 meal. “It left me with a bad taste in my mouth,” she said.

Singles also look for class signifiers and obviously want to date someone financially stable. People make snap judgments based on people’s jobs and alma maters. Why else would they be included on Tinder and many other dating and social-media apps? Other socioeconomic indicators include grammar, location and even hobbies. Riding a horse at Saratoga Springs or sailing off Cape Cod will tell a very different story than a photo showing you smiling at your local bowling alley.

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Raya is a privately owned app favored by boldface names, designed for ‘dating, networking and friendship.’ If Tinder is your local dive bar, Raya is the bar at Chateau Marmont.

Online dating is swarming with social cues and clues, 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 for Demographic Studies, added, “Confident in their writing skills, the upper classes play out and enjoy displaying their cultural capital by crafting descriptions that, in many cases, simply cannot be decoded without the requisite cultural keys “”Users from less privileged backgrounds, on the other hand, often post far more modest bios – or none at all. To make a written self-presentation is considered not only difficult but also pretentious,” she added. That seems a little bit of a generalization, but Bergström was likely correct in one hypothesis: Social scientists have been shown, by and large, that people of the same socioeconomic class flock 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 most represent your true self, giving you the best chance of finding a match. Hopefully, it won’t choose the ones with sunglasses or a COVID-era face mask (yes, people do post them). Tinder’s advice: “Find your light: Think of yourself as the star of a glamorous photoshoot.” The takeaway: If you can’t date a star, you can at least market yourself as one.

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