DALLAS, 1957 (The Daily Whatever Press) — Match Group owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, and Match.com itself — essentially, nearly all the data apps out there. It’s looked out over the smoking crater of modern romance and identified the culprit, which is modern romance.
The good news is that for a monthly fee, the people who sold you the swipe would like to sell you the antidote.
The antidote is called Upward. It launched in March 2020 as a Christian dating app called FTH — short for “Faith,” because apparently vowels are a secular indulgence — and Match has now relaunched it as “the home of modern courtship” for anyone, devout or not, who is dating with marriage in mind. The campaign is called “Wanted for Life,” and I’ve had Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” stuck in my head for two days, and I hate that stupid fucking song.
Steel horse, white dress, whatever gets you to the altar, I ride.
Chivalry Mode, or the Sadie Hawkins dance in reverse
Here’s how the marquee feature works. When both people opt in, Chivalry Mode gives the man “a very clear role to message first,” according to Match’s director of brand marketing, Lauren DeFord. Then women get to “be in control over what happens next,” which in practice means they have 72 hours to respond or politely unmatch.
So the woman’s power in this arrangement is the power to wait, plus the power to say no nicely. My grandmother had that exact feature set. She didn’t need an app for it, and nobody charged her for premium.
It gets better. Bumble built its entire brand on the wild idea that women could send the first message. Match looked at that, looked at the calendar, and shipped the mirror image with a nicer font. Gen X grew up with Sadie Hawkins dances, the one night a year girls were officially permitted to ask a boy out. We thought the joke was that it was only one night. Turns out the joke was that someone would eventually “productize” the other 364.
Sort by urgency
The second feature is Marriage Timeline, where members post when they hope to get married so matches can be sorted accordingly. MediaPost summed it up as a way to sort prospects by how fast they want to get hitched, which is the most honest sentence anyone has written about dating apps since 2012. Match’s own research says 99% of Upward users ages 18 to 30 want marriage and children. The app is basically a waiting room with a ring light.
I date on the apps. I’m a Gen X woman with pink hair and a framework: find a lover who might become a boyfriend who might become a partner, and let each phase be fun before you audition it for the next one. The whole point is to find out whether he chews with his mouth open before anyone picks a china pattern. Marriage Timeline skips straight to the china and lets you filter out anyone who’d like to check the chewing first.
I’m also raising two daughters, and the numbers make my teeth hurt. Match says 72% of Gen Z wants to get married. Pew found that the share of high school seniors who expect to marry someday dropped from 80% in 1993 to 67% in 2023. Somebody’s data is doing hot yoga, and it isn’t Pew’s.
“Wifey” material
The ad copy, from Corner Table Creative, includes “Known to change a tire, not his feelings for you” and “Often described as wifey material.”
I was a latchkey kid in the 1980s. I can change my own fucking tire. Every woman I know who ate Hamburger Helper alone at 4 pm while watching Gilligan’s Island reruns can either change her own tire or has a AAA membership and doesn’t need to. What we’d like is a man whose feelings are allowed to change, because when feelings change on purpose, that’s called growth, and Match just wrote a tagline against it.
DeFord says “Wanted for Life” makes lasting love feel “almost a little rebellious.” Sounds like he’s defining “rebel” as a promise ring with push notifications.
And here’s the topper. According to DeFord, the brand’s number one platform is Facebook. The GenZ trad revival is running hottest on the website where GenX argues with high school classmates about potholes.
I mean, I found The Atlantic’s story about it on Facebook. Of course I did.
Then The Blaze showed up with a fucking casserole
On September 29, The Blaze ran a piece by John Mac Ghlionn cheering the whole thing on. His argument is that dating apps taught a generation to treat partners like inventory, that young men spent years being told masculine initiative was toxic, and that Upward is finally admitting what women actually want. He also sneers at the Atlantic for being baffled that a 25-year-old woman might want a husband who picks up the check.
Nobody is baffled, John. Women are allowed to want a man who books the reservation. “Traditional” is a perfectly good thing to choose. It’s a shitty thing to have chosen for you by a product team in Dallas.
But connect the dots. Mac Ghlionn and Match agree on the diagnosis, which is that the apps broke dating. Match is the apps. So The Blaze’s big take is a standing ovation for the company that set the house on fire and then opened a fire-extinguisher store in the driveway. His summary of the strategy reads, “It’s cynical. It’s brilliant. It’s America.” He liked that line so much he used it twice in the same piece. How brilliant, John.
Then there’s the headline. The Blaze originally billed Upward as a dating app “for Christians only,” which is the one thing the relaunch specifically ended. The headline has since been changed, and an editor’s note says the piece was revised for clarity on Chivalry Mode and how it works. The URL still says “Christians only.” So the guy explaining courtship to the coastal elites couldn’t get through the press release. Insert slow clap round of applause here…
It’s cynical. It’s brilliant. It’s set to auto-renew.
Wanted for life. Or 72 hours, whichever comes first.
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Seriously are we in a time warp. I’m like 61 years old. I never lived when it was like Leave It To Beaver. But I sure as hell don’t want my young granddaughter to. ✌🏻💙