New Dating Apps All Have the Same Problem

What The Right Stuff still gets wrong about online dating

The Right Stuff, the invite-only dating app for conservatives that launches this fall, will not take off. But you don’t need me to tell you that.

It’s not its corny name or its typical conservative branding, which, unsurprisingly, meets at the intersection of “free template” and “no creative directors were willing to work with us.” It’s not even the ham-fisted commercial the app released, in which Ryann McEnany, the sister of former Trump press secretary and Fox News host, Kayleigh McEnany, does everything in her power to drive the point home that this app is for natal men and women only. 

Even if you’re somebody like me, who considers our current political polarization to be less about a conflict of genuinely held principles and more about tribal (fandom) warfare, political dissension is a fire that continues to burn hot. One would then think there would be intense demand for an app that serves conservatives seeking conservatives, but I’m not so confident. 

There is, already, a substantial catalog of failed dating apps launched in the wake of Tinder’s explosive popularity, including the astrology-themed Struck; Spoonr, for cuddle-enthusiasts; and Righter, just one of several apps geared toward like-minded patriots. If there’s an exception to this rule, it seems to be dating platforms that cater to people with specific fetishes, like FetLife, which has survived a remarkable 14 years on the market, or Feeld, recently profiled in The New Yorker. Even bigger players like Facebook parent Meta have stepped into the matchmaking arena only to see their dating app crash and burn.

This may very well be because these new apps aren’t iterating on the right features and therefore aren’t attacking the root problem: the reason people might want to use a different app in the first place. It’s true that people are dissatisfied with their romantic lives—Pew Research data tells us that 67% of people don’t think their dating lives are going well at all—but offering them more of the same with different branding isn’t going to fix that. A new dating app for a certain group is all well and good, but when you create a Tinder clone, all you’re doing is re-creating the same problem with a smaller pool of people. 

The Right Stuff suggests that the underlying problem with dating in the United States is that the big apps disadvantage conservative daters ostensibly because they cater to intolerant, gender-variant users. I think I know what conservatives are getting at, though: The charitable interpretation is that by continuously emphasizing their disinterest in people outside of the gender binary, what they mean is, “It’s hard to find people who share our conservative values.” That is believable: Dating apps leave little room for you to declare what it is you’re after, exactly. Instead, you’re thrown into a melting pot of people who want to hook up, who want to get married, who just want to talk, as if those are all the same things. Additional issues arise when you consider other factors, like people who want to have kids. Even if the current model for dating apps is not quite in the failed state some people claim it’s in, I can sympathize with serious, conservative-minded daters who feel it doesn’t serve them. 

My issue with The Right Stuff, then, is that it doesn’t appear to introduce any meaningful changes to the idea of a dating app, just as conservative social-media copycat platforms like Truth Social, Gettr, Parler, and Gab have failed to innovate on their liberal precedents. The Right Stuff advertises “less talking, more dates” and an option to broadcast potential date ideas … but is all else equal? Imagine a hypothetical young conservative man who struggles to find dates—a demographic that, if you’ve spent any time on social media, you would imagine struggles the most with dating. 

Assuming that’s true (very little good data exists to back this up, though it’s not difficult to believe based on cultural trends), why wouldn’t he be cynical about The Right Stuff? What, exactly, is the selling point of a re-skinned Tinder for somebody in that position, especially one who may be more socially, and therefore sexually, conservative? From the looks of it, The Right Stuff isn’t making good on its promise to “get back to the right way of dating.” Unless, of course, the “right way of dating” is an app that filters out NGO employees and millennials whose tattoo sleeves obliquely reference socialism instead of the Bible. 

But the reason the existing swipe-based apps may feel unfriendly to conservatives isn’t because of their liberal branding: It’s because of the structure of the apps. The ephemeral nature, the tendency toward unlimited optimization—this is an issue deriving from swipe-based models, not from how many neo-pronouns they accommodate on profiles. Mobile apps sold themselves as digital speed dating when they’re closer to digital cruising. Simply rebranding to keep out people who voted for Biden won’t change that.

A true disruption to the dating app paradigm, at least one targeted at a conservative audience, would be something like what Keeper Dating offers: curated matchmaking for marriage-minded men whose standards for a potential partner might offend liberal sensibilities. That is, saying “the quiet part” out loud: not “I don’t date liberals,” but “I’m optimizing for fertility in a woman.” For women, that quiet part made explicit is the earning potential of a man and, for both sides, elevating qualities like “Christian.” But even here, the “disruption” starts with the structure of the app, which impacts the behaviors and goals of its users. These are things that superficial branding changes can’t and won’t affect. Let me offer an analogy: A Christian bar, a gay bar, and a dive bar are each just a bar. The same behaviors will emerge over time, even if they take on different forms. But a gay bar and a church are two different venues serving two different purposes in two different contexts, not just different populations. 

It’s possible The Right Stuff’s tech will be sufficiently different, however, as it offers very little information upfront. I’m not kidding when I say it spends way too much time on the “pronouns” feature or lack thereof, because it’s unclear what makes The Right Stuff different from Tinder, besides a vague, hand-waving sensibility.