Bumble Just Admitted What Matchmakers Have Been Saying for Years. Nobody Owes Us an Apology.

Written By Nick Rosen

Whitney Wolfe Herd told the world this week that swiping “degraded” people’s love lives. She’s right. She just forgot to mention that her company got rich doing it.

Bumble is getting rid of the swipe.

Whitney Wolfe Herd appeared on Axios this week and announced that the feature responsible for a generation of dating behavior; the right swipe, the left swipe, the gesture that reduced human beings to a binary, is going away. “People are feeling exhausted, they’re feeling fatigued,” she said. “They feel like the swipe has degraded their love lives.”

She is correct. The swipe degraded people’s love lives.

I have been saying this, in various forms, for years. My colleagues in the matchmaking industry have been saying it for years. We said it when it wasn’t popular. We said it when clients looked at us sideways because they could swipe for free while we charged for expertise. We said it when the culture had decided the apps were the future and professional matchmakers were a relic, an expensive eccentricity for people who couldn’t figure out technology.

We said it and we were dismissed. Bumble cashed the check.

Bumble’s total revenue last year was $966 million. This year, in Q1 alone, paying users dropped 21%, down to 3.2 million from 4 million, and revenue fell 14% year over year. The business is shrinking. The users are leaving. And now, finally, the CEO is standing in front of a camera telling us what the product did to people.

I want to be clear about something: I am not celebrating Bumble’s struggles. I am pointing out what they mean.

The Confession Nobody Is Treating Like a Confession

When a company that built a billion-dollar business on a feature publicly announces that the feature “degraded” the lives of the people who used it, that is a remarkable statement. In any other consumer industry, we would call that a product liability admission. We would ask who is accountable. We would ask what happened to the people who used the product for a decade and are now, by the CEO’s own description, exhausted and fatigued.

In the dating app industry, we call it a pivot.

Wolfe Herd framed the decline of Bumble’s paid user base, the shrinking revenue, the disappointing quarters, as “a period of real transformation.” She told investors the company made “a deliberate reset,” that it chose “quality over quantity.” This is the verbal architecture of a company that knows the numbers are bad and needs to make a structural failure sound like a strategy.

I am not angry at Whitney Wolfe Herd personally. I am angry at what this moment exposes about how the matchmaking industry, the human side of this work, has been treated while all of this was happening.

What We Were Told While They Were Getting Rich

I hear from singles every day. I have for years.

They come to me after the apps have done what the apps do: made them feel like objects in a catalog, created the illusion of abundance while delivering loneliness at scale, trained them to treat other human beings as a scroll rather than a person. They come to me burned out, skeptical, sometimes angry; not at the apps, but at themselves for not being able to make the apps work.

This is the damage I see up close. Not as a statistic. As a client sitting across from me explaining why they feel worse about dating than they did five years ago.

And while I was sitting with those clients, building a network city by city, introduction by introduction, learning the actual work of human compatibility, the apps were spending hundreds of millions of dollars teaching people to distrust the human approach. Matchmaking was expensive. Matchmaking was for rich people. Matchmaking was an admission that you couldn’t figure it out yourself.

The apps were free. The apps were efficient. The apps were modern.

The apps, by the CEO’s own account this week, degraded your love life.

The Disrespect That Never Gets Named

Here is what I want to say to my colleagues in this industry: the matchmakers, the relationship coaches, the professionals who have been doing this work on shoestring budgets because they believe in it:

We were right.

We were right about the swipe. We were right about what algorithmic matching does to human beings psychologically. We were right that an incentive structure built on retention rather than outcomes was going to hurt people. We were right that there is no substitute for a human being who knows your story, knows a network, and cares whether you actually find someone.

We were right, and we were treated like an afterthought, by consumers who had been marketed into trusting a machine, by press that covered every new app feature as innovation while ignoring the work happening in our offices, by investors who poured capital into the very model we were telling anyone who would listen was broken.

I have never been more disappointed in human beings than when it comes to dating.

That is a strange thing to say in a profession built on belief in human connection. But I mean it. Not at any individual client, people trusted what the culture told them to trust. I mean it at the collective choice we made: to hand the most important search of our lives to a company whose business model required us to fail.

The apps needed us to stay single. That was the product. And we lined up.

What “Revolutionary” Actually Looks Like

Wolfe Herd has talked publicly about where Bumble is going next: an AI dating assistant called Bee, and a future she has described as AI bots that date other AI bots on your behalf.

I want to sit with that for a moment.

The solution to the problem of technology making dating feel inhuman is to remove the human entirely. Send your bot. Let the machine represent you. Let algorithms choose what version of you gets presented to what version of someone else, and then let you know when the bots have agreed you are compatible.

This is being described as revolutionary.

What matchmakers do is not revolutionary. It is old. It is the oldest form of this work. It is a human being who knows you, who knows other people, who listens, who adjusts, who has a stake in the outcome because their reputation depends on it. It is someone who will tell you the hard thing when the hard thing needs to be said. It is a phone call when you’re spiraling after a bad date. It is a network built over years of actual relationships.

Bumble lost nearly a million paying users in one year. Wolfe Herd is calling it a deliberate reset. I am calling it an audience that finally reached their limit and started looking for something else.

They are finding us. Later than they should have, after more damage than necessary; but they are finding us.

The Market Is Finally Becoming Honest

The singles I talk to now are not coming to matchmaking as a first option. They are coming as a last resort after years of app fatigue. The burnout is real. The exhaustion Wolfe Herd described this week is exactly what I see when a new client sits down and tells me what the last three years on the apps looked like.

That is the bitter irony of this moment: matchmakers spent years trying to reach a consumer base that the apps had already damaged. We had to convince people that human judgment was worth trusting after the apps had systematically replaced human judgment with an algorithm and called it progress.

We operated with smaller budgets, smaller teams, smaller megaphones. We built our networks introduction by introduction. We absorbed the skepticism of a culture that had been told we were overpriced and obsolete.

And now the most prominent dating app in the world is standing in front of a camera saying the product degraded people’s love lives, pivoting to AI, and calling it a new beginning.

Nobody owes us an apology. That is not how markets work.

But I want the record to be clear: we were not wrong. We were not obsolete. We were not overpriced for what we were actually delivering. We were the professionals doing this right, at the moment the industry doing it wrong was collecting billions from the people we were trying to help.

That matters. It should be said.

Nick Rosen is the founder of Met By Nick and co-founder of QUALITY, human matchmaking services operating across more than 10 North American cities. He has been writing about the dating industry, the economics of human connection, and the public health costs of algorithmic matching since 2021.

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Nick Rosen
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