Why Women Are Struggling to Find Love on Dating Apps

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a single woman in your twenties or thirties. You’ve been using dating apps for a while, maybe since Tinder came out in 2012. It’s been an interesting ride with some ups and downs but you still don’t have a ring and a family. You’ve probably met some good guys and some not so great ones. A few you really liked, but none of them stuck around. You might feel frustrated, hurt, or even used. A part of you might think this is normal or ok. Your heart knows something is wrong.

Your heart is right. In our grandparents’ generation, 90% of women ended up married. In ours, it’s projected to be about 30%. Something is broken. As dating apps have become the predominant way to meet a significant other and it’s never been easier to find a first date, it seems like getting a guy from the first date to a proposal has gotten much harder. What has changed? Are guys pickier now? Do men not want love anymore? Is it hopeless?

The short answer is no it’s not hopeless. Guys still want love just as much as they always have. But to find the man you want, who you will live happily ever after with, you have to understand why the current approach isn’t working.

Dating apps aren’t giving you what you need to make good judgements about men.

Dating app profiles are built more for men than women. They heavily emphasize photos (i.e. physical attractiveness) - which is important but certainly not everything. You are wired to make much deeper judgements than what dating apps allow you to. Women have a wide range of preferences about traits like personality, status, competency, humor, intelligence, masculinity, and athleticism to name a few. But you and all the other women are in the dark, swiping based on profiles that tell you very little about those traits and going on dates with guys that you aren’t totally sure about. Most guys typically aren’t the best at demonstrating their most attractive traits with limited space that dating apps do give them, and so you end up swiping left, through no fault of your own, on guys who may have traits you would find attractive - because they are hidden to you based on the user experience design of the products.

Men (even most of the good ones) swipe for both short-term attraction and long-term.

Men are evolved to be generally more interested in and have lower standards for short term mating like hook-ups and one night stands than women. You will usually have no idea what a guy is looking for with you (he knows, but he’s not going to tell you). For any given guy, there are many more women out there that he would be interested in sleeping with, than those he’d be interested in committing to, and it’s very hard to know which category you fall into. This isn’t any particular man’s fault, it’s just an attribute that led to his DNA surviving this long. The best of the guys are able to overcome this and be hyper-intentional by only matching with women we think they’d consider for marriage (although they get this wrong too, due to the limited info dating apps provide). Those men are rare. Most men that do want something long-term can still be distracted along the way by a short-term opportunity, i.e. an otherwise attractive woman who a man does not deem to meet his requirements for marriage, for whatever reason.

So what’s a girl to do?

1. Don’t use dating apps that don’t give you the information you need to accurately judge if you’ll be attracted to a man.
2. Don’t use dating apps that allow men to match with women they aren’t interested in for marriage.

Keeper is built with these issues in mind.

We give you all the details you would ever want to know about a guy - we show you much deeper levels of information about a guy, based on what women generally find attractive AND based on what you’ve indicated you care about. Whatever your preferences are, we’ll provide info on them.

We also only match you with men who are looking for serious relationships with you. Guys that use the site for hookups get banned. And we make guys give us all of their criteria for a wife up front so we only match you if you meet 100% of what he’s looking for.